Saturday, March 05, 2005

Isaac: A birth story in seven acts

(abridged version)

Scene: Saturday, February 19th, 2005. Small Town, California.
Characters: Kitty (preggo), Mike (Kitty's husband), Maggie (the midwife), Rachel (midwife's assistant), Pam (midwife's assistant 2), Isaac (baby)

Act I:
6am: Bounce out of bed to email everyone I owe emails to.
7:15am: Dive back into bed, because for godssake, it's Saturday.
7:16am: Mary calls from Brooklyn demanding to know what I'm doing up so early emailing her. We catch up. She leaves me with wishes for a pleasant birth. "I'm sure it will be ... " (being the nurse and never one to sugarcoat, she searches for something appropriate) "... memorable."
10:15am: Finally get out of bed again. Don't feel very good. The rain is hard and steady. I comment about "what beautiful rain" out loud to myself watching it through the front window. A minute or two later, Mike comes in and notes "Cool rain."
Mike heads out to do errands – gathering bits and pieces for all the last minute projects before the baby arrives, in two weeks or so. I stay home and attempt to clean the house. I'm moving slowly since my stomach hurts. Damn indigestion.

Act II:
12:00pm: While washing my hands in the bathroom, I notice the giant conch shell that lives on the window sill. It's the one Mike brought back from a research trip to the Bahamas almost six years ago. I grab it and start scrubbing the dust out of the crevices. I chuckle to myself unsuspecting that this is just the kind of thing women were said to do when they started labor – become gripped by strange urges to madly clean things they would otherwise not even notice.

Act III:
3:30pm: Mike finally gets home from the stores and we put together the closest thing we have to a nursery – a corner shelf from Target that we fill with the baby's books and Pooh characters from Grandma.
6:30pm: After continuing to feel bad all day, I try to go to bed and block it out. From that point on I am up and down, up and down from bed, miserable with what I think is gas pain.

Act IV:9:00 or 10:00pm: A fleeting thought - "What if this is labor??" But I blow it off. Shortly after that Mike has the same thought, but I blow him off too. I try a Gas-X and Mike reads about indigestion in his medical remedies books. "I can't deal with this pain, Mike. How am I going to handle labor??"
11:00pm: We try a walk in the rain. I head up the hill at mock speed. "Do you want to slow down?" Mike asks. Though colorful retorts fill my head, I do him the favor of declining to answer and plow steadily forward through the dourpour. The rain battering the umbrella is the best thing I've felt in hours. By now, the pain is clearly rhythmic. Denial digs deeper into its foxhole, peers out with beady eyes – labors can stop, it tells me.
11:30: (Back home and still stubbornly waiting for the Gas-X to kick in.) I let Mike convince me to sit and watch the beginning of Saturday Night Live. Okay, the Botox talk show bit is actually pretty funny and I make it through most of it before squirming away to writhe on the bed some more.

Act V:
Midnight: Panic. I'm inconsolably miserable. I can't be anywhere. What if this is really labor?! And then... Ohmigod! The house is still a disaster! I beg my husband to straighten the living room, finish the dishes... Mike leaves me with an Eyore rattle to ring for him when I need him to come be with me. Unable to tell him immediately just how insanely stupid this idea is, I wait until the next contraction, throw Eyore across the room, and scream Mike's name. No one heard from Eyore again that night.
1:30am: We call Maggie. "Do you feel like you want me to come right now?" she asks me. Apparently bent on preserving my misery, I hesitate. "Then call me back in half an hour and tell me what's going on."
2:00am: My waters break.
2:15am: We call Maggie back. She's on her way. (The home visit, where she would have come here and made sure we had all the supplies we needed, we'd have staked out the place for birthing, and just allowed the midwifery team to see where the hell we live so they weren't – uh – looking for the apartment for the first time in the middle of the night, was set for four days from now...)

Act VI:
Months later (2:50am): Maggie arrives. "Hi, pretty lady," she offers. Ugh. Start with me. Pretty my ass. I quiz her about whether she let the cats out when she came in. She is slightly puzzled, but used to me. Mike reports on the exact locations of the cats and appeases my neuroses.
3:00am: No sense of time left: Maggie is vigilant on the cell phone still trying to get ahold of the assistants. I need her to focus on me. She'd tell me later how quietly freaked out she was to find me ready to push with no back up, nothing set up and no instruments sterilized. I wasn't worried about any of that, I just had to have a baby. With instruments boiling on the stove, the smoke alarm sounds. Could these people have mercy on my poor cats?!
I am lost in a haze. Relaxation techniques are the biggest fucking joke right now. "Did I mention labor hurts?" Maggie quips. I stare at her from within my pain, shooting daggers but helpless. "Did I mention it hurts alot?" She smiles.
Pam arrives. She looks fresh and calm at 3:30 am. I'm glad to see her.

Act VII:
3:40am~4:10am: At first I'm not pushing very hard. I'm tired and the pain has shifted, it's less intense, I'm resting. I change positions a couple times and with directions on how to push more effectively push the head down. "You can reach down and feel the head!" Maggie tells me excitedly. I take this in and ignore her. "Feel the head!" she repeats. She should know better, I do not want to feel any heads emerging from my yoni, but she is full-on midwife mode now, my inclinations meaningless to her. "It's a once in a lifetime opportunity!" Even now? Even now, I have to be a people pleaser?? I feel the head. "It's weird!" I conclude. "Did you feel the baby's head though?" Maggie prompts. "Yes," I tell her, "And it's weird!"
4:13am: Rachel arrives. I ask her if she let the cats out.
4:14am: Mike is holding my left hand. I turn to him, "Are you ready for this?" "Yes," he answers. I laugh at him, it's that half-crazy laugh. I see a flash: the blue/grey of the cord entangled with floppy limbs - all of Isaac shoots into Maggie's hands.

(No Pooh characters were harmed in the making of this production.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

except eyore

erinberry said...

That was a lovely story :)

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