you can stare all you want, but i'm not taking my shirt off

In 7th grade I was forced to stare into a woman’s vagina for 27 painfully awkward minutes. The film was called The Miracle of Birth, and I suppose it was meant to be educational, but to me and my classmates it was pure pornography. Afterward at lunch, as I ate my corndog in a guilty silence, I vowed to never let myself witness a miracle, any miracle, ever again.

Twelve years later, this vow is what’s on my mind as I watch a Ugandan woman writhe in pain on a plastic sheet. The nurse-midwife tells me the woman’s fully dilated and ready to push, then leaves the room. Tea break? I stand there and fidget awkwardly, unsure of the cultural protocol. I’ve never met this woman before, but I’ve come specifically to stare into her vagina in hopes of witnessing The Not-Quite-Miracle of Science. Do I introduce myself? Ask her how her morning has been? That seems insensitive. Tell her about my 27 minute training in labor and delivery? I approach the bed and she grabs my arm; suddenly I’m her birthing coach. “Uh, hi, I’m…just…breathe! Yeah, you’re breathing really well! Thank you for, um…your work.”

The woman lifts up her gown and for a split second, I think she’s spilled a can of soup between her legs. For another split second, I think about how much I love soup, and for a third, I think about how in the future, soup will always have this association for me, how soup is probably ruined for me forever, even Campbell’s Select Harvest Mexican-Style Chicken Tortilla, and how it’s all her fault, selfish laboring woman that she is.

The woman yells; I yell louder. I pry her fingers off my arm and start running from the room, presumably to look for help but possibly to escape the stressful situation entirely. Then I hear it: a baby’s cry, or what a baby’s cry might sound like if a Campbell’s factory worker accidentally delivered her baby into a vat of soup. Campbell’s maternity leave ain't what it used to be. I glance back toward the woman’s bed and there he is: ten blue fingers, ten blue toes, delivered by nobody into nobody’s hands. My first instinct is to pick the baby up; my second instinct is to yell again, if not for help than for his pathetic blue-figured sake.

The midwife rushes back into the room and gets right to work. I momentarily consider sniffing her breath for tea. She tells me to glove up and I realize I’m officially part of this. She clamps and cuts the cord and hands me the baby. I’ve seen this on T.V., of course, but here there’s no bulb suction to suction, no warmer to warm, and no handsome doctor to stand around and be handsome. So I swaddle him. I tell him out loud that I’m sorry, and that I should have been there to catch him, and that his life will probably get better than this depending on the Ugandan government’s future response to necessary education and healthcare policy reform and/or the end result of the world food crisis. I sense this baby is a realist. I secretly name him Benjamin.

Benjamin enthusiastically spits up on me, but after that he seems fine. He keeps staring at my left breast and puckering his lips. I sense this baby’s going to be a ladies' man. I hold him for around an hour, long enough for the mother to clean up, put on a prom-worthy gown characteristic of all important, not-so-important and altogether trivial events in Uganda, step into the hallway to make a few phone calls, send a few text messages to friends, take a short nap, and only then ask to see her son. I consider telling her she’s interrupting the vital bonding period characteristic of the first few hours of an infant’s life but ultimately and regretfully hand him over.

Afterward at lunch, as I ate my boiled pumpkin in an overwhelmed silence, I decided birth is probably the most disgusting, incredible, wonderful, horrifying thing I’ve ever seen.