I have been overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and support I have gotten since my son was born. Thank you all so much and know that your kind words have been so appreciated. I have been enjoying these small moments with my son so much. I quit my job (again) to work opposite shifts of my husband so I can be home with my son most of the time. Motherhood is truly the greatest blessing of my life. If you like my stupid bullshit, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. <3 This is a story about something that happened to my family during our first days postpartum.

The second place I took my son when he was finally earthside was a drug-testing facility. It was down the street from a duplex my husband and I rented when we were first married, back when we weren’t yet priced out of that part of town. Before it was a corporate drug-testing facility, it was a lamp store with a beautiful old sign. They painted the drug-testing facility a sterile white. The lamp sign is gone and the new sign is not beautiful. A stock image of a woman in a lab coat greets you at the door, ready to receive your specimen. Something nobody tells you about having a baby: the first few times lugging them around in their carseat is bound to be awkward. My husband and I carefully remove the car seat, a maneuver that feels like a death wish because to park at the drug-testing facility you must park in the street. The woman at the front desk—who is conspicuously not wearing a lab coat—asks if we are there for Child Protective Services. I wish she’d keep her fucking voice down.

I did not plan on writing my birth story. I’ve never read a birth story willingly, and in fact when I was pregnant, the last thing I wanted to do was read someone else’s account of their child being born. Please stick with me as this is not Ina May territory.

I went into labor two weeks and two days before my due date. I was massively pregnant but convinced I would not have the baby early because first timers typically come late. At least, when I confidently told my midwife that I was sure he was going to come early, she told me dryly to not get my hopes up.

It was Saturday night and I had to cancel my video gaming plans because all I could do was lie in bed. I didn’t think I could be in labor and I had made a lot of plans at work for the next week that necessitated me not going into labor. But as the night wore on it became very clear that yes, I was in labor after all.

I called the midwife around 5 am after an excruciating evening. I laid on the couch and cried all night. I made my husband sleep in the recliner. It felt like waiting out a tornado in the cellar. Eventually my birth team showed up. I thought my water had broken but it hadn’t. Nobody prepared me for the sheer amount of fluid involved during labor. At some point I got into the birth pool but I was too hot to relax. Outside it was a beautiful day, cool and rainy, and I did not want anyone to touch me. I laid in the shower and let cold water flow on me. I disregarded what might become of my white linen sheets and insisted on laying in bed. My sheets are fine, thank god.

It was Easter. I was very concerned that I was being rude to my birth team by not being able to speak to them other than saying “oh no…oh no…” and the occasional indication that I wanted to die. After 20 hours of labor at home, no sleep, and no food (I couldn’t, they tried), I went to the hospital and got an epidural. I pushed my son out in, like, 20 minutes. It was not what I had imagined, but then things rarely are, and I did not find it “traumatic” like so many women do. And then CPS showed up at our house.

In the drug testing place there’s a man in a trench coat and another man who is wearing a t-shirt with the Punisher logo on it and he has the volume on his phone turned way up so I can hear him sending messages on Snapchat. I wonder what both of these men are on probation for, though I acknowledge this is an unfair assessment. Maybe they are innocent, like me and my husband and certainly my son. I’m sure the patrons in the waiting room of the drug testing place heard the woman ask if we were there for CPS. So the man in the trench coat probably thinks I did drugs when I was pregnant and that’s why I’m here with my husband and my son. My son is eight days old. The trench coat man keeps refilling his paper water cup at the fountain. Maybe he has a shy bladder. I don’t know it yet but my bladder is shy—meaning I can’t piss when the woman watches me. I’m 8 days postpartum and I’m bleeding. I have to go sit in the chair of shame and drink water from a paper cup for another hour until I can will myself to piss.

When the woman came to our door on a Saturday at 6:30 pm I had the baby reclined on a pillow from a company called “My Brest Friend,” branding with which you are forced to comply when you become a mother. Both of my tits were out: I was nursing on one side and pumping on the other. The woman barked at me from the other side of the storm door that she was there for “Child Abuse and Neglect.” We let her in. She saw my tits and immediately apologized. She said the hospital had sent in a crisis report after they drug tested me. I had tested positive for codeine.

Codeine!

I laughed and told her it must have been from the epidural. She said no, they don’t use codeine in epidurals. I asked why it took four days for the report to come in. She relented and said that the hospital had dropped the ball in some way. I was incredulous. They never should have discharged me!, I said. The woman agreed. I saw my drug test results and saw that codeine was positive, but I assumed it was from the epidural. And now CPS was at our house looking at my raw, six-day-postpartum nipples. But she was shrugging her shoulders and telling my husband and I that she wasn’t worried about it. Before she left I asked her for her card. She didn’t have one. She wrote down her name and number on a piece of legal pad paper. When I’d try to call her, later, I’d learn that the number was inoperable.

I had never wanted to go to the hospital. But the baby was safe and healthy and after we were home I did not, for once, allow myself to feel ashamed. I needed to go to the hospital, because I was weak from laboring for over 24 hours with no sleep and no food. And I needed to go because the truth is that I was scared—I could not imagine the baby being here, and that scared me. Until the very last minute, my son was always an abstraction. Even though I spent 20 weeks puking in the sink. Even through I felt him kicking inside of my womb. Even though I was ginormous and waddling around my classroom up until the day before I went into labor. I didn’t believe it, could not believe it. And I was scared, so I ended up in the hospital.

The drive to the hospital (we crossed the state line) was torture. The epidural was easy. Everything that followed the epidural was a cakewalk. I was talking and making jokes to my husband and being generally charming to the L&D nurses. One nurse asked me a series of questions that I understood as standard: am I safe at home? Do I have access to food? Do I think about harming myself? Do I currently smoke or use tobacco or have I in the past? Alcohol? Drugs? I answered truthfully: yes, yes, no, yes, yes, yes, but I’m nearly five years sober. I did not know that saying I had any history of substance abuse would subject me—and my son—to drug testing. But it did. They drug tested us both and they did not tell me they would drug test us both. The hospital drug tested my son when he was mere hours old and they did not tell me or his father. The hospital collected a piss sample from me when I was still under the epidural, using a catheter. The hospital did not inform me nor ask my consent. I found out about this much later. I expressed my concern that this was a violation when asked about my experience in the hospital. I refused to take fucking Zyrtec when I was pregnant, so I wasn’t worried that my drug test would not come back clean. I let them know how I felt. I was polite. All that mattered was my son and bringing him home.

And then CPS showed up at our house.

I found out that the CPS worker’s number was inoperable because after she left I realized what had happened. The morning I went into labor, I got fancy bread from Whole Foods. Regrettably, the bread is called Seeduction Loaf. It’s called Seeduction Loaf because it has seeds. Specifically, it has poppyseeds. Like Elaine Benes, and many an American service member1 (allegedly), I had fallen victim to a false positive drug test due to something as benign as seeded bread. I called the social worker to tell her about the stupid fucking bread but I could not get a hold of her because she had given me a number that did not work. Doesn’t that seem, like, illegal?

On Monday, the woman working my case called. I was on my way to a breastfeeding support group. I was not nice to her. I could hear her typing on some kind of ancient keyboard everything I was saying. “Codeine? Where do you even get that?”2 click-clack-clack-clack. I told her how violating it was. clack-click-click. I told her that this was disrupting the bonding time with my son, who was eight days old. click-clack-click-clack. The person who made notes in my file from the home visit was a different person than the woman who visited.

The case worker from CPS ordered a drug test for me and for my husband. We had to go to a facility and pee into a cup, except for we also had to have a hair follicle test done. I had only heard rumors of hair follicle tests from the hardcore weed smokers of yore. You know, back when you had to drive to the woods to smoke weed. I asked her if I had to take the test, and she said I did not have to but they would then have to escalate my case. I asked several people what they thought of this. Many of them encouraged me to get the drug test over with. “You have nothing to hide,” they said. I hated them for saying that to me, hated how violated and powerless I felt within these circumstances. I held my baby and cried and pled with God to please not let anyone take him away from me. I weighed the drug test against the possibility of not taking the drug test and how it would look to the black-and-white minds over at CPS or a judge. I asked my husband, and many of my friends, if it was possible that I actually did codeine3 and didn’t remember it.

For a few days I understood what it must be like to believe you are being gang-stalked.

I talked to a lawyer. He told me that the only thing I can do is take the test, or refuse and have it used against me. He said I am now a cog in their fucked up system and the best thing to do is comply. So we shlepped our newborn into the car for only the second time in his life.

After I successfully piss into the cup the woman takes me to a small room to collect my hair sample. I ask her if it will be noticeable. “Shouldn’t be,” she replies, readying the supplies. “You have a lot of hair.” I weep as I hear the snipping of her shears. I am so scared. I am so angry. I should be at home. I should be soaking it all in. I should not be under suspicion. I did everything right. The woman cutting my hair must be used to people crying—mothers, maybe, under authoritative surveillance—perhaps regardless if they are guilty or innocent. I am having many thoughts at once: the hair follicle test coming back positive somehow. My son in foster care. Waking up in my home without him. My breasts painfully engorged with milk he cannot drink, because somewhere, someone is feeding him formula. She finishes taking the sample. Finally, I reunite with my husband. The baby has been asleep in his carseat since we arrived. I desperately want to get home, to hold his little body in my arms. I want to tell him that nothing in this world can ever bring us apart, even though an unfortunately-named bread has proven this untrue.4

It has been four weeks and I can still feel where the hair sample was taken atop my head. I am reminded of the room each time I feel spiky, uneven patches on my scalp. The results came back negative. I had to call CPS to get the case worker to call the drug-testing company and check on our results. She would not close the case without first making me disclose where our son sleeps. Then, everything went away, just like everyone said. All I had to do was comply. I had nothing to hide.

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