A Return to Water
by Christine Swint
I.
A human embryo begins life like a tadpole in a private pond, nurtured in its mother's electrolyte soup. Seeing a fetus in its pea pod, sucking its thumb in slow motion, it seems as though the liquid should be thicker, like corn syrup. But when my unborn child clamored for his release at 5:00 in the morning, the contractions started with a warm, tenuous wetness. I thought I had wet the bed, and in a way I had -amniotic fluid contains mostly urine during the later stages of gestation. *
II.
I've always migrated to water in pools, lakes, and oceans. The community pool where I swim laps tastes of the sea from the saline water filter. The weight of water sustains me, supports my frame, and invites me to swim for miles. While flutter kicking my way from one end of the pool to the other, I respond to the comfort I feel on a deep, cellular level. I'm so at home in the water, I begin to wonder if my original amniotic sac altered my DNA.
III.
My mother had just turned twenty-one, and we were in Camden, New Jersey, at Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. My father, twenty-three was probably ushered to a waiting room for the duration of the labor, the custom for most men besides the obstetrician in 1960.
The anesthesiologist induces a twilight sleep for my mother with a combination of drugs. He knows she will feel some pain, but will have complete amnesia of the delivery. I imagine fluorescent lights shining on grey walls, and my mother sweating and groaning as her uterus dilates. The nurse straps her arms down to keep her from flailing and disturbing the obstetrician. I am breech, but because of a deep episiotomy, an incision of my mother's pelvic floor tissue near the vaginal opening, the physician is able to drag me by the legs from the birth canal.
An attendant carries away the afterbirth for incineration, and a nurse commandeers me to the nursery. When my mother awakens in the afternoon she has no memory of the morning. She knows she is sore, tired, and no longer pregnant. Six hours after my birth, she still hasn't seen me.
All the while I'm desperate to return to the dream of my warm cocoon, my limbs caressed in silky water, where I can turn upside down, kick, and delight in my weightlessness.
The dream couldn't last. When I grew too large for my first liquid container, I heeded the impulse to escape to a larger environment. But the aqueous longings have remained. The ocean calls me each spring. I can sense the rhythmic crashing of waves from my inland home in the Chattahoochee hill country. On the beach, the waves come to shore in tandem with my beating heart, and I fall into the theta-wave meditation I imagine from the time I was inside my mother.
IV.
When depression descends on my chest like an X-ray apron, compressing my lungs and causing shallow breaths, I gravitate to the pool to log laps. Sometimes it can take over an hour for the regular breathing pattern of the freestyle stroke to ease the sadness and anxiety. Water cradles me, salty like the amniotic fluid I once took into my lungs. From the movement of my limbs in the water, sinovial fluid lubricates my joints. Gravity lightens its downward pull on my frame, and once more I revel in the soft awareness of my beating heart.
The end
Christine Swint studied English and Spanish at the University of Georgia, and Spanish literature at Middlebury College in Spain, where she completed her M.A. She writes poetry, fiction, and personal essays in Spanish and English. She lives in metro Atlanta with her husband, two teenage sons, and two dogs, Raf and Duffy. After teaching in the public high school for many years, she now teaches yoga to adults. She recently completed a training in the Amherst Writers and Artists method of leading writing groups and workshops, and is intending to lead yoga and creative writing workshops in the near future. Contact Christine.
