SING

6:28 pm

Having a baby, I’m learning, has a lot to do with space. (It has do with other things too, so I hear; being a first-time dad, though, I wouldn’t know much about that.)

It’s a cool, windy evening, the bright heart of spring; my wife and I have just arrived at our local non-teaching hospital. We’re here for a tour of the hospital’s maternity ward—it’s not the real thing.

Inside, the hospital’s shaped like an irregular octagon and located on the top of a very tall hill. As soon as my wife and I walk in, a receptionist greets us from behind a desk big enough to be mereologically related to the second floor. Signs in the form of conditionals guide us places: if we take this hallway φ, we’ll wind up on ward β. A cluttered-looking gift shop rests at the crux of the L-shape that’s the lobby’s northern end. Inside, I notice, there are many rows of stuffed yellow ducks. Each duck is cuddly and charming and teacup sized. They are also, your correspondent regrets to reveal, a brisk $22.99 each.

The feeling of the hospital on the outside—that is, lonely and forlorn, like the feeling of a chain grocery store at night—isn’t how it feels on the inside. In the lobby, everyone who’s going somewhere is doing it quickly, with purpose. There are some people are sitting in chairs, scrolling on their phones, facing rows of windows filled with coming night.

Somehow, they seem to evoke the feeling of dusk outside: of an ineffable sadness, and a slow but impending doom.

6:35 pm

Some background here is probably due. In June, my wife and I are expecting a baby girl. Beyond that, unfortunately, there’s little information to relay. Details concerning the little girl are speculative and hard to come by. My wife and I think we know her name, and some pertinent facts about her background and origin; we have theories—again, all speculative—about the things she will like and dislike and gravitate towards, and maybe even love.

Other than that, we’re going in blind.

Maybe this is why—a week ago—my wife decided it’d be a good idea for us to familiarize ourselves with the place she will first come to meet us, this mysterious summer child; this heretofore-only-dreamed-of girl of sunshine and fireflies and light.

There’s one small hiccup. I’ve alluded to it already, so I won’t spend much time on it. Though I can abide hospitals at a distance, driving past them, say, or picturing tours of their arcane medical wards as part of a sort of anticipatory visualization exercise in my mind. I’m aware that this tour isn’t about me; I am here because of this little girl who is soon to arrive and steal my heart.

I’m sweating heavily, I can report, but hanging in there.

The stuffed ducks back at the gift shop look distant now, almost bereft, like a child’s favorite toy swept out to sea.

6:34 pm

We’re only mildly late, it turns out. By now, we’ve managed to join the rest of the tour at the north end of the lobby. There are eight of us total, eight to-be-parents, and greetings have already been exchanged—I’ve escaped one social engagement so far. Two of the couples are rural-looking, young, and radiate the intangible air of first-time parents—it’s hard to describe. They look uncertain, but enthusiastic. Worried, but well-rested (at least for now).

Our tour guide’s name is Mary Anne. She has white teeth and a veritable halo of bright white hair. Prior to acting as tonight’s guide, she worked as a maternity room nurse here, at this hospital. There’s a glimmer in her eye, something maternal, and it endears her to us; makes us feel a bit closer to home. In fact, the gentle way she speaks to us—with candor, and humanity—is the second sign this hospital might suit my wife and me just fine. The first sign was the ducks. As Mary Anne continues to welcome us, relaying self-deprecating stories and idle advice about what might like on our Big Day, I begin to notice a theme. In everything Mary Anne tells us, there’s some allusion to space. Almost every word she uses is spatial: the quickest route to take from the parking lot to the maternity ward; the (small) circle of friends and family we should invite to the recovery room; the carving out of our own private sphere of us time, either in the birthing room or recovery room, as we revel in the arrival of our someone new.

It’s another reminder of our purpose here. Tonight, we’re finally getting a glimpse of this new, foreign land we’re soon to become denizens of: Parenthood.

And—consequent to our arrival there—we’re going to be temporary denizens of clinical, recuperative space.

In her essay Heterotopias of Illness, scholar Stella Bolaki writes of how disease and affliction are often framed in ways that are spatial. The term Heterotopia is a Foucauldian one, repurposed from a medical term referring to the incidence of ‘body tissue appearing in an unlikely place.’[1] In her paper, Bolaki describes how Virginia Woolf (in her own essay On Being Ill) refers to disease as an undiscovered country; later, she invokes Susan Sontag’s famous opening to her essay Illness as Metaphor: ‘Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.’

According to leading theories of space—or spacetime, if you prefer—two leading positions abound: substantivalism and relationism. A substantivalist endorses a realist conception of space: that is, they posit the existence of a spacetime framework, a container-like frame of reference, outside of whatever relations obtain between material objects. Because everyday speech makes use of—quantifies over—locations (i.e., in predicate logic, one might say ∃x [x is somewhere]); and realism about the existence of locations is a core tenant of the theory, the substantivalist has a ready-made, practical grounding for their claims.

Contra the substantivalist, the relationist says that—beyond whatever relations hold between material objects—no container-like spacetime framework exists. There are only material bodies and the relations that obtain between them—nothing more, nothing less.

More speculative fans of space, of course, can advance more whimsical ideas: in the Continental tradition (that quixotic, flower-child sibling of the analytic) a looser strain of relationism exists, whereby space is conceived as a generative (or immanent, in the Deleuzian sense) force, rather than one comprised of relationships between matter.

The argument goes something like this.

(P1) space is the result of interrelations; (P2) interrelations run through and also make up space, so relations unfold spatially; (C) space is never fixed, but always in the process of becoming.[2]

It follows that, in conceiving of space in this way—as an immanent process, made up of new, ever-developing interrelations—one is forced to rethink conceptions of spatial scale.

In the words of scholar Jonathan Murdoch: there are no essential qualities to any given place (it is a ‘global’ place, a ‘local’ place), for all (scalar) identities are derived from the relations established between places.[3]

Even now, as our group mingles in the lobby, a concern for relations and space feels prescient. The hospital defines itself as a system of signs, like a language: the location of the recovery room expresses its purpose because it’s across from the birthing room. Hallways are described by their shape.

Directions to places refer to other places that you need to know the locations of for those directions to make sense—there’s something Derridean, even Escher-esque about it.

6:46 pm

Mary Anne is finally beginning to wrap things up. Empirically, I can confirm that pop-satirical references to the quality of hospital food appear accurate; twice I’ve seen carts go by with plates of macaroni and cheese that look gelatinous enough to be reflective. The desserts don’t look bad though: some sort of chocolate crumble with cherries.

As I’ve gathered, the tour will consist of this. First, Mary Anne will show us the maternity ward’s waiting rooms; next, we’ll proceed to the birthing rooms; after that, we’ll drop in on a series of smaller maternity ward rooms that honeycomb the hallways, acting as temporary dens for nurses in between duties requiring their exigent attention.

Before we start, Mary Anne asks us to keep some things in mind.

Though we’re on the main floor of the hospital, it’s technically the third floor on the hospital’s blueprint—it even says third floor on the elevator keypad, which is something we’ll need to remember later. To wit: if we press third floor on the elevator keypad to, say, get to the cafeteria (located on the fourth floor), we won’t go anywhere—the elevator will sort of hum and idle like a John Deere tractor in neutral. The second floor, Mary Anne says, is below the floor we’re on, but it’s not underground. (Don’t ask me; I’m just nodding at this point).

6:50 pm

Okay. We’re underway. My wife is at my side; she’s murmuring things in an encouraging monotone. More dessert carts are going past: more chocolate crumble.

Your correspondent-on-the-scene can report that—for those who also might be expecting soon—as soon as you arrive at the hospital, you’ll be admitted to triage first. In fact, this is where we’re headed now, a small, cuddy cabin of a room with obscure-looking equipment emitting beeps at irregular intervals. There’s a bed resembling a gurney, facing a wall painted a harsh shade of white. On closer inspection, the walls are made of concrete—vaguely bunker-like, when you knock on them with a fist. The expectant mothers among us, it appears, are less than impressed with this room. There is no magic here, no wonder; no sense of the miracle to come.

As one who cannot abide places like this, clinical or no, it does seem in fact to represent the worst of clinical space, the utilitarian, sterile, impersonal uniformity of a localized zone you’re not allowed to leave until you’ve been purged of your money and dignity and honor. Here, you’re nothing but numbers on a clipboard’s sheet of loose-leaf paper, a blood pressure reading marked in horrible permanent, a sort of bag of human bones and organs to be prodded and poked at will.

I am no longer hungry, I can report.

6:53 pm

We’re departing triage. I, for one, am relieved. This place is a damn maze; we’re passing rooms I could swear we’ve already been in. Now, faintly, you can start to hear the bleat and wail of newborns from behind closed doors: the chirps and murmurs of inchoate life.

Each time, the expectant mothers among us make a cooing sound that’s hard for me to describe, in print.

The dads—if I may speak for us—are starting to look a bit desultory now. Not sullen; or bored; but just…out of place. It’s sort of starting to feel like we’ve been escorted to a woman’s-only section of a department store.

Where we’re going now, it wasn’t made for us. It’s hallowed land. Special territory.

We’re broaching the heart of the maternity tour now: its raison d'etre.

6:55 pm

Imagine a room that looks like a cross between an elementary school classroom and a discount hotel’s best attempt at a suite: this is Birthing Room Six. I know this, because it says so on a plaque on the wall. The quality of light here is vaguely subterranean, plum-like, the shade of an early winter twilight with the sun refusing to

As we enter, an awed hush falls over the room, what feels like a sudden uniform awareness of where we are. Things happen in this room. Things that are hard to imagine, much less foresee ourselves taking part in.

There’s a bed to our left, I can relay, framed by two big PCs; a leather sofa is shoved up against the far wall—this is where, Mary Anne tells us, the husbands among us will try out best to scrabble for sleep.

You can almost feel it, looking around. The hundreds—maybe thousands—of new lives that have arrived in this room.

For a minute, Mary Anne lets us stand and admire the space. Lets us peer at the weighing station to the left of the door; to wander towards the jacuzzi-tub occupying half the dorm-sized bathroom, the largest bathroom I have ever, it occurs to me, seen up close, outside of a college football stadium men’s room.

6:57 p.m.

Before we depart for the recovery room, Mary Anne herds us back into a semi-circle, then asks if we have questions. At first, there’s quiet. My wife is still admiring the tub; it makes me wonder if she’s thinking about special ordering one for home.

At last, one of the expectant mothers raises her hand. She’s tall, imperious, the wife of one of the rural to-be fathers, a woman who seems destined to raise a young boy that’s both the awe and terror of the playground.

“Uh, yes,” she says. “What happens if, you know—when we get here, all the birthing rooms are taken?”

The moment she says it, a few of the other expectant mothers nod. Even I admit, it’s a good question. With only twelve birthing rooms, surely a scenario like this has happened before?

However—smoothly, in her insouciant tone—Mary Anne tells us not to worry. She tells us it’s a question she gets often; but not once, in all her thirty years of working in this maternity ward’s trenches, has she seen all twelve rooms been occupied at the same time.

It’s nice to be reassured. But right away, I’m back to thinking about space…only, in its most plainest, most straightforward form. Surely, here, in this big college town, it’s at least possible for twelve women to go into labor at the same time? Virtually zero or no, the chances of it exist (∃x).

And what then? Is there some sort of tiebreaker rule to determine who gets a room and who doesn’t? Being turned away from a hospital due to space constraints might make a good story later, like something from Luke 2:7; but it’s not like there’s another maternity ward just down the street. Something better than an assurance would be nice. Maybe even something in writing.

6:58 pm

Okay. At last, we’re departing the birthing rooms now.

Mary Anne in the lead, she guides down a new wide, bright hallway (I don’t think we’ve been here before) to a fresh part of the ward. Now, I don’t want to speak for everyone, but I, for one, am glad to leave this room. It had felt…clinical. Frightening, vaguely. Full of devices it seemed best I didn’t know the names or intentions of. In a phrase, bereft of the possibility that’d previously inured me to spending $22.99 on a tennis ball-sized duck in the lobby.

In the birthing rooms, space had felt Euclidean. Accounted for, structured. Every inch of the birthing room had fixed points and coordinates designated for some ultimate, incomprehensible purpose. There, it felt as if things happen, in some inarguable, predestined way. If the birthing rooms had a descriptive operator, it’d be: □ (necessity), not ◊ (possibility).

7:04 pm

I’m starting to get hungry again. It feels like we’ve walked a long time. Still—if I have the gist of our itinerary right—there’s one region left of the ward still to see.

One last stop on our tour, before we’re released back into the cold spring night.

Night is limning the windows now, running the length of the hall to our left.

I’m still a bit sweaty, but I’m hanging in all right.

A corridor that feels more accommodating—more gentle—guides us in the loose direction of another corridor bordered by many rooms with double doors. Things...feel different here. It’s not easy to put into words. Slowing her pace, Mary Anne veers left, leading us without preamble into a room that’s practically shaped: just a rectangle.

Inside, there’s that same sort of…gentleness here. A feeling of pride. Of rightness. Wide dark windows are concealed by curtains, so it feels cozy, isolated. The bathroom is just a toilet: no high-tech tub with jets and a complex topography here.

That sense of necessity, of practicality, that had haunted the birthing room…it’s a distant memory.

It’s only when Mary Anne arranges us all in a row, so we’re directly facing her, does it dawn on me why this room feels so different.

By the time we’re here, someone else will be with us.

Our new arrival, our ticket to the new land of Parenthood, will have joined us.

Holding court before us, Mary Anne tells us that the journey we’re about to take…there is no way to prepare for. It’s uncharted land. Unexplored space.

But—and now, she looks us in the eyes; looks us in the eyes with a maternal look, one that’s both piercing and profound, as if she’s seeing right into us—she says she’s sure, being with us now, that we’re up for the task.

A bit dazed, the rest of the to-be parents and I shuffle from the room. A big spring moon is hanging in the lobby windows, filling with semi-dark space with a sidereal glare. One or two old couples are mingling by the souvenir shop, whose windows are dark, its teacup-sized occupants dozing for the night.

It’s as I step out into the warm evening air, bring with a big spring moon, that I feel some hint of that cosmic shift to come.

It isn’t a feeling of necessity, (□).

It’s possibility (◊).

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/nursing-and-health-professions/heterotopia

[2] Massey 1998

[3] Murdoch, 2004(?)

[4] Murdoch, 33