An Exciting Day -- Part One

(A description of our baby’s birthday.)

People warned us not to make a big mental fuss about our “due date,” and they had a point. It’s a week after the appointed time, and the questions from well-meaning family and friends – many over the phone by way of messages – are slowly driving us mad. Some warned us against even telling anyone what the due date was, and we honored the idea to the best of our ability, mumbling when pushed that we were due sometime around the end of July. But it hasn’t seemed to help.

We’re natural-childbirth types, and so our goal is to have as little medical intervention as possible before and during delivery, but as the days tick by the doctors want monitoring done at the hospital (which is stressful) and – beyond that – they want to schedule induction. They have some scary reasons to back up their request, too, including the risk of impure amniotic fluid from our little baby’s bowels starting to move. I cave – way, way sooner than I thought I would have, then Kim caves, and we actually schedule a date. Are we nuts? What were all those nights at the yoga center practicing meditation and massage and everything else natural about? On the other hand, when it comes down to it, we’d rather be happy than right.

Of course, I’m not going to go down without a fight, so though induction is scheduled for tomorrow, I find an acupuncturist who can attempt to induce Kim with needles today. We drive to the office complex, meet the kind doctor of Chinese medicine, and Kim falls profoundly asleep with needles stuck in her hooked up to electrodes. She’d grown nervous, meanwhile, that baby had stopped moving as regularly (further panicking the doctors) but when I sit and watch her belly with her asleep on the treatment table I see that baby is kicking like a pro soccer player about every eight or ten seconds. Turns out Kim has grown used to the kicking and doesn’t even feel it sometimes.

So, the acupuncture relaxed Kim, in a big way, but … no baby. (At least not right away.) We drive home and wait for the contractions to start in earnest (they’ve been coming and going for nigh on two weeks). We try some more of the “what-got-her-in-there-will-get-her-out-of-there” approach that various couples have been swearing by, and … no baby. When night falls, we resign ourselves to going to the hospital, and when we wake up in the morning that’s where we go.

They start Kim on a pitosin drip, and immediately she’s hooked up to monitors and feeling about as “natural” as a computer hooked up to another computer hooked up to another computer can feel. The doula has come, just in case anything natural can occur, but even after hours of the pitosin drip, the contractions aren’t strengthening in intensity and they aren’t coming more often. And, happily, the doctors ask if we’d like to call it a day and come back next week. Yes, we would. The front desk within Labor and Delivery signs us up for the following Tuesday and we go home a hard-to-understand blend of exhausted stress and relief.

After about our tenth love connection in two weeks, baby still fails to arrive. What color are her eyes? Will she be healthy? Will she be glad to be in our family?

The next day passes with startling slowness, and we decide to go to the beach just before sunset. We swim and semi-bodysurf (as a surfer, Kim knows how to stay out of danger) and walk up the beach to another spot to try more of the same. The water’s warm, we’re the only ones swimming, and for people who are on the edge of their seats we’re feeling pretty cozy and content. By the time we drive home, we’ve swum in three different spots, and there had been a little bit of pixie dust over us at each one.

At five-thirty the next morning Kim wakes me to say she’s been having some pretty regular contractions, and I know when I look in her eyes that today is the day our daughter will be born. She’s two and a half minutes apart and everything about her says, “Game on.” For one thing, she’s both calm and jittery, in a way I haven’t seen before. More than that, there’s light in her glances that I later realize is the dawn of our own miracle of birth. I call the doula (who says she’ll be at the house within an hour), feed us toast and the dogs their kibbles, and time contractions, although, already, something tells me that they’re going to stay fast and furious from here until the finish line.

Trissa, the doula, comes as promised just a little before 7 and, pretty soon, we’re both massaging Kim in the king size bed in the master bedroom. Trissa’s only been a doula for several months, but she’s centered and calming and knowledgeable – and loving, for that matter. Kim handles the contractions well, but before long they’ve grown more intense and the shower is suggested as a possible change of venue. For twenty or thirty minutes, the warm water and Trissa’s soothing voice are enough to keep Kim grounded and relaxed – and basically she’s showing guts and determination already that I didn’t know she had.

Around 9:15 or 9:30, the hot water runs out, the contractions continue to build in intensity, and we conclude that going to the hospital soon wouldn’t be a bad idea. I’ve preloaded the back of the truck with gear, including our own inflatable birthing ball (a renamed workout ball), and I load a last few things to make us hospital-ready. Trissa will drive our truck to the hospital for us to have, and I will drive Kim in the back of Trissa’s PT Cruiser where there’s more room for her to recline – and retch. We’ve made arrangements for the dogs to be fed in our absence, so we shut them in the house, climb in the vehicles, and start the drive to the hospital.

Usually a journey of no more than thirteen or fourteen minutes, today the trip will seem to take two or three times that long. I will prove that it is possible to drive too fast and too slow at the same time, according to my suffering wife – and who can blame her? Bumps she doesn’t like, either, and I’m behind the wheel of a car I’ve never driven with a slightly odd gearshift and a slightly odd clutch and the ride’s a little stiff and the angle of the seats is a little strange – and I’m not even the one in heavy labor. A third the way there I begin to want to lie to Kim and say we’re halfway, but I know this would be an extremely bad idea. When, an incredibly long time later, we really are halfway there, I still hold off, because I suspect that the loud groans coming from Kim are getting louder and that the second half of the trip might seem longer than the first and that yours truly might end up shouldering the blame if I call halfway now, even if it really is halfway. Sixty percent of the way to the hospital, we pass by the beach, and I see oddly calm people shuffling out of the parking lot and onto the sand like it was any other day. Finally, I say, “Halfway, baby.” It’s best if I don’t write down what Kim said then. She was in pain, remember.