For Esmé with Love and Amor

We stood around waiting. I went out to skate, but it couldn’t be helped. There was no focus to be had. The hospital had scheduled the induction for five, but then moved it back to seven. The last thing we had been told was to call at 5 to see if anything would be available. Everyone was having a baby in Arcata on the same day. I came back in from trying to skate. We called the hospital. They told us to come in at 7-7:30 pm, but no promises that there’d be space in the birthing center.

We drove to the beach. We had to do something. The sun was already setting and a cold wind had risen from the water to dispel the warmth of the day. We left our shoes in the car and climbed up through the tangles of huckleberry and waxy marsh plants. A dune, 30 feet high, sifted down into the dim forest. We stepped into the hulk of cold, dry shadow and scrambled up over the sands, grass and the ocean. Night rose from the leaden waters and sent the birds wheeling into the sky where it looked like a star had gorged itself on fire and popped. The low burn of the evening was dissolving into the darkness like ice tinkling and melting in the deep red of a cola glass.

We stood there for a moment. Feeling the wind in our eyebrows, in our ears. We talked and felt it on our teeth. I said, this would be the last time we went anywhere as individuals, not as someone’s parents, when we could just jump in the car, alone and wend out to the ocean. Watching the red sunset, I was happy about this change. So many years with a bag over my shoulder, getting on trains, staring out the window, reading the same sentence over a cup of coffee in a loud cafe and not paying attention to where it would lead. I told Gina how nice it was to go somewhere new, I mean really new.

When we got back to the car, it was almost entirely dark. There was just enough light down around the horizon to illuminate the old saw mill on the slough, the smell of years’ old cut redwood was dusky and stale in the air like old spices in a kitchen droor. The radio wasn’t on. We didn’t say a word; the car filled with the silence the precedes something important: that gulp of air before the news.

The house smelled old when we returned, like no one had been inside in months and the carpet had gone stale like a church basement. I made coffee to dispel the odor. Gina showered. I put the bags in the car. The dark came in from the ocean, landsliding the streetlights until they were vague points of light out over distant neighborhoods. We got in the car, the sand grating underfoot on the rubber mats, the vague lights skipping past until they piled in the hospital parking lot, a little city, a palace.

“There’s no room,” the nurse told us. “You’ll have to take this spare room for now. You probably won’t stay, though; too many people here tonight.” And she rubbersoled back down the hall, leaving us in a check-up room with our ironic smiles, looking up movie showtimes.

We considered ways to distract ourselves as we waited. We read, but only to put down our reading and look at the clock or each other. I drank the coffee I’d made at home and started eating all the snacks we’d brought for labor. Down the hall, I head some serious hospital talk: close, murmuring voices. The nurse came back. She’d spoken with the doctor. The induction would go through. We had only to wait and with that, the heavy door slipped shut, the catch clicking gently only after the footsteps had faded down the hallway. Someone coughed lightly, maybe a baby.

The room only had one bed. I was in a folding chair, my feet flung lazily out in front of me, reading the same sentence over and over while people knocked on the door and opened it without waiting for a reply. “Who knows how long it’ll be,” they told us. “You might want to rest. Do you want a cot if there’s one available?” I told them I did and helped the orderly wheel the ungainly thing into the room and move the machines around to accommodate it. I finished the last of my coffee, noticed Gina was already asleep, turned out the light and stretched out.

The light came on. I wobbled out of unconsciousness. One of the nurses, a woman with tiger paws tattooed on her neck, had a white square pinched between the tongs of small forceps. There was a light rustling and the induction was done. The door clicked closed again. I reached out and turned the light off. Sleep came over me like a damp blanket.

Every hour or so, there was another awakening. The door opened. The nurse-station laughter blew into the room. The nurse who’d been assigned to us, checked the machines and asked questions and then reminded us sleep was important because Gina was now beginning to contract, but the nurse would stay, contradicting herself and talking, not allowing us to sleep as recommended. Because they weren’t talking to me, I lay there, feigning sleep, my socks sticking out from under the blanket, occasionally, sitting up on an elbow and earnestly listening, considering getting up and then swooning back into humid, cold sleep on the cot.

Early in the morning, someone came in. It was around five, I think. I got up. Folded up the cot and pushed it back out in the hallway. Brought the folding chair back in. Plodded out to the nurses’ station and caged a cup of coffee. Thus, signaling we were awake.

The contractions had gotten more severe. Gina was beginning to rock and moan a little, but when the nurse came in and asked about pain, Gina said it wasn’t too high, about a three on a scale of one-to-ten, nothing too crunchy.

To cope with the intensifying pain, we moved around the room a little, not finding much room to occupy that wasn’t bed or bathroom. I sat down to open the floor to Gina who needed it more than me.

The nurse came in and told us a room had opened. The shift changed and we were handed off to a new nurse and a new room, much larger. The nurse gave us a few pointers on helping the contractions along and then left us in our new suite, one with windows, a bathroom with a shower and a bunch of exercise balls.

After we got into the new room, there was too much pain to the newfound freedom of movement. Gina began to curl into this new bright and sour pain that rolled in like the revolutions of a lighthouse torch in the fog, yellowing everything and then disappearing, only to circle around again. The doctor came in. The nurses came in. Everyone had a strategy, but nothing worked. The plan had been to try to avoid an epidural. I coaxed Gina outside, but she couldn’t take more than a few steps without crumpling, arms draped over my neck and swinging her hips in time to another heartbreaking moan.

Before the contractions had gotten intense, they’d told her she was 3-4 cm dilated. As the pain crescendoed, I knew things were opening, ripening as they say. The cries, however, were getting much harder to tolerate. It’s difficult to listen to someone you love groaning in pain—pain that you know can be ameliorated, pain that doesn’t have to exist. But, we’d talked before about drugs and pain treatment. It was something we wanted to wait and see if we’d need. I knew Gina wanted to see if she could do it without the drugs, so I hung back and tried, pathetically, to help her with the breathing. Occasionally mumbling, ‘you’re doing great,’ or some similar non-commitment assurance.

The pain gradually spread and seemed to envelop the room with the dismal light of a migraine. Gina could no longer sit still. She ranged around the room. Kicking up puddles of pain and breathing hot, irritated air from her nose, balling her fists, sitting on the exercise ball and then kicking it away in disgust.

Eventually, she retreated into the shower. Her moans became cries; her cries became sobs and I uselessly paced the room, trying to escape the misery, but knowing that at least half of it was my due and that I was shirking it. I stayed close to the bathroom door and felt like the most abject of voyeurs, the one who stealthily observes the pain of others. After a particularly strident cry, Gina called out, meekly, ‘help.’My guilty conscience finally brought me, hangdog, into the bathroom. I asked, stupidly if she was alright through the shower curtain. It was silent for a while. There was only the sound of the showerhead and the smallest moan that sounded like it was coming through the drain from another room, when suddenly, the moan quavered and answered me. “I need something.”

I left the bathroom to consider this. I sat on the unused and unhelpful exercise ball and contemplated my situation. Did I call the nurse in for an epidural, knowing that, initially, Gina had wanted to try not to have one? Did I allow myself to be the one to potentially put the baby in an artificial situation that might produce complications of its own? Or did I accept my position, nobly and call for an end to the pain of my beloved? Did I throw open the door of iniquity and say ‘no more! Get that damn anesthesiologist in here! I will have no suffering!’ I sat on the ball, a coward, wavering. I looked up the effects of drugs. But it was taking too long and I knew there’s be a glut of information to wade through, information I couldn’t even focus on over the shouts and groans coming from the bathroom.

Salvation seemed to come in the form of the nurse who entered to announce that she’d be checking dilation. ‘Surely after all this time,” I reasoned, “there would be a significant change and, with this encouragement, Gina could power through what remained of the contractions. It wouldn’t be easy, nor pretty, but she’d push and soon she’d be finished. Then there’d be the reward of knowing she’d done it unaided.”

Despite groaning protestations, the nurse was able to check the dilation. She said the result at the same time as a cry rent the air, either from Gina or the room next door—It was like an aural assault. I had to ask her to repeat. “She’s still at 4 cm,” the nurse said and walked out of the room, leaving me to contemplate the hopelessness. Gina was already back in the shower, whimpering. I had to do something.

We ordered the epidural and I got my beloved back. After such body-wracking pain, she was so relieved to be at ease, it was like she wasn’t even in labor. We talked easily; the nurses came and went. It got darker. I took a few pictures. At this point, we’d been in the hospital for around 24 hours, so it felt like we’d run the gamut. It also began to feel like nothing was going to change, that for all we’d been through, Gina would just stay pregnant for another week or two.

Around 10 pm, a little over 24 hours after we’d arrived to the hospital, the doctor came in and made her pronouncements. ‘Try a little Pitocin and let’s start thinking about pushing this baby out.’ After hearing shouts of ‘push!” resounding in the corridors all day, I was both eager and hesitant to move into this final and, presumably, most painful stage of labor. Still, it was one we’d have to confront eventually. Gina got a new IV bag and I lay down, suddenly exhausted.

I sank into one of the blurriest sleeps I’ve ever known. My mind snagged on dream fragments which exaggerated aspects of the day in sharp and colorless shards. I woke on a sodden pillow with a numb hand and an itchy eyelid. I felt like a kid who’d drifted off in class. I sat up and tried to fake a serious demeanor, but it wouldn’t take and I just sat there grinning at everyone, hoping to win over the labor support team by sheer grace. Luckily, no one seemed much concerned with me and I retreated somewhere behind Gina, who’d become the main event.

A smock was readied. A tarp was spread on the floor. A bucket, large and plastic-lined was set on the floor. It looked like the idea was to welcome the stars of Seaworld into the delivery room. The pushing started, in what seemed like practice. The nurse and the doctor talked between contractions; everyone was setting up to be in the room for a while. Given the lengthy progress of someone’s corridor-echoed pushing I’d heard earlier in the day, I thought we had at least two hours before we could expect anything.

From the beginning, a patch of hair disclosed itself, disappearing and reappearing with each contraction like a coin, tumbling though water, flashing and dimming, a valuable circle, eclipsing. In a few pushes, the circle widened and an entire thatch of hair moved up. The thatch became a small mound and the mound became the crown of a head. In the fastest moment of my life, some slight-of-hand followed the mound with a face, neck, arms, body and legs and my daughter was lifted, gasping, clammy, incredible onto Gina’s chest. We both started sobbing, leaning forward, trying to impress on our memories this eternal moment.

My daughter coughed, flexed her fingers and uttered a little cry, like she was testing her voice out without much conviction it would work. This peaceful little cry hang in the air before it was replaced with another and that, with another, before there was a sting of such cries of life hanging about the room like a garland. All we could say in reply was ‘awwwww’. It was, of course, the only thing to say. ‘Awwwwwwww’.

It’s been nearly a day and I’m still unable to think of much else, but gradually, the new words will come and, when they do, my family and I will test them out together, finding how they fit with someone who is slipping into being with her curling fingers, her curious facial expressions and her beautiful future.