Birth: Buddhaboy

All it took was for Ed to say — once — that he didn’t want Matthew to be an only child. Back I went to the fertility specialist, and in only one cycle, I was pregnant. I remember knowing that I was pregnant because suddenly I was exhausted. Matthew was 2, and my ass was dragging. On the day I went to the doctor’s office for the confirmatory blood test, we arrived before they’d opened. I sank to the floor and sat in the hall and watched Matthew scamper around until the door was unlocked. On the way back to the car after my appointment, Matthew began taking his clothes off in the parking lot. I can’t remember what I promised him, but I made some sort of deal with him if he’d just keep the rest of his clothes on.

My exhaustion continued throughout my pregnancy. Of course, sometime during my second trimester, Matthew decided that he was done with naps. On one memorable day, I told him that he didn’t have to sleep, but that he did have to play quietly. I collapsed on my bed for about an hour. When I went to Matthew’s room and opened his door, he was standing in the middle of his room, proud and happy. He’d removed his mattress, sheets, drawers and their contents, and had strewn everything around his room. Being a loving mother, I captured the destruction in a series of three photographs, then called Ed to tell him what his son had done. Ed was amused. Me? Not so much.

During this second pregnancy I endured four bouts of preterm labor. Only one was bad enough to land me in the hospital overnight for observation. I’m not sure, but I think that was the episode where I drove myself to the hospital.

The first thing they did was hook up IV fluids. I came to hate that damn IV insertion. One of the times a tender young nurse approached me, and I gave her a look.

“One is all you get,” I said, meaning that I’d only tolerate one stick. If she didn’t get it, then too bad. She didn’t, and she brought in an older nurse who managed to get it in one.

Another IV insertion went wrong, and I wound up with a huge lump on the back of my hand. It was filled with blood, and the nurse was horrified. I wasn’t pleased, either. That bruise took forever to go away.

Buddhaboy (and we knew that it was another boy) was due on Groundhog Day 1998. On my birthday, January 15, my mother was taking me out for breakfast. While I showered that morning, my belly grew hard.

“Oh, no you don’t,” I remember thinking. “Not on my birthday!”

We had a nice breakfast — french toast for me, my favorite. During the meal, my belly grew hard a couple of times, but I didn’t think too much of it.

When we left the restaurant, we went to the pharmacy to pick up something for what felt a lot like a head cold or imminent sinus infection. As I walked back to the counter, I had to stop about half-way there, holding my belly, breathing hard. While I was at the counter, it happened again.

Mom took me home and asked if I thought I needed to go to the hospital.

“Oh, no. I’m fine.”

“Well, I’m just going to go over to Price’s Corner to pick something up. I’ll swing by on my way back to check on you.”

When she left, I puttered around, then really needed to use the bathroom. I grabbed the phone and my phonebook on the way into the bathroom.

“Thank you for calling,” the recording said. “If this is a doctor’s office or you think you are in labor, press 3.”

I pressed 3.

“Doctor’s office. Can I help you?”

“Yeah. Um … I think I’m in labor. Hang on.” My belly tightened and I had to breathe hard.

We chatted, then I was told to go ahead and come into Christiana Hospital.

My mother arrived, and I said that we needed to go to the hospital.

White-knuckled, my mother drove the 15 minutes to the hospital, growing more tense each time I groaned. When she pulled up at the door, a volunteer came to my door.

“Do you need a wheelchair?” she asked when I just sat there. I groaned. She fetched a wheelchair.

I was taken into an exam room, where I peed, then took my pants off. Someone examined me, then asked me if my water had broken.

“I don’t know. I just peed, so maybe that was it.”

Mom arrived and wasn’t looking too good.

“Mom, if I have to puke, please don’t let them give me one of those tiny kidney pans. I’m going to want the trashcan.”

Shortly thereafter I announced that I was going to hurl, and the nurse gave me a tiny kidney pan. I tossed it across the room.

“Give me the damn trashcan!” I said through the rising bile. Mom was on the job and gave it to me.

“Oh, dear,” she said. “There goes your breakfast.”

I laid back on the bed, panting. I asked the nurse what I should do, and she gave me a blank look.

“I mean, am I supposed to pant? Am I supposed to push? Or what?”

She said that I could pant-pant-pant-blow, so I did.

They got me into a wheelchair and took me at what seemed like warp speed up to the labor and delivery floor, or as I liked to call it, the screaming floor.

“Just hop on up to the bed,” the nurse told me.

“I can’t.”

“Sure you can. Go on now.”

“If I stand up, the baby is going to land on his head on the floor.”

After some back and forth along these lines, the nurse helped me onto the bed. She got me settled, then went off to do some sort of nurse-ly things.

And this was when the shit hit the fan.

Labor pains were coming hot and heavy. My mother had gone out into the hall to wait for Ed to arrive. The nurses weren’t helping me at all. In fact, the were talking about things like what they’d had for lunch, what they planned to do over the weekend, etc. The only thing they weren’t talking about was the woman in heavy labor behind them in the bed.

I panicked. I began to scream.

I’d always said that I’d never lose control to the point where I’d scream while in labor. I’d always said that women who do were just drama queens looking for attention. I’d always thought of myself as a well-read woman who knew all about labor and what to expect.

I never knew what fear and pain would turn me into: a scream machine.

I was in a hospital, and a nurse was in my room; however, I was all alone. No one was talking to me, telling that this was normal, that everything was OK. My mother was in her own hell, having to listen to her child scream in pain and fear. My doctor was nowhere to be seen. I felt like I was all alone.

While this was going on, Ed arrived. He said later that he’d considered stopping to grab some McDonald’s on the way but decided against it.

My mother was in the hall, waiting for Ed and was relieved to see him as the elevator doors open. He rolled over to where she was. A scream ripped through the air.

“Boy, just listen to that one,” Ed said with a smile.

“I think that’s Laurel,” mom said.

“Uh … I guess I’d better get in there.”

Ed came in the room to find me still in the nice shirt I’d worn for my breakfast with mom, my face red and puffy, and my eyes filled with rage and fear.

He positioned himself at my side and rubbed my arm. I snapped at him to stop touching me.

“I don’t know what to do to help,” Ed said.

“Just stay here with me,” I gasped. The screaming continued.

Finally, the nurse turned from what she was doing over by the window.

“What you need to do is stop screaming and start pushing.” She sounded aggravated.

I wanted nothing more than to get up and punch her right in the face. If I hadn’t been in labor, I would have.

So I thought to myself that if she wanted pushing, pushing she would get.

I pushed like I believed my life depended on it, as if as soon as I delivered I’d be able to leap up from the table and go after Nurse Ratched.

A new character came into my room in time to enjoy my screaming. This poor young resident was there for the delivery, which was fast. Unlike with Matthew, when I’d been numb from the epidural, with Elliot, I actually felt his shoulders, arms, and legs make the journey into the world. Weird.

“Wow! Look at that head of hair!” someone said.

I began to cry. I cried from an excess of adrenaline. I cried from the terror that was beginning to recede. I even cried from shame that I’d been screaming like some kind of lunatic.

While Elliot was being weighed and tested, my mother came into the room. One look at my blotchy face and swollen, red nose and she went into mom mode.

“Do you think we ought to call her doctor?” she asked Ed, meaning my psychiatrist. Perhaps my endless repetition of the phrase “I’m sorry” had her worried.

“I’m OK, mom. I’m just … so sorry.”

I calmed down and was relieved to hear Elliot crying.

After a while, my doctor came into the room. He wasn’t in a hurry. My mother told me later that when he arrived on the floor, he paused to chat up the nurses. She was poised to drag him to my door and push him through it when he strolled in under his own steam.

Although he was late, he was there in time for the pain to resume as I struggled to deliver the placenta. By this point I was begging for pain relief.

“If we give you medication at this point, you might have trouble bonding with your baby,” I was told. To this day, I still don’t understand what that means. Pain = bonding with your baby? Does not compute.

Once the placenta was delivered, the resident settled in to stitch me up. I was still in the shame mode as he got started.

“You’re hurting me,” I said in a thin, pathetic voice. I said it again. The third time I said it, though, my tone had changed to one of wrath … a deep, Optimus Prime warning of impending death and destruction.

Fortunately for the resident, I wasn’t in the best position to kick him, so he finished up and beat a hasty retreat.

I finally held my baby in my arms. He was perfect and had a full head of thick black hair. (Where had that hair come from?) The terror and shame I’d felt only a few minutes ago melted away, and the memory of the pain I’d endured also faded. I’d done it. I’d survived the pregnancy, and so had my baby. I’d made it through the incredibly fast labor and painful delivery and held in my arms the best birthday gift I had ever received — and ever would receive.

Birth: Skimbleshanks

Now the story of Skimbleshanks’s birth is quite a bit different than my own. Ed and I had to travel a long, bumpy road before I became pregnant. In fact, the fertility expert we’d seen first had spent a lot of time and a lot of our money only to announce that he didn’t know what the problem was, maybe my eggs were “bad,” and that the next step was IVF.

“No, it isn’t,” I said. “You’ve spent all our money, so our next step will be adoption.” You could say that I was angry and bitter at that particular point in my life.

After I’d attended a presentation on adoption, during which the presenter said in an offhand way that adopters could expect to spend about $20,000 before they were done, I was devastated. I asked the presenter how people went about getting that kind of money. She said that many ask friends and relatives, that they got the money “somehow.” Yeah, right. After going through the expense and heartache of infertility treatments, I wasn’t about to leap into the deeper waters of debt. Nothing like welcoming a new child into your life and worrying about the enormity of the debt you’d incurred to make it happen.

At the time I worked at the state’s medical society, where, among other things, I was the managing editor of it’s monthly journal. The editor, Wayne Martz, was a retired family doctor. Kind and thoughtful, he said that he would be willing to be a reference for Ed and me if we pursued adoption. However, he said, a new fertility doc was coming to Delaware, and he urged me to see him first.

With a heavy heart, I made an appointment to see this new guy. With his move to Delaware, it meant that Delaware now had a grand total of two fertility docs.

Without going into a lot of grisly detail, after only five cycles, I was pregnant. I remember hanging up the phone, not really believing that the test was accurate, not really believing the “yes” answer I’d heard not once, but twice.

Ed was home from work that day with an upset stomach. I called him from the office once I had it to myself (these were the days before everyone had cell phones).

“Soon both of us will be puking,” was pretty much how I broke the news to him that we were finally going to be parents. Classy, right?

The pregnancy was pretty uneventful. However, since I would be 35 by the time I gave birth, I was considered to be of “advanced maternal age” and so needed to be watched. I had ultrasounds out the wazoo, it felt like. The first, to detect the fetal heartbeat, was very cool. The next, to check the position of the embryo, was not so cool. This ultrasound had to be done while I had a full bladder. By itself, that’s not such a big deal. What made it a big deal was that the technician had to press on my abdomen in several places to get accurate readings. After begging to be allowed to pee, the tech said that I could, but just a little. Really? Is that even possible? I nearly had tears of pain in my eyes by the time she was done and had stumbled across the hall to the bathroom.

The end result was a black-and-white ultrasound picture of what looked like a lima bean or a peanut. I was still in denial that I was pregnant, despite the peanut picture and despite feeling a bit more tired than usual and having tender breasts.

After another month or two, I was coming home from work, taking a nap, eating dinner, then going to bed. Saying I was tired was an understatement. It still beat the pants off puking morning, noon, and night like some women do when they’re pregnant.

At Christmastime that year (1994) I remember wallpapering what was to be the baby’s room. I went up and down the stepladder and hung the pastel-striped paper while accompanied by the lovely Christmas music sung by the Cambridge choir on NPR.

Late in my pregnancy I developed edema. As a child, I remember seeing elderly women with legs like sausages, their puffy feet stuffed into sensible shoes. This is what I looked like. When I walked without shoes, the flesh on the top of my feet actually vibrated with each step. I bought a pair of sneakers and wore them with the laces as loose as I could make them. At work I tried to keep my feet elevated, which translated to

At my next doctor’s appointment, I was told that, from that point until I delivered, I was on bed rest. Boom. Just like that.

Now on bed rest (meaning: stay supine except for trips to the bathroom), I thought about all the things I could finally get done. Unfortunately, most of those things required being perpendicular.

At my next prenatal visit, I mentioned to the doctor that the baby didn’t seem to be moving much. About the only thing I can remember that resulted from that was my having to pee in a large plastic container for 24 hours, then bring it in to the hospital. Now peeing while squatting is kind of a challenge. Try doing it while you can’t see what you’re peeing into because of a huge belly. Try balancing while an ungodly amount of weight has thrown off your center of gravity. Go on. I’ll wait.

So my mother took me to the hospital, bucket o’ pee in tow. After taking me back, I had yet another ultrasound. Once I’d

essed, I was ushered into a doctor’s office. He told me that he was concerned because the amount of amniotic fluid was pretty low. He said that they’d need to induce me.

“What? Now?”

“Yes. We’ll admit you now and begin the induction.”

“So I can just go home and get my bag and come back, right?”

[crickets chirping]

“You’re not going to let me go, are you.”

“No.”

“Well, can I at least call my husband?”

“Yes. You can use my phone.” (I think he said this because he was afraid I was going to bolt.”

“Ed? We’re going to have a baby.”

“Uh, yeah. I’m aware of that.”

“No. I mean we’re going to have a baby today or tomorrow. They’re keeping me here. They’re going to induce me.”

[crickets chirping]

“Ed?”

“Yeah … Do I need to come?”

“No, I think we have some time.”

I was admitted at around noon on January 20, 1995. My baby’s due date was February 19. Was I scared? You bet your ass I was. But I had my mother there, and she was on the case. She stayed for a bit, then left once Ed arrived, McDonald’s bag in hand. Since I was now a patient, I wasn’t permitted to eat anything. At that point, I would have eaten the McDonald’s bag, I was so hungry.

I was hooked up to a fetal monitor, which was a big elastic strap that went all the way around my belly, and an automatic blood pressure cuff. I was exhausted and slept pretty well, considering that I was in a hospital.

The next morning one of the nurses was looking at the paper readout from the overnight monitoring.

“Wow!” I said with amazement. “Look at those contractions! I slept right through them.” I was pretty excited at the thought that contractions that looked like an outline of the Rocky Mountains could be slept through. Labor and delivery were going to be a breeze.

The nurse looked at me and laughed.

“Those aren’t contractions,” she said. “You were snoring. Boy, you were really sawing lumber!” She was grinning. I was not.

Saturday was a long and hungry day. Sometime that day I was hooked up to a pitocin drip to get labor underway. My doctor stopped by to check on me and decided to rupture the amniotic sac, such as it was, and insert some sort of catheter. Fortunately for him, he was sitting on my slippered foot. He did something that really hurt, and in an almost literal knee-jerk reaction, I tried to kick him.

I spent a few hours walking up and down an unlit corridor that had boxes and extra equipment pushed up alongside the walls. Ed was there to lend moral support, and we must have made an interesting sight: me with my gown, hospital slippers, and IV pole, him in his wheelchair.

At dinnertime, a wonderful nurse with a Scots accent gave me a “clear tray” (broth, tea, and jello), which I inhaled. A little while later she came in with another tray. She said in a hesitant voice that another mother on the floor had been given the tray but didn’t want it. Would I like to have it?

Would I?! I inhaled that tray, too, bless her heart.

After they’d cranked up the Pitocin to 11, things started to happen. Labor pain, which had been described to me as being like cramps, started in earnest. Let’s see if I can make an accurate comparison. Labor pain is to cramps like the hulk is to a preschooler dressed up like the hulk. It wasn’t a lot of fun, and it went on and on and on.

Finally I’d had enough and asked for an epidural. Now this was the one thing about labor/delivery that had me scared shitless. The idea of someone inserting a needle anywhere near my spine was enough to make me pissless, too.

The doctor who was to give me the epidural finally showed up late … and cranky, too. I was not comforted as she wheeled in a Sears tool cart.

“Are you going to pull out a monkey wrench and whack me over the head with it?” I asked in a futile bid to get some sort of human reaction from her.

I finally cried. I was curled up in the fetal position on my side with a humorless doctor about to stab my spine with a needle. I was tired. I was hungry. I was done. Ed did his best to comfort me.

It wasn’t too bad, all things considered. She ran medical tape over the tiny epidural tube from my lower back all the way up to the back of my neck.

My doctor came back and removed the catheter, and then things really began to happen. He positioned himself at the foot of the bed, just inches in front of the wall. Interestingly, the wall had a chair rail, and the rail was gouged and scarred. Ed joked that that must have been where the babies who delivered quickly landed. Har har.

Once the doctor said I could push, I pushed once, twice, three times, and the baby came out. I am not making this up.

“Do you want to cut the cord?” the doctor asked Ed.

“No. That’s what we’re paying you for.”

The baby boy was wrapped up and put in my arms. I’d never before held such a tiny infant. Skimbleshanks was 5 pounds and some ounces — tiny, but perfect. He began to fuss a bit. I wasn’t at all sure what to do.

“Don’t cry, baby,” I said. And his little face turned up toward mine and he calmed down, just like that.

They had to take him out of the room to take his stats, and I told Ed not to take his eyes off our baby. When they came back, Ed told me that Skimbleshanks had just missed the physician who was weighing him when he let loose an impressive stream of pee.

“That’s my boy!” Ed said.

The doctor who had taken care of all the testing, weighing, and measuring came back in the room with a Polaroid photograph of my newborn and gave it to me. I was going to be taking it, not my baby, to my room with me. Skimbleshanks was headed to the NICU for monitoring.

At some ungodly hour I was wheeled into an unoccupied room, clutching my photograph, and helped into bed. Shortly after that, a middle-aged nurse wheeled in what looked like a sump pump.

“You’re breast feeding?”

“Uh, yeah. I plan to.”

She pointed to buttons, knobs, and tubes, gave vague instructions, then left. What followed was a short, painful, embarrassing exercise in futility. My baby was a month early. I was exhausted. I was clueless.

The next day I visited Skimbleshanks after scrubbing in in the NICU. I later learned that my mother and father had each been in for a visit, too, after they’d been to see me.

The concern the doctors had was that Skimbleshanks's lungs hadn’t fully developed and he was straining just a bit to breathe. He was released from the NICU the next day, so it was all good.

I’d been told that the pediatrician would be arriving that day to circumcise Skimbleshanks, but I was still surprised that she was there so early. I put on my robe and, at the nurse’s suggestion, went for a stroll.

I came back early to hear my baby crying and caught a glimpse of his little body strapped down onto the hard plastic snipping tray-like thing they use. In tears, I went into my room and sat down to have breakfast. When I lifted the lid from my plate, I saw a couple of anemic pancakes and two tiny wrinkled sausages. Naturally, that reminded me of what was going on in the next room, and I slammed the lid down. Then I took it off, because I was starving. I snuffled and cried as I ate everything on the plate.

That evening my sister-in-law, a postpartum nurse, arrived. She asked if I’d tried nursing Skimbleshanks yet, and I told her I had no clue what I was doing. She said she’d help me, then hesitated and said it meant she had to touch me. It wasn’t possible at that point for me to care any less about who touched me where, as long as it meant that my baby was going to live. (Note: Foreshadowing for my future postpartum depression.)

So she helped me, Skimbleshanks nursed, and then Jan held him to burp him. He yapped up some of the colostrum and, again with the drama, I was devastated. Jan reassured me that he was fine and would be fine. Then she said to rest.

I must have dozed off, because when I woke, I heard my baby crying in the next room. To me, it sounded like someone was hurting him. Adrenaline pumping, fists clenched, I stomped through the door and saw a nurse holding my child.

“What are you doing?” I said in a menacing voice. I was ready to cold-cock the woman with severe prejudice.

Jan turned around, smiled at me, and said that she was giving him a bath.

I took a breath. Then another one. Man, so that was what people meant when they talked about the mothering instinct kicking in. There I was, ready to punch someone in the face just because I thought she was hurting my newborn.

The same thing happened when Ed, Skimbleshanks,  and I came home. My mother was waiting at the door and barely let me come in before she had her new grandson out of his car seat and into her arms.

Mom told Ed and me to just go to bed and rest and that she’d take care of everything. So we fell into bed, but I couldn’t fall asleep, even though I fully expected to pass out the moment I was horizontal.

Skimbleshanks cried. Then he cried some more.

I was out of bed like a shot.

“What are you doing to him?!” I said to my mother, nearly in a panic.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “I’m just changing him. Go back to bed.”

I did, wondering why I was acting like a lunatic. My mother was the only person in the world, other than myself (and even Ed) who I’d trust with my baby, and there I was, ready to throw down with her. Yet another clue that my hormones were totally off the rails.

If it hadn’t been for my mother’s help, I’m pretty sure that I would have spent some time in the hospital for regrooving. Not only was I not eating, I seemed incapable of even the simplest of tasks, like brushing my teeth and unloading the dishwasher.

Buddha bless my mother. She’d made arrangements to have a place to call home here on the East Coast when I let her know that I was expecting. Those first few weeks she’d arrive at my home by about 9, and I could collapse, knowing that she’d take care of both the baby and my tender sanity. She brought order and warmth to an environment that felt alien to me and eased me into my new role as the mother of a newborn. I’d never had any experience with infants, so every peep and burble was cause for alarm, as far as I was concerned. Add to that the uncertainty of caring for a premature infant, and I was toast.

I’d decided early in my pregnancy that I would breast feed. After delivering prematurely and after a horrendous two-day induction, I was convinced that if my baby wasn’t nursed, he would die. (Again, a clue that my mental well-being was off kilter.) Because Skimbleshanks  was a preemie, he had real trouble learning how to nurse, just as I was having trouble nursing him. So I rented a breast pump and doggedly pumped several times a day for about six weeks.

Pumping was awful. First, I wasn’t eating or drinking nearly enough to make pumping easy. Second, I felt a sense of despair every time I sat down to pump. If all were well, I reasoned, I’d be able to nurse my baby, rather than having my mother feed him my breastmilk from a bottle. Woe woe!

Birth: Mine

My mother hypnotized herself to give birth to me. Since she was the first woman in Delaware to do so, she was surrounded by medical students. Oh, and her physician, Dr. Conrad, was a woman.

Nearly three years before, when mom was in labor with my brother, her physician was late in arriving. The nurses who were attending my mother gave her ether. By the time mom delivered Alan, both she and her new baby were green from all the ether she’d been given. After that experience, mom vowed that if and when she had another baby, she’d never go through that again.

In January 1961, it was snowing when mom went into labor. Since their car didn’t have chains (the requisite equipment for driving in the snow at that time), my father borrowed their neighbor’s car.

My dad … *sigh.* When he was younger, dad was prone to tension headaches. As you might expect, when mom went into labor during a snowstorm, dad was being “destroyed” by yet another headache. He remembers mom castigating him about it, too, saying that “I’m in labor, about to give birth, and you have a headache!” Yeah. I’m glad I didn’t get to participate in that happy time other than just being the cause of it.

From what I gather, the birth wasn’t complicated, and I arrived, healthy and whole. Dr. Conrad wheeled the bassinet in which I lay out to the waiting room where my father sat with the other fathers. I suppose if a father-to-be had made a fuss he might have been allowed to scrub in and be in with his wife for the delivery. However, in the early ‘60s, it wasn’t the norm.

Dad says that Dr. Conrad wheeled the bassinet over to him and told him that he had a daughter. Then she whisked the blanket from my little body to give my dad a look. Every time dad has told me about that day, he’s included this bit. He guesses that the doctor wanted dad to have a good look at me so that he could see with his own eyes that I had all the requisite parts a baby girl was supposed to have.

And that’s all I know about my own birth. Heralded by snow and pain (my father’s), my mother brought me into the world by hypnotizing herself into a deeply relaxed state so that she could stay in as much control of herself as was possible for a woman in labor.