Page 52 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
• • •
At thirty-seven weeks, the baby stopped growing, so labor was induced. Just three hours after the drugs entered Iris’s system and triggered labor, I held her hand as she pushed, and even now, my right hand still clicks when I move my fingers in a certain way. Pretty sure she shattered my knuckles, but I’m not one to hold grudges. And anyway, Iris was in the worst pain I could ever imagine. I’d never heard any human making the noises that Iris made—a mix of screaming, weeping, and begging. It was awful, and I could only sob and ask the doctor why the baby wasn’t coming out. He was monitoring the birth closely because the cord was twined around the baby’s neck, and every ten minutes or so, the doctor would measure the baby’s heartbeat to make sure it wasn’t losing oxygen.
“We may have to give her a C-section,” he said after the fourth push garnered nothing.
I wasn’t too worried at first. C-sections were very common in Asia, where a lot of cultures believed in auspicious birth dates and times. But a glance at the doctor’s face told me this wouldn’t be like a normal, planned C-section. It hit me then that it would be an emergency one, unplanned and harried, and the fear struck like an ice pick straight through my chest. I brushed Iris’s hair back from her sweaty forehead.
“Cici, you have to try again. Just one more push.”
Iris’s eyes were wild, hardly able to focus on anything. But when I said, “Cici!” she blinked several times and met my gaze. She gave me a small nod.
The doctor directed one of the midwives to climb up ontothe bed and—to my horror—push down against the top of Iris’s belly as Iris started pushing. It looked medieval. My stomach heaved at the sight and I had to turn away. There was one last bloodcurdling shriek from Iris and crackling pain shooting up my arm as she crushed my hand, then there was one moment of silence that was broken by the sweetest sound in the world.
The baby was here at last. The doctor caught her as she came out squalling, her little kitteny wails filling the delivery room. I laughed through my tears. “Iris, you did it! Oh my god. It’s a girl. You have a daughter! I have a niece!”
Iris just lay there whimpering and weeping. After the baby was cleaned up, the doctor placed her on Iris’s chest for some skin-on-skin contact, but Iris didn’t hug her. She simply lay on the hospital bed, completely defeated, with nothing left to give.
When I said, “Can I?” Iris closed her eyes and turned her face away. I stroked Iris’s arm and kissed her temple. “You did so well, Cici.” Then I picked up the baby gingerly, marveling at how fragile she looked, how tiny she was. “Hi.” The baby turned her little face toward me, blinking slowly. A tear dropped from my eye onto her cheek, and I laughed and wiped it away. “Sorry, little one.”
Iris watched us blearily. “Name her.”
“What?” My head snapped up. “I don’t—”
“Some kind of plant,” Iris said. “But not a flower. Not like us. A strong name.”
I wanted to say no, to tell her that I wasn’t ready for this kind of responsibility. But then I looked down at my beautiful niece and found her looking at me. Even though I knew she was way too young to even focus her eyes on a single object, I would’ve sworn that she was taking me in and that she completelyunderstood my role in her life. And her name came to me, unbidden, as though it had been waiting for her to claim it all along. “Hazel.”
Iris smiled and closed her eyes again. “Hazel.”
• • •
Hazel trees are more shrub than tree. They’re small, but despite their lack of height, the wood is strong, durable, and flexible. I didn’t know any of these things when I chose the name for my baby niece. I just liked the name Hazel because it was witchy and cute and a little bit magical. And, as Iris requested, it wasn’t a flower. But when I looked up the characteristics of the hazel plant later, much later, I thought it funny how apt the name was.
The only people who visited at the hospital were Parker and a handful of Iris’s friends and contacts. Mama and Papa never showed. Neither did Parker’s family. I knew from weeks ago that Parker’s parents disapproved of Iris’s separation, and although I personally thought they were total snots who didn’t deserve a shred of my time, I could tell that Parker was displeased by the whole situation. But I chose to play the fool; I didn’t want to give any space to his concerns about saving face. It was just as well that Iris and I were largely left alone at the hospital. We were obsessed with baby Hazel. Well, at least, I was. To be honest, Iris was pretty out of it. Hazel had been born sunny-side up, with her face turned up as she came out, and the back of her head had fractured Iris’s tailbone as it was pushed out. As a result, Iris couldn’t sit down; she could only lie down or stand up, and obviously she wasn’t doing much of the latter. So she mostly flopped in bed, staring at me and Hazel in an exhausted fugue, trying to nurse Hazel without much luck.
After two nights, we were allowed to take Hazel home. She was so tiny she didn’t fit in the newborn car seat, and I had to pad it out with rolled-up blankets to make sure she was secure. Her cries were pure magic—so high and keen and so short-lived, as though just the one cry alone exhausted her. This did not last long; within the week she would be wailing for what seemed like hours, and I would ache for those first few days where all she could do was mewl gently.
The next few weeks passed by in a blur. I’d foolishly thought that the hardest part about babies would be the diaper changes, but it wasn’t, not by a long shot. The hardest part was, hands down, feeding them. First of all, you had to hold them in the right position; otherwise, they would refuse the bottle. Then you had to position wads of tissue paper around their chin to catch all the milk that would dribble out the corners of their mouths—and, oh, I swear, about half the milk they sucked ended up spilling from their little mouths. We’d put a bib on Hazel, then about four layers of tissue paper under her neck folds, and still everything would be soaked by the time the bottle was empty. Then she would look up at you lovingly for about two seconds before her little eyes crossed and with barely a warning, all that milk would come spewing out. Yep, Hazel had indigestion. I didn’t even know that babies could have indigestion. She threw up after almost every feeding, so we’d have to wait fifteen, twenty minutes before trying again. You were supposed to feed newborns every two hours, but it took over one and a half hours to feed her, so by the end of each feed, I’d look at the clock and say, “It’s…almost time for her next feed?” And both Iris and I would collapse in a pile of laughter and tears.
Parker largely left us to our own devices. The few times hebroached the subject about how long Iris and Hazel were staying with us, I immediately lunged for the “Are you saying you want to throw out a newborn and her mother onto the streets?” card, and he dropped the subject pretty quickly after that. I’d figured out by then, you see, that in the end, like most Chinese-Indonesians, what Parker valued above all else was saving face. His reputation. And instead of fighting it, I’d decided that I was going to lean all the way in and use it to my advantage. After all, I’d grown up being told to use my feminine wiles. I was merely putting the lessons I’d learned into practice.
Chapter 18
MAGNOLIA
2008
Hazel was four months old when I turned twenty-six. Iris made me tiramisu for my birthday cake, and Parker took a photo of the three of us crowded around it, Hazel squished in between us, looking so impossibly chubby. Iris often called Hazel her little potato because she was so chubby by then that her features were hidden by her full cheeks. I was looking at the camera. Iris was looking at Hazel, and her smile was both loving and sad. I still look at that photo from time to time and wonder what was going through Iris’s mind then. Because the thing is, while I found it effortless to fall completely in love with Hazel and put everything else in my life on hold for this little life, I knew even then that Hazel wasn’t Iris’s first love.
Iris had always been ambitious. Her career had always come first, and it made sense, because that was maybe the thing that saved her, the thing that woke her and gave her the courage to turn her back on all of the patriarchal bullshit our parents hadraised us on. When I say that Iris’s first love was her career and not her baby, I say that with no judgment. Remember this, Izzy. As women, we’re taught to put our children first, no matter what, and god help us if we ever admit to loving anything else as much as our children. But it doesn’t have to be that way, and watching Iris, I finally understood that one could still be a loving mother without giving everything up for one’s child.
The changes in Iris were subtle. Certainly, Parker noticed nothing. But I saw them. The way she’d sometimes look out the window and stare off into the far distance, a look of longing on her face. The way she’d scroll through tech news as she pumped. And even when she played with Hazel, I could tell that her heart wasn’t one hundred percent in it. She enjoyed Hazel’s gurgles and squeals, but I knew it wasn’t fulfilling her.
The day after my birthday, while Iris and I took Hazel out for a morning walk around the housing complex, I said, “You could go back to work if you wanted, you know.”
Iris snorted. “Don’t be silly. Who’s going to look after Hazel?”
“Me,” I said simply.
