Bw-wah-h-h-h! (Backstory to Grandchild)

When my grandson was born, I had an experience I’d never had before, or since. I call it emotional hurling.

The day after he was born, several of our family members met in the maternity ward waiting room for visiting hours to begin. We were joyful, filling each other in on the details of his birth, how his mom was doing...all the details the others had not been there to know firsthand. We were having a good time.

From out of nowhere, I felt my body heave, starting in the pit of my stomach. A wave of nausea came over me, but instead of throwing up stomach contents, I threw up emotions.

“Bwa-a-awhhhh! Bw-w-wa-a-h-h-h!”

Only sound came out of my mouth. My eyes filled with tears which flooded down my cheeks. I was sobbing, but I wasn’t feeling sad, nor were these tears of joy. It was really weird. I felt detached from what was happening.

I tried to apologize and say that I was okay, but another rush of emotion came flying out of me, more sobbing, buckets more tears. My behavior was uncontrollable and was beginning to upset everyone else in the room. I went to the women’s restroom, thinking perhaps splashing cold water on my face would help.

Before I could do that, the heaving stopped, as did all the other symptoms. I didn’t know what to think.

One of my friends came in to check on me. She’s a retired RN. I asked her if she had ever heard of such a thing. She said it likely was stress, or maybe relief that my daughter and grandson were fine – a subconscious response to an unconscious fear, a motor reflex kind of thing.

Made sense to me, so I didn’t give it another thought.

I had the same experience a couple more times, in the restaurant where my ex-Beloved and I went for lunch after spending time with mother and son. This time the “bwwahhh” was louder, longer and my face was soaked with tears; I mean instantly flooded, no trickle and then a torrent – just immediately soaking wet.

People looked at my husband as if he were responsible for my outburst; maybe they thought he had hurt me. We turned back to our food and I was trying to make light of the outburst when it happened again! I was mortified!

Ex-Beloved looked around at the tables close to us and said, simply, “New grandmother, today.” Lots of smiles, knowing nods, then we were ignored.

In talking with other women afterwards about the emotional hurling, none of them had ever had it happen to them or anyone they knew. One of my friends said it reminded her of the scene in the movie, "An Unmarried Woman," where Jill Clayburgh’s character is so overwrought about losing her husband to another woman that she vomits on the street.

Over the next couple of months after D’s birth, I told the story a few times, but never had anyone tell me they had had the same sort of thing happen to them. I decided it was an anomaly, and let it go. But the brain stored the experience away, as it does everything, in all of us.

When Grandpa Joe and Jeep-Man had their brief exchange in the coffee shop Thursday morning, I recognized the sound of an emotional hurl coming on when Joe said, “Thank you” to Jeep-Man. There was a soft quiver at the beginning of ‘thank’ that was swallowed down by the time he got to ‘you.’

I knew that sound, and the brain said, “Oh, yeah, that was what you sounded like when D was born, remember?”

Maybe I projected onto Joe my memories of how my body reacted to the ancient, id-driven fears surrounding birth. In writing what I think Joe was reacting to, perhaps I was completely wrong. After all, I don’t know men and their emotional lives. Maybe a man would never have such a dissociative reaction, like I did. Maybe no other human being on the face of the earth has ever had my reaction, for any reason.

But I know that sound, and Joe made it, probably unconsciously. It was the beginning of “Bwa-ah-hh!”

(c) 2009 Martha McLemore