Thin Skin
San Miguel de Allende, 1997
The layers shocked me. Maybe because I'd never witnessed a surgery, much less a c-section, maybe because I grew up in such a fatphobic environment without even knowing it. I was sitting at the woman's side – she had no family with her, for reasons I wasn't aware of – and told her she was doing great as she squeezed my hand. The scalpel sliced through the skin, and I surprised myself by not wincing or cringing as I might if I were watching a medical drama. This was medical and it was dramatic, but it was also real, and some part of me understood that to wince or cringe would be to make this moment about me rather than focusing fully on the woman whose baby was on its way into the world, who was alone at this small-town clinic.
The phrase "thin skin" came to mind; despite being seven-layers thick, all together it still doesn't look like much considering it's the organ that holds in the rest of us and protects our insides from the outside in more ways that we register day to day. I have no idea what I was expecting – thinking about this now, 25 years later, I cringe at how naive and underexposed I was when it came to bodies. The next layer was fat, several inches of it. It was yellow, the way congealed butter that had melted and hardened again might be. "Everything is going so well," I told the woman, my face close to hers.
How this was allowed – why a 23-year-old with no medical or birth-related experience was assisting a cesarean – remains a bit of a mystery to me, though at the time, the clinic depended heavily on volunteers and you just kind of chipped in wherever you were needed. I spent much of my time doing more administrative tasks, like helping to translate and format an operational manual, but on this day for whatever reason, I'd been asked to come assist during a birth. So here I was. After the layers of fat came the rectus, the parietal peritoneum – or first layer surrounding the organs – the loose peritoneum, and finally the uterus. As the surgeon worked her way downward towards the baby, I alternated between watching and keeping my attention on the mama's face, letting her know things were good, the baby would be coming soon, and breathing with her.
I have no idea how long this part of the process took. It felt like hours but was likely no more than 10 or so minutes. I felt I was in the presence of an archaeological dig, and the ancient land was this woman's body, holding unseen treasures that had not yet been named. I felt keenly aware, self-conscious even, of my own slightness. It had been five years since I'd had a regular period due to being chronically underweight; my skin was still smooth and taut; pregnancies, stretch marks and cellulite were in my distant future, and this contributed to feeling suspended in time, less a woman than a girl yet not at all a child. I belonged nowhere, I felt, except maybe in "The Two Fridas" painting, which I'd recently seen in person at Frida Kahlo's home in Mexico City. In that painting, I recognized something so essential and true and seemingly impossible to translate into my lived life: there were two of me, and I was in some ways my own best friend, impenetrable, impermeable, and thus, deeply alone.
Suddenly, the doctor's gloved hands disappeared completely within the woman's abdominal cavity, and within seconds, lifted a baby – a person! – out from inside of her. Despite my earlier intention, I burst into tears, as did the baby, as did the woman as soon as the nurse placed her newborn, slick with vernix, hair thick and matted, on her chest. The baby's eyes were dark and shockingly wide open and focused as soon as he met his mama's gaze. The tears turned to laughter as we all marveled for a moment before they began the process of closing her back up, layer after layer, leaving the womb once again deep within the fertile earth of her body.
As for me, it would still be some time before I learned to stop fighting my body, my blood, my skin, the whole human mess of me. But something happened in that little room. A baby was born, a young woman became a mother, and – as I walked up the steep hill to my little apartment that evening – I thought maybe, someday, I would find a way to excavate my own buried self, bring her out into the world, and embrace her with my whole heart.
