Excerpt from my memoir-in-progress (for critique)

This is a 3 page excerpt.
I have one other excerpt that's ready for human eyes, but I'll wait till I know for sure I've done this right.

My chief aim here is to gather input about the form and structure of this story because I am not satisfied with it. I wrote it several years ago. (the reason it's so short: I had to condense the story for a contest. I didn't place.)

what do you think this story needs? what questions do you have after reading it? what, if anything, is not clear?

thanks in advance for your input

**************BEGIN STORY*********************************

There’s a lot of joy in childbirth, but no dignity. Not even when you’re alone afterward.

The first two days are the worst. All that cushioning, nurturing blood your womb’s been holding is not expelled during childbirth. No, it waits until the baby is wiped and measured and wrapped, and you’re resting in bed and then have to get up to go to the bathroom, alone finally after having a gaggle of nurses and the doctor examine your messy, spread-wide vagina for 13 hours.

My trip to the bathroom was a ginger, creaky shuffle, my thighs protesting being held too closely together. I made it halfway across the room before my uterus clenched and I felt a pop, and a hot torrent of blood gushed out of me. It splatted on the floor like a wet mop, and all I could do for a few moments was stare at it in disbelief, panting. He- he-, hooo. He- he-, hooooo.

I waddled to the bathroom to get towels, but when I turned around and saw my smeared bloody footprints, the huge pool of bright red blood, and felt it still oozing out of me despite my best Kegel exercises – I knew I’d make things worse with every helpful squat.
Sighing, I leaned on the intercom and said, “I made a mess.”

In the bathroom doorway, blood making loud splinks at my feet, I counted what was white, what I’d missed. 17 floor squares on the left. The privacy curtains. Three walls. At least 22 floor squares on the right.
When the nurse arrived I apologized, eyes averted.

“Oh, honey,” she said, wiping my quivering legs with a scratchy white towel. “This is normal. Now you get in the shower and this’ll all be gone when you get out.”

There in the shower, forehead resting on cold tile, watching my blood curlicue in the water, I was slashed by reality: I’d ripped out my heart.
I’d ripped out my heart and was bleeding to death and couldn’t even cry.

Relinquish: to renounce, abdicate, surrender; to hand over.
Relinquishment is in Roget’s under the heading Abandonment.

According to Mama, not only was I abandoning my child, I was giving away my best chance of love. “What about walking side-by-side down railroad tracks?” She wrote me when I first told her. “What about his first word, Mama?”

This from the mama who put me in foster care when I was 11 years old, like her mother did with her and her two sisters.
I folded her letter up tight and shoved it in my underwear drawer with the cocoa butter she’d sent for stretch marks, where it lay forgotten. Till now.

I got out of the shower, rinsed clean but feeling smudged and gloppy, wishing for cocoa butter to rub on my spongy, slack belly, wishing for Mama. I wrapped a towel hard and snug around my head - - the hospital gown was so loose - - and scrunched another towel between my legs under my panties and maxi-pad.

I’d just eased under the covers and pulled the bleached sunshine sheets up to my nose, sucking in the smell like it would somehow stop my hemorrhaging, when another nurse came in.

“Would you like your....” Her hand wavered in the air. “The baby?”

“Yes.” Like there was any question.

Two days I spent hot-eyed and hollow, bottle-feeding my baby while my breasts burned with un-used milk. Then the nurse came, careful, kind, with the relinquishment papers. I’d been cradling my son, rocking and whispering love into his tiny ears. Suddenly his weight felt foreign to me, heavy and not mine.

“You can change your mind,” she said. “You have a six month grace period.”

Hope, cruel and fierce, beat against my rib cage. For a moment.
The baby’s father was a one-night stand. My mother had told me I couldn’t live with her. Were I to keep him I’d either bring him home to a dorm room on a Conservative Baptist college campus, or I’d bring him home to my molesting father, who pinched my nipples and said my body was his, and to a savage stepmother who beat my younger sisters for such offenses as dumping shampoo on the floor and forgetting to do chores. Who asked me if I’d give her my baby. He - he-, hooo. He- he- hoooooo.

Hell, no.

So I nestled my son on the covers between my knees and signed the papers with a shuddering scrawl through scorching, muddy tears. I thrust the papers at the nurse and waved her off so I could feel my baby’s weight one more time. So I could lock his square face, his blue eyes, his perfect knees, his pink tiny mouth, all of him into my memory.

My best friend, Jill, who’d given a baby girl up the year before, told me that my sacrifice could be someone else’s blessing.

I believe that.

But I haven’t breathed properly since.