Early in the morning, May 20th, we drove over to Blue Lake to pick up some vegetables.
The afternoon winds had already picked up, although it
wasn’t nine o’clock yet and the air was ocean-current cool. Driving east, it
warmed slightly when the foothills blocked some of the wind, but most of it
made its way through the narrow valleys that wend their way alongside rivers
and streams in the eastern portion on the county, bringing the meltwater out
and the salt air in.
The vegetable pick-up was for ten and we arrived in town
before nine with no clear destination. We stopped by the tennis courts and my
daughter Esmé took her bike once around the nets before abandoning it for an
errant tennis ball, which we threw back and forth for a while the sun warmed
the courts and a team of a sort of ping pong-tennis hybrid moved in an occupied
a quadrant of the court. We all stopped, mesmerized by the plink and plunk of
their miniature rackets and balls.
The breezes slackened and the sun warmed us into more
exploratory movements. We wandered out past the horse corral, over the
pedestrian bridge that spans a dry creek bed and up to the foot of a lumber
mill which no longer runs but is chromatic enough to appear functioning despite
the closed fences and the weeds springing through the parking lot.
Parked in front of this derelict mill, was an abandoned
Mercedes, missing a back door. I climbed in. Gina, my wife, didn’t like the look
of the thing, and, once inside, I had to agree. There’s something interloping
about even being in an abandoned car: a place that only one or two people have
spent substantial amounts of time in, molding it to their shape and
personality. The mill, on the other hand, was too general to have this kind of
feeling. It would be hard to interlope in a place that had been created for a
large-scale purpose but sitting in the back seat of someone’s car was like
finding a photo in the trash and trying to put oneself behind the viewfinder,
imaging why it was taken in the way it was and why it’d been thrown out.
While I was taking my time thinking about all this, Esme’
had climbed into the car with me and we were sitting in the back pretending to
passengers in some great cross-country road trip when Gina hurried us out of
the broken-down and doorless car, it was time to get the vegetables and get to
our appointment at the pool.
When we got back home from the pool and half an hour of
playing crocodile, I wasn’t too surprised to find a pool of water in the
hallway even though we’d showered, and changed back at the locker room.
Somehow, going to the pool, one brought puddles of water home, even when you
didn’t cross the threshold with wet flipflops and dripping bathing suits.
However, this puddle was more viscous looking than pool
puddles and standing over it, Gina mentioned that it had come from her. This
was no errant pool water. It was amniotic fluid perhaps coaxed forth by our
time in the pool and the similarity of the surroundings. Either way, here it
was. No contractions, no other signs of labor, but enough of a sign to call the
hospital.
On the phone, the nurse asked the requisite questions and it
came back that we’d have to come in. As usual, feeling nothing myself, I
dithered, inquiring if maybe I should stay and let Esmé have her nap, after
that I could take her in the bike trailer to her grandparents and, only then,
would I ride over to the hospital to check in on things. I liked the idea of
riding a bike to important life events: weddings, births, etc. Luckily, Gina
isn’t nearly as nearsighted as I am and requested that I stop what I was doing
and get everything together.
I still probably took too damn long, but eventually, we
ended up in the car driving a few miles over the speed limit only because I
felt I had a good excuse.
At Gina’s folks, I puttered around getting the car seat out,
still in no real hurry. Esmé, two years before, had been induced and the entire
process was about 48 hours in the hospital. I saw no reason to hurry for
something that worked in long stages and, with such dubious reasons for even
going. Water breaking? Wasn’t that a Hollywood reason to go to the hospital?
Did anyone’s water even break in that crazy-making way? It certainly didn’t for
us. Not last time, anyway. I drove to the hospital like a grandmother driving
home from church, still half-convinced that what I’d seen on the hallway floor
at home was from the pool.
We went into the same tirage room we’d been in years before,
the one we’d slept in while we’d waited for the induction drugs to start
working. Gina got the once-over and they were about to let us go when the nurse
got the call from the doctor—check the cervix.
Four centimeters. Well, this was slightly unexpected,
but…um…encouraging. I guess it was good that we’d packed these bags and dropped
Esmé off; yes, maybe it would be a good idea to stay. But, still, let’s take a
nice long walk. After all, we’ve got a sitter now and really no reason to stay
here. Might as well go out and get a coffee or something.
We moved into the delivery room. The same room we’d been for
14 hours the last time we’d been here. The room where I’d read, talked,
encouraged, lapsed into silence, hid in the corner, cheered and cried out “it’s
a girl!”. It was a great room, but like the empty mill, it had been designed
for an institutional purpose and didn’t maintain one’s memories—I guess that’s
an argument for giving birth in a car; until you have to sell it, anyway.
I was prepared to toss my stuff down and stride out the
door, but, the hospital has its requirements and we had to fill out the intake
forms and give preferences, listen to options, etc.
We were still moving through the bureaucratic rigmarole
when Gina started to feel sick and then started moving around the room looking
for things to hang from. She started to moan and I stood by, uncertain when
things would get serious enough to act. I didn’t want to be a nuisance, but I
didn’t want to look uncaring either, so, I just followed her around like a
Charlie Chaplin character miming someone, making quiet suggestions of
encouragement, mostly to myself. Still wondering if we were going to be able to
take that walk.
Luckily, a nurse came in and, by the look on her face, gave
me reason to abandon the idea of doing anything but staying in this room. It
was good to understand where we stood. I started to give my encouragement a
little louder now, with a little more confidence, but still mostly to myself.
By now, Gina was moaning loud enough to drown me and pretty much everyone else
out. The nurse saw me in the corner shouting encouragement to myself and
suggested that I offer a sort of guided meditation, listing body parts to relax.
I couldn’t tell if Gina thought it was a good idea or not because when I said
things like “Relax your hair; good! Now, relax your ears” she just moaned
louder, but when I got to ‘relax your shoulders’ and saw them flop down, I
thought perhaps it was helpful, so, I kept going.
I got so wrapped up in finding new things to relax each time
a contraction started, I didn’t notice the room gradually filling with nurses.
I did notice that Gina’s moans and had turned to screams because I could barely
hear my own guided meditation which by this point had digressed into more of an
anatomy lecture as I thought of more and more esoteric parts of the body to
relax like uvula and hyoid bone.
One contraction went on for so long I was hoping to get my
guided meditation down to relaxing tarsals and metatarsals, but when I was
still on ‘sternum’ the doctor walked in briskly with a whole coterie of nurses
in tow. There must’ve been about 20 people in the room. I wondered how many had
come over from idle curiosity, as Gina was now screaming loud enough to almost
command an audience. We’d only been in here for about an hour and I wondered
how long she’d be able to keep it up without losing her voice. Then the doctor,
leading the assemblage of nurses in a chorus, squatted down like an umpire
behind home plate and shouted “push!”
“Push?” I looked down to see how things were progressing and
saw there was reason to push. The baby was already on his way out. This wasn’t
Hollywood, it was faster. We’d gone from “I think my water just broke” to
“Push!” in about two hours. Most movies are longer than that.
It took a while for my excitement to catch up. I’d been so
ready to be standing on the sidelines for the next six hours or so, that I
needed to remind myself that this was my wife and my child right here both
happening now. I took up the refrain “Push!” I shouted, maybe a little too
loud, checked myself and then switched to “breathe!” because it didn’t seem so
demanding. But when I realized that breathing wasn’t going to get the baby out,
I switched back to “push!”, but I stopped jumping up and down and clapping my
hands when I said it.
In a few minutes and what I can only imagine to be
indescribable pain, it was over. Gina looked up at me, dazed, but still fully
in possession of her faculties.
Still dazed Gina looked up at me and asked “Is it a boy or a
girl?” With Esmé, I’d been able to help in a way that wasn’t just cheerleading.
I’d seen her come out and announced “it’s a girl!” to the room. This is the
great thing about not knowing the sex, it gives the partner a purpose, but,
even in this respect, I’d dropped the ball. Everything had happened so fast:
I’d been so caught up in yelling “push” and so relieved when the baby came out,
I hadn’t bothered to look at the genitals. “I don’t know,” I admitted. The
doctor looked up from her work anticipating the placenta and turned the baby
over in her hands so I could see the penis. “It’s a boy!” I yelled, although I
was pretty sure that Gina could see for herself. At that moment, it was like everything came
back together again. The three of us—me, my wife and the baby— had all been put
in these disparate roles in this somewhat socially circumscribed task of
childbirth, but, the news that the baby who’d just shot out was a boy was so
remarkable, the three of us, my wife, my son and me, cried. The doctor, seeing
that we were in this vulnerable position, asked the boy’s name and it was like
we all said it at once: Luca.
…
Later that evening, when we’d been moved to the postpartum
room, I drove out to get dinner and, leaving the hospital, I felt like an
astronaut drifting out into space further and further away from the earth and
from warmth, love and life. I passed the exit for the 299, the highway that
heads out to Blue Lake and thought about the ordinary morning we’d had walking
past abandoned mills and climbing in empty cars and I saw that perhaps it had
been the emptiness that had resulted in Gina’s labor. When the cold becomes too
intense, we seek out warmth and when the world feels depopulated, perhaps we
seek to fill in the absences. It felt that way, anyway, driving down the
near-empty highway at night, the father of a baby boy who already felt too far
away.
…
We got home the next evening after staying the requisite 24
hours in the hospital for all the tests that ferret out the various maladies
that might not be immediately obvious. Luckily there were none. It was
impossible not to continually compare the experience to the way it’d been when
my daughter had been born. I kept finding myself saying inane things like “I
don’t remember this.” As if having a single child is enough to turn anyone into
birthing center expert. Luckily, they kept us fed and often enough someone
would come in and see how we were doing. The whole experience really gave me
sympathy for nurses who are constantly having to barge in on other people’s
life-changing moments and ingratiate themselves to the mood. Here we were
beaming with happiness and the nurses who were probably having all kinds of
ordinary non-beaming-with-happiness kind of days, were having to acclimate
themselves to our level of joy. I know I’d find this very hard to do every day.
The nurses also seem to be on rotations shorter than their
shifts. I know nurses work long shifts, but it seemed like every five or six
hours, someone new was coming in and introducing themselves to us and we’d have
to watch as they measured our happiness and gave a commensurate response. By
the time the last one came in, I was too weary of watching them mirror my
elation to really respond to their questions with anything more than
monosyllables. It almost started to seem like they were more excited than me,
which I didn’t think was possible.
When they finally let us out it was late in the afternoon
and we had to deal with the added strangeness of daylight after being inside
all day while strapping a floppy-necked infant into a car seat. The whole
process of taking an infant home from the hospital is so awkward, I imagine
there would be a lot of money in any idea that could make it feel cozier
somehow, like, I don’t know, baby taxis or something.
Gina’s folks were waiting for us with Esmé at home and what
we’d been waiting for all day—this new sibling meeting which seemed to cement
the four of us as a family—was almost too ideal to feel real. We set Esmé up
with a Boppy cushion to hold Luca and she gently smoothed his hair and repeated
‘hi Luca!’ with a toddler’s candor and interest. I’m sure at some point, she’ll
get jealous of him, but watching her smooth his hair on the couch with a
radiant smile on her face, that moment is hard to imagine.
…
It was initially difficult to settle down. I felt like I had
100 things I’d fallen behind on while in the hospital and the house was a mess.
There were also these two babies that needed to be cleaned up and put to bed.
Gina was almost too exhausted to stand and I had no idea how I was going to be
of much help. I kept walking around in circles, picking things up and setting
them down in the wrong place.
I managed to get my daughter to sleep and to pick up a
little. Gina was in the bedroom with our new son, hoping he might sleep for
more than two hours at a time. I sat in the living room having a beer, thinking
with this new pace of life, an evening beer would probably be my only respite
from family, work and social obligations. After the beer, I meant to go in and
read, but I fell asleep almost immediately.
I couldn’t have been more than two hours later when I woke
up to Gina shaking me awake. “Esmé’s awake!” She whispered at me. I was so
tired, it took me a minute to remember that Esmé was my daughter. I stumbled
into her room and discovered that she needed a diaper change. In my exhausted
state, I accidentally emptied the contents of the diaper on the floor, then I
did the same thing somehow in the bathroom. Then, in her crib, Esmé hit her
head and started crying.
After half an hour, I finally got her quieted down long
enough to crawl back into bed and then be awakened again by her cry coming over
the baby monitor. This time, I grabbed a pillow and a blanket.
…
Our first night as a family, I slept on the floor of my
daughter’s room and my wife slept—if you could even call it that—feeding my
son, in various positions, crib-side. When Esmé woke me up on the floor in the
morning, and when I heard baby cries coming from the next room over I cried out
“welcome to your new life!” to Gina. I was smiling when I yelled it.
