Metallica Made Me a Mother

Joy Victory

Word Count 634

When it came time to deliver my baby, I had planned for an absurdly ideal setting: The comforting glow of fake tea lights flickering in the background as Fleetwood Mac streamed from a wireless speaker by my hospital bed. Stevie Nicks would sing about gold dust women and players only loving you when they’re playing as my baby arrived and was handed to me like a gift, wrapped in a soft swaddle blanket and pink-or-blue cap. We’d cuddle for a while before both of us drifted off into a deep, recuperative nap.

But as minutes of labor turned to hours turned to days, nothing could soften the medical-grade floodlights pointed at my crotch, the blood pressure cuff on my arm, the IVs jammed into the front of my hands, and my stained clothes rumpled in a chair in the corner, coated in the vomit that had spewed from me at the same moment my water broke.  

When the baby’s heartbeat grew erratic, and they had to crank up the Pitocin—a medicine to increase contractions—I was spent. Music was still playing, but Rumours wasn’t helping anymore. I requested music with more energy. My husband scrolled through our playlist, selecting The Rolling Stones.

“No,” I wheezed between excruciating waves of drug-induced contractions, “heavier, it needs to be heavier. Metallica.” He picked Master of Puppets, their third album. The title song was about drugs. The title song was about loss of control. The title song was about fear. 

Master, master

Where's the dreams that I've been after?

I pushed and pushed. I had to let the medical system, as flawed as it was, take over. I had to stifle the panic at the rising numbers on my blood pressure monitor and the falling heartbeats on the fetal heart monitor. I had to do this. The only way out was through.

Veins that pump with fear, sucking darkest clear 

When she arrived, my baby would not be handed to me. She entered the world with lungs of fluid that needed to be immediately and violently suctioned as I watched from a few feet away, prone and bleeding, being stitched up on the inside and outside.

Then, it happened. A nurse placed her in my arms, ever so briefly. I looked down into her oceanic blue eyes, and as we made first contact, I fell headfirst into a cosmic well that took me back, way back, first through my father, then my grandparents, and further and further through the tunnel, until all I saw was stardust. 

I traveled across time and witnessed eternity. 

The wormhole closed seconds or hours or days later, I know not which. My moonage daydream evaporated when a nurse took my baby from my arms, wheeling her off to the NICU.

A few days later, my daughter was declared healthy and ready to go home. But I was not healthy. I was not better. I was not ready to go home. I was transferred to many rooms, six or seven in as many days, as they debated my case. I lost track of where I was, and who I was.

Never-ending maze

Drift on numbered days

I was a mother whose case was baffling, who may or may not need emergency medication to prevent a seizure, who may or may not have a liver that’s about to explode, who may or may not have lost her mind from sleep deprivation.

When I finally got home, I walked into the apartment of a stranger, staring at a bookshelf of books I didn’t recognize. Disassociation, a side effect of the culmination of the labor, the drugs, the stress, the exhaustion, the severe preeclampsia. 

A panic blew through me. 

But with time, I got better. 

Your life burns faster, master.

Thanks to Metallica, I was a mother now. 

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Joy is the Managing Editor for HealthyHearing.com and was named a finalist in the 2022 Writers’ League of Texas manuscript contest. She writes professionally as a health journalist and personally as an essayist and memoirist. Her creative non-fiction has appeared in publications both commercial and literary, including The Sun Magazine, Cosmopolitan, VICE News, ABCNEWS.com, 3Elements Literary Review, YourTango, San Antonio Review, and Montana Mouthful.