Originally published in The Unmooring, Issue 2, June 2021, page 50
by Lisa Swander
The day my uterus ruptured was the beginning.
Not the beginning of me, of course, or even the first beginning of my life. I’d been through my share of onsets—adolescence, career, marriage, motherhood—before my freshly split womb stormed onto the scene. Each beginning was a dot, a You Are Here on the neat, horizontal line I walked, the paved pathway to the life I’d been taught to imagine.
But the tear in my uterus was a different kind of beginning.
I was thirty-one that year, and life had been flat and orderly for a while. I’d secured the career and the husband, then checked off the baby and the church. We were two years into parenting and one year into regular attendance, and I felt both could be absorbed into successful womanhood without a hitch.
Yes, I was exhausted, but that was a known side effect of a life of service. I’d been teaching middle school for a decade. Adding a baby was a simple matter of extending my work day from seven hours to twenty-four: other people’s children during the day, mine at night and on weekends. If I needed sleep or a haircut, my husband could swoop in for an hour or two, work permitting.
We hadn’t meant to be complementarians. The logic just kept holding it up. If I was always home earlier, why wouldn’t I cook dinner every night? If daycare was at my school, why wouldn’t I just keep the car seat? If he worked late every evening and twelve hours each Saturday, why wouldn’t I just do all the parenting?
I could rest on Sundays, I reasoned. Except for every other Sunday, when I took care of both other people’s children and mine in the toddler room. My pregnant body raised issues with that arrangement, but I powered through. Fatigue was a sign that I was crushing it, this service to God and man. I was leaving it all on the spiritual floor, and my under-eye bags challenged anyone to say otherwise.
As far as I could tell, this was the way to be a woman.
Like most nondenominational churches, ours had a culture around gender. There were songs about men leading and women begging to be led. Women could preach, but only on Mother’s Day, or to talk about that obeying husbands business in Ephesians. We had a craft circle and a meal ministry, and the men’s group went skeet shooting.
Complementarianism was not the air we breathed, exactly, but it was certainly a scent that wafted through it.
I did my best to ignore this from week to week. Everyone was so kind, and I was on the right religious team for once. So I had some crippling stomach pain a few times a month. What was a little tension, a little unease during Sunday service? Nothing I couldn’t wring from my hands into every cell of my body, locking it away tight where God couldn’t see.
Besides, I knew better than to trust my flesh. It lied to us. It made us angry and resentful when we should have been grateful and joyous. The world was obsessed with our bodies, but we weren’t. We were clothed in strength and dignity, and this sick, exhausted, petulant form was nothing but a wire hanger that I was free to ignore.
When my uterus ruptured, it was not the culmination of a great and sophisticated examination of these ideas. It was, as I said, merely the beginning.
It would be many more months before I discovered Rachel Held Evans, learned that doubt was an asset, and realized feminism and Christianity are not mutually exclusive. I still had years to go before I found Anne Lamott and Meggan Watterson and the permission they gave to broaden my view of God. I had never heard of Sue Monk Kidd or Glennon Doyle. I did not yet know the authors who would help me remember the sacred feminine in me, and help me discover it, if I cared to, in the teachings of Jesus.
It would be many more years before I would arrive at an uneasy peace with my spiritual wandering. I would endure many more dark nights of the soul, many cataclysmic moments of transcendence, before I accepted that I’ll never settle for only one way of knowing God.
Before any of that, there was a Saturday night in early April. It was the day before my due date, and as I settled my massive, unbalanced body into bed next to my husband, we both thought everything was fine—aside from the indignities of late pregnancy, of course.
To me, my blossoming stretch marks and varicose veins and pinched sciatica were further evidence that my body did nothing but betray me. It was a burden handed down from Eve, an obstacle that stood between me and my commitment to incinerating myself on the pyre of others’ needs. That night, I took the sleeping pill my OB had prescribed and prayed for at least two hours before my first bathroom break.
Around 11:00, I woke up. Not for the bathroom. For the feeling that my abdomen had exploded like a tree struck by lightning.
“This must be what labor feels like,” I thought, and took exactly two shallow breaths before falling to the floor.
Around 11:02, my husband called 911.
There were convulsions. There were also chattering teeth and a green complexion and other signs of shock. There was my answer to both the dispatcher and the EMT that yes, I’d had a previous C-section, and so it might be a uterine rupture. But I wasn’t treated for shock or internal bleeding or anything other than low oxygen levels, and that was my fault.
It was my fault because I refused to scream.
I was quite committed, even as my body split apart, to be a bother to no one in the ER that night. I knew to fear hysterical illness more than death. I knew a woman’s overreaction was a one-way ticket to irrelevance, a permission slip to everyone else in her life to never take her seriously again.
At least if I died, silent and suffering, they might eulogize me with the ultimate compliment. She never complained. A true Proverbs 31 wife.
My body lied, and I would not be duped.
So I was polite and soft-voiced. I said, “Yes please,” and, “No, please don’t,” to ice chips and a cervical check, respectively, and I got my cervix checked anyway. I still didn’t scream, even though flipping to my back shifted the baby toward her eventual exit, and made me wonder how much pain the human body could endure. Or fabricate.
But I didn’t scream.
Eventually, the doctor on call stood over me, speaking apologetically to my husband. It had been almost an hour. A line of white crust had formed around my mouth, and the stretcher rattled faintly with each tremor of my body.
“I’m not sure what else we can do,” she said. “Maybe take her home and call her OB.”
Maybe drive her to the OB’s hospital, someone else suggested. It was only 20 minutes away.
“I won’t make it that far,” I whispered, but my voice was easy to ignore. All my energy was focused on the railing of the stretcher, on squeezing like it was the last tree root between me and the bottom of a ravine. A nurse loomed at my feet, hands on hips, frowning not unkindly.
“Sometimes labor just hurts, honey,” she said.
The pain kept me from thanking her for her input, but I did manage one last whisper.
“This isn’t labor.”
No one heard. They’d already left to draw up the discharge paperwork, and my husband put his forehead on my hand and wept.
“I can’t take seeing you like this,” he said. “You have to get better, Lisa. You have to.”
In the years since, my daughter has shown little patience for indecision. I suppose that when you have a hotline to God, the constant frizzling of your own intuition must make adults and their waffling positively unbearable. “Come on, Mama,” she tells me all the time. “What are you waiting for?”
It was at that moment, then, as best as the doctors could figure, that she thrust her shoulder through the hole in my uterus.
And it was at that moment that I screamed.
I can’t describe the pain, but if it helps, I imagine it felt not unlike the creature bursting through the guy’s abdominal wall in Alien, because that’s more or less what was happening.
I was dying and my baby was dying, and I screamed and screamed and did not stop.
The ER, so filled with clinical detachment all evening, came alive. Doctors surrounded me. Ceiling tiles rolled past. I screamed. A doctor held my shoulders down. I screamed some more. I screamed until I heard my own voice first amplify, then muffle, as the mask went over my face and the gas into my lungs and then, as the panicked anesthesiologist kept promising, there was no more pain, Lisa, no more pain, okay?
Sometime after I regained consciousness, I held her for the first time.
The feminine wound, as Sue Monk Kidd calls it, festers in my DNA. My epigenetics include excommunications, aborted careers, mental illness, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, financial abuse. I didn’t know its name then, but I knew its universality; after all, I had been a feminist long before I was an evangelical.
And now God had entrusted me with a girl.
She came with a tiny pink bow, pasted to her head with lubricant while I was still asleep. We had just met, and already we’d skidded to the edge together, peered over, and realized it wasn’t meant to be an edge at all. We’d simply needed to turn.
The on-call doctor, shaken and nervous, gave me the simplest version of events. What had woken me up an hour prior was my uterus splitting cleanly from end to end, “like someone pulled it open with a zipper.” For the baby and I both to survive this was a miracle. We would not have survived the car ride home, or to my OB’s hospital. The time between my first banshee scream and my daughter’s birth was less than a minute, and we would not have survived another.
“I don’t know what you all believe,” she said, sitting down on the nurse’s stool at my bedside, “and I don’t know what I believe either. But I can tell you I was in that operating room thanking every god of the universe tonight.”
She lifted my daughter from my body a few minutes after midnight. It was her due date, April 5, 2015. Easter Sunday.
When we told the story in the days and weeks following, that was the keystone, the piece de resistance—an Easter miracle. A wink from God, a reminder that we’re still in the business of triumphing over death. Who could argue? Even the agnostic doctor fell to her knees in the face of it.
It’s been six years since that Easter, and I still believe she’s a miracle. It would be impossible not to. But I believe something else about that night, too, and especially about what it was that pulled the gaze of our beleaguered on-call doctor toward the heavens. It was more than just a close shave and a calendar.
The doctor, with her hands in my body, was its most intimate witness. She knew the urgency of its message, its desperation to be heard, the ravaged condition of its tissues. As she lifted my daughter out and up, she held the power it possessed, a wrinkled and vibrant piece of creation. When she stitched my gaping womb, she closed the circle and let our healing begin.
We both heard my screams. We both witnessed the beginning of my emptying, the self-betrayal I had pushed into my body beginning its ascent, out through my throat and into the open air. We both heard the birth of a woman’s belief in her own holiness.
But only the doctor heard the cry of my baby. She held the sacred space for me. And when she leaned against the OR wall a moment later, to tremble and to pray, I like to think it was because she heard the cry of the sacred feminine, demanding to be born. I pray the same for all of us.