A Spot of Blood

There is a spot of blood on my book.  Someone tried to wipe it away, but you can still see its faded remnant amongst the stylized daisies on the cover.  There is a second spot of blood on the bottom of the pages.  When I open the book, it spreads apart, splits.  I'm not sure why, but I can't stop looking at either of the spots.

During my wife's labour (21 Oct 11), I was standing beside her head, silently encouraging her as she tried to push out our baby.  My mother in-law was there too, cheering her on, watching it all.  She came to me and said, 'You've gotta go see, Tim.  It's so beautiful.  You can see her head.'  So I went to see, and all I could see was the blood oozing out, covering the doctor's gloved hands, spilling onto the waterproof bed, mixing with a tiny blotch of black baby-hair.  The doctor looked at me, then at Chelsee (my wife), and said in a serious but unpanicked voice, 'There's a bit more blood than usual here.  So that usually means we've gotta get this baby out.'  Chelsee said OK, the nurse made a walkie-talkie announcement, the room filled up with 5 or 6 nurses and another doctor, and the first doctor pulled out a 'vacuum,' which was really a little suction cup they stuck to Dorothie's head, so they could pull her out.

Three times, the doctor was pulling and the little suction cup popped off little Dorothie's head.  One of these pops sent blood splattering.  Two different splatters made two different spots on my book.

The book—the book with the blood on it—is called The Stone Diaries, by Carol Shields.  I had been reading it while we were waiting to be induced, then while we were waiting for the induction to actually do something.  It opens with an extended chapter about the birth of a child, and the death of its mother during the delivery.  If I were writing fiction, I would say I was freaking out because of the juxtaposition of the very realistic and tragic chapter I had just read with the blood made me think I was going to lose my wife.

I didn't think that.  I thought I needed to stay calm, because my wife was teasing me in the beginning stages of labour, saying, 'Tim will probably start freaking out cause he thinks everything's going wrong, when really it's just normal.'  So I stood beside her head again and thought, 'This is crazy, they're just pulling her out.'  They said she was facing upward, and I thought, 'Aww. I was facing upward when I was born.'  They finally pulled her out, and I thought, for one second, 'Did we have another boy?' (You'll understand that if you're ever in the delivery room of a baby girl).  They asked if Dad would like to cut the cord and I said Yes, and I thought, 'I thought they made more of a ceremony out of this.'  They took her to the cleaning-up table and started cleaning her up, and I thought, 'She is So beautiful. I could cry.'  I thought of my Dad telling me that one of the first things he thought when he saw my older sister, his first child, was 'I wonder who she is going to marry,' and I thought, 'I wonder who she is going to marry.  I wonder what she is going to be like.  I wonder if she'll be just like her brother. I doubt it.  I wonder if she'll like to draw, to sing, to write, to dance, to rebel against her parents.  I wonder what Dot Blackett will be.'

The Stone Diaries continues to tell a fragmented narration of a woman's life, from her birth in the first chapter, to her death in the last chapter.  Two marriages, three children, grandchildren, jobs, vacations, hobbies.  The novel comes at her life from a hundred different perspectives—her kids, her father, her co-workers, through letters, through obituaries, photographs, you name it.  The result is one of the most rounded characters I have ever encountered.  Shields was thinking of the biography form as she wrote it, and it feels like I have read about the life of real individual.  Yet even in the book, after her death, her kids sit around discussing how they didn't know everything about her.  Upon finding her journals and documents, they found she was someone entirely different (though much the same) than they thought she was.  She was much more complex, you might say.

In my own fiction, I find I spend a lot of time focussing on a single even in my character's lives.  As if these events define who they are.  I usually have a good idea of 'who they are' as a character, but feel as if my story is the only part of their lives.  I know that technically that's true, but I think if I want impactful characters, they should have entire lives outside of my story.  The thing about people is they have lived their lives one day at a time until today.  Each day they have encountered as much or more than I have.  Obviously, in fiction it's impossible to write all the menial and trivial aspects of a character's life, but I'm finding the more I think of character's in this way–people who have lived one day at a time until they reached my story—the more fully developed they become in my mind.  I start thinking about what they were like as kids, teenagers, who they married, IF they married, what they did to waste time, whatever.  Characters should be complex enough that one can never entirely understand them from one story.  Yet they need to be relatable enough that people care about what happens to them.  I don't feel I'm good enough yet, but I would love to write a story like The Stone Diaries someday, one that follows a single life from beginning to end without becoming mundane or boring, yet is still extraordinarily believable.

After a few seconds of drooling over my daughter,  I looked at my wife and the doctors stitching her up, and I thought, 'She looks like shit.'  They spent almost an hour fixing her and not long after, she puked a bunch of times.  They gave her meds for the pain and the nausea, which made her drowsy and out of it.  She barely got to see or hold her daughter for a few hours after she had given birth.

What I thought about her then was, 'She is so tough."  But I think that was the wrong word (though it is true).  I think my wife is incredibly Strong.  She has a friend who was due to give birth the week after we were, and when they were talking after we had Dot, her friend asked how the labour was.  My wife said, 'It wasn't bad.  It hurts.  But it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be.'  If it were me, I would have broken down, sobbing on the phone and telling her she's probably going to die.  She surprised me then with the strength of being able to hide the horror from her friend.  Since then, Dot has had some long nights where she's been crying for hours on end.  Chelsee is up with her more than I am cause she's feeding her and everything, yet I'm the one complaining.  She's standing firm and staying positive and reassuring me, while I'm crying in the corner.  After ten years of being together, six years of marriage, this strength has surprised me.  Not that I doubted her strength before, but it's just a new aspect of her character that I have not appreciated in the past.

And this is what good character should be like, I guess.  Real life has the ability to surprise you after 10 years.  Real good fiction should be the same.

I already think of The Stone Diaries as one of my favorite books.  Because it's an incredible work of art, yes.  But because of the spot of blood on the cover, and on the pages that will always remind me of the day Dorothie Eve Blackett was born, even more so.  I really can't wait to see her life, and my son's, unfold before me.  And mine before theirs.