Yitzy’s birth

Yitzy’s birth turns a routine prenatal visit into an urgent delivery and becomes a bodily and emotional turning point for Devorah. Preeclampsia brings the pregnancy to an abrupt close; labor is induced, and the next day she gives birth. The event does not resolve her uncertainty about motherhood. Instead, the force of delivery and the strangeness of meeting her newborn expose a gap between what she thinks she ought to feel and what she actually experiences, while the religious rules surrounding her body complicate even the care she receives.

Medical Crisis and Admission

At a routine appointment, Dr. Patrick taps Devorah’s knee with a small metal hammer. Her leg jumps wildly. Dr. Patrick takes her blood pressure, reads it as 135 over 85, and concludes that it is time to deliver the baby. Devorah leaves stunned and finds Eli double-parked outside. The decision makes the birth imminent before she has begun the research she had hoped to do about pursuing a degree after the baby arrived.

At St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, Devorah and Eli take the elevator to the labor and delivery ward on the seventh floor. On the way, they pass a birthing center where women balance on large plastic balls and breathe through contractions; Devorah manages to laugh at the sight. She is admitted to a room with flowered wallpaper, a pink quilt, and a view of Midtown. The calm details of the room contrast with the diagnosis she receives there: Dr. Patrick’s colleague explains that Devorah has preeclampsia, a dangerous condition for the baby, and describes her body as reacting to the baby as though it were a threat.

Induction and Religious Boundaries

The doctor proposes a gentle induction because Devorah is far enough along. Medication administered through the cervix is intended to begin dilation while she sleeps; Pitocin will follow intravenously in the morning to bring on contractions, with an epidural available when they become painful. The plan gives the crisis a clear timetable: the doctor confirms that the baby is expected the next day. Devorah is nineteen, a fact that prompts the doctor to remark that she had thought Devorah was in her twenties. Devorah smiles weakly, reading the praise for an early start as judgment rather than simple encouragement.

Twenty-four hours later, Dr. Patrick wakes Devorah with the news that it is time. A male nurse holds one of her legs because Eli is no longer permitted to touch her. Devorah experiences the arrangement as a pointed religious contradiction: another man can look at and hold her in a moment when her husband cannot, because she is considered impure and the rules are understood as protecting Eli’s purity. The delivery room therefore places medical necessity and ritual restrictions alongside one another, with Devorah’s own comfort and sense of ownership over her body caught between them.

Delivery and First Contact

The birth itself arrives as a sudden bodily force. Devorah feels an extraordinary pull in her belly, as though her insides are being sucked out; the weight in her abdomen slides away in a split second, and her stomach collapses so quickly that she feels as if she has fallen from a great height. Dr. Patrick asks whether she wants to see the baby immediately or wait until he has been cleaned. Devorah asks for him to be cleaned first. The sight of the squirming, pink newborn makes her feel sick, while Eli is already beside the crib looking between the doctors.

The placenta is placed on a nearby table. Dr. Patrick asks Eli whether he wants to take it, since some Jews bury the placenta to honor it. Devorah shakes her head when he looks to her. She knows the Talmud calls it the tree of life, referring to its branching surface and its role in giving life, but she finds it disgusting on the tray, quivering, and they do not take it home. A moment later, the baby is brought to her wrapped in clean blue blankets. She notices his tiny blond curls, darkened by moisture, and his golden skin. Eli tears up beside her; Devorah remains calm.

Uncertainty, Retrospection, and Significance

For the first hour, Devorah talks continuously to the baby, while he looks up at her without turning his gaze away. Yet speech does not immediately create the connection she expects. She cannot reconcile the small person in her arms with the body that has just come out of her, and feels as if the baby has been arbitrarily placed in her care. She wonders whether she should feel maternal and tries to talk herself, the baby, and everyone around her into believing that she is in love. The scene resists a simple story of instant attachment: birth creates a relationship, but Devorah’s feelings do not fall neatly into place with it.

The physical experience, by contrast, stays with her. Looking back, Devorah wonders whether the sensation of giving birth was the only moment in her five-year marriage when she felt fully alive. She describes it as a wake-up call that made her begin fighting again. That later understanding gives the delivery significance beyond the immediate medical emergency: the body that had been governed by religious expectations also becomes the source of an experience she remembers as unmistakably her own.

The memoir’s retrospective structure makes the birth part of a longer account of recognition and change. Devorah says that she did not understand at the time that she had lost her innocence; only later could she identify a moment when she stopped accepting authority simply because it was authority and began drawing her own conclusions. She also remembers the accident that occurred when the date changed to September 9, 2009, reading the number nine as a sign of endings and beginnings and the day as a divide in her life. At the memoir’s close, she describes having freed herself from her past without letting go of it. Those later reflections do not alter what happens in the delivery room; they show how the event is carried forward in the narrator’s account, as one bodily beginning within a much longer movement toward self-determination.