In accordance with my long time love affair with preparation, Nick and I enrolled ourselves in nearly every birthing and parenting class available to us after learning I was pregnant. I witnessed more videotaped births than was probably necessary and swaddled more stuffed babies than I had as a young girl playing house. On Thursday, July 22nd, we completed our last class and officially were certified as parents, fully equipped to handle both the process of labor and the enormous, but obviously completely doable, task of parenting. On the way out the door, I rubbed my belly and jokingly said “Alright, Henry, we’re ready for you, so you can come on out.” Ha. Ha. Ha.
Ten minutes later I was stopped in my tracks as Nick and I entered our local library (no doubt getting more parenting books) and I experienced what I figured was probably the strongest “practice” contraction I had had until that point. I laughed it off and felt that my cavalier attitude was totally justifiable since a.) He wasn’t due for more than three weeks and b.) I experienced no more contractions. Sure, I felt weird for the rest of the night, as if he was corkscrewing his way down my belly, but there had been plenty of times during this pregnancy that weird feelings were nothing more than a bad Jimmy John’s sandwich, so I wasn’t worried.
The next day, I was still feeling a bit off and decided to take a half day off from work. I came home, took a quick nap, and upon waking up, feeling refreshed and less weird, decided to finish up the last part of the nursery, the rocker’s cushions. It took about four hours and as I was putting on the finishing touches, I again jokingly said to my belly, “All done. Your room is ready for you, come on out.” I did not know at the time that infants are apparently unable to detect sarcasm while in the womb.
Shortly after going to bed and tossing and turning until about 2 am or so, I got up to pee and as I stood up I experienced, for lack of a better word, a gush. My first thought was that I had peed myself. If I am being honest, it wouldn’t have been the first time during this pregnancy, but any other time I had an accident it was because Nick had made me laugh too hard. But this was different. Especially when it kept coming.
Nick was, for some reason, still awake watching TV and I called to him. “I think my water broke.” He looked at me skeptically. “Or else I just peed myself. But I think it’s my water.” And it was at this point that I started to shake. Uncontrollably, teeth chattering, the works. I’m pretty sure I looked as white as a ghost.
“What’s the matter?” Nick politely inquired, “We’re ready for this.”
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ready? Oh, no, no, no, sir, I require three more weeks if I am going to be ready. That is what I was promised, what I deserve! The doctors, the midwives, all of the myths about your firstborn, they all said we’d get to the due date, if not past it. I have more books to read. I never finished that chapter in Dr. Sears book about infant sleep. I don’t have any nursing bras. I still need to clean out the fridge and create a designated area for stored breast milk. And the cats!!! What about the cats?!
For an entire five minutes, I became obsessed with the cats. I hadn’t been playing recordings of baby noises to acclimate their little feline brains to a new being. There was still cat hair everywhere, little dust bunnies of fur running rampant throughout my household. We need to move their litter boxes. What if they hated him? What if they hated me? What if he was allergic and we killed him with cat dander in the first few days of his short little life? OMIGOD, WHAT ABOUT THE FUCKING CATS?
To his credit, Nick took my sudden panic about our pets in stride. He patiently stated we should probably call the hospital and figure out if I was really in labor and perhaps then deal with the cats and other such problems. Personally, I wanted to call my mom first, but he convinced me otherwise. So we called the midwife and were told, since I was not yet having regular contractions, we could wait it out at home for an hour or so and see what happens. I then called my mother, completely interrupting my family’s annual two week vacation to
No sooner than I had hung up with her when I was struck with what felt like the worst menstrual cramp EVER. Practice contractions had nothing on this sucker. I thought angrily about one of our birthing classes that insisted that because birth was natural, it was therefore painless. Really? The flu is technically natural. So are cramps. They both suck and are often painful. So kiss my ass. This is fucking painful.
Nick looked at me and asked, “So this is really happening, huh?” I nodded my head and was yet again reminded why I married him. That man put his game face on and truthfully, has not taken it off since. I will be eternally grateful to whatever cosmic forces brought us together because there is no way in hell I would have stayed as calm as I did without his steadying presence. He dragged our suitcase up from the basement, started packing according to the list (shocker!) that we had made, all the while asking how I was doing and keeping his tone light and cheery, as if we were going out for ice cream instead of having a baby.
The contractions started coming closer and closer together rather quickly, so when we determined that it was time to go to the hospital, he asked me, “Is there anything else you want me to do before we leave?” I asked him to do the dishes and sweep the kitchen floor. Silly, I realize, but he merely nodded his head and did just that because he knows me like no one else does and was fully aware that in my strange OCD addled brain, a clean floor would help me labor better.
The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. They checked us in, examined me, etc. and then basically left me alone to labor until I was fully dilated. Both Nick’s parents and mine were on their way, and I only hoped that Henry would give my mother enough time to get to me because I knew that I needed her if I was going to do this properly. I call that woman when I get a cold, for God’s sake. I knew she could be appropriately sympathetic and simultaneously be the one to tell me to buck up and get over it when the pains got tough, something Nick was probably unable to do – not to mention, that such an attitude from him would have elicited a much different response from me.
I won’t bore you with the details of the next eight hours, but there are a few moments from the day that I hope I never forget. Our room had a beautiful view of the sunrise and I remember saying to Nick that by the time the sun set that day, we would have our son. Here it was, evidence the earth kept spinning, even as my world was about to drastically change. While I labored in the tub, Nick and I decided to say our vows to our son. I had hoped to have our promises written down, something we could look at and perhaps one day give him, but we ran out of time, so instead he got what we could think of on the fly. It was one of the more precious moments of life as, in between painful contractions, Nick promised to love this little boy and try to help him become the best man he could be and I vowed to let him be whatever he needed to be – even if that required me to scrap my precious plans.
At around a quarter to two, my midwife informed me that if I wanted to push, it was okay by her (I had a really lovely midwife with a wonderful sense of humor). I asked if we could wait just a bit longer since my mother was almost here and she said if I could hold off, we probably had about a half hour until it was totally necessary to get going. Fortunately, my mom and my dad showed up just minutes after this exchange. My mom walked in and said exactly what I knew she would say and exactly what I need to hear: “Hey, baby girl, I’m here. Everything Is Alright.” My dad came in and did exactly what I knew he would do, cracking jokes and laughing when I gave him the finger (its our way of saying I love you) but right before he left he gave me the Dad look, the one that says I love you, you can do this, and Everything Is Alright. With that they wheeled me into the other room and I started pushing.
Again I will spare you the details, but I will say that Nick and my mom were fucking fabulous as coaches. Nick held my hand, kissed my forehead, and kept telling me what a great job I was doing, even the times when I wasn’t doing so well. I remember thinking that this will probably be the last time I would be his first priority – he hadn’t met Henry yet, so he couldn’t know that the love he would feel for the little guy would supersede anything he felt for me, but I knew it because my attachment to our son had already made him my primary concern. Our relationship as husband and wife was about to change fundamentally and while I don’t regret deciding to have a kid, I did take a moment enjoy this last time that we would be two, before we’d become three.
My mom, meanwhile, was busy keeping me focused on the task at hand. I don’t quite know how she did it or why, but some how she came up with the best analogy that could have worked for me: she told me take a breath and hold it as if I were swimming. Swimming? I can swim. I love swimming. I’d been swimming with Henry three times a week throughout the pregnancy. I could do this.
So I swam. I even kept singing Dory’s little jingle from Finding Nemo. And when I thought I was going to lose it, when I thought there was no way I can keep going, my mom was right there, telling me in that no nonsense tone that she has that I can and I would do this.
Shortly after this, I heard Nick say, through tears, “Katie, open your eyes. He’s here.” I did and he was.
They handed him to me, covered in goo, crying his head off at the indignity of this new place. I had thought of this moment a thousand plus time during my pregnancy and even before, even when he was just an abstraction, a possibility, a hope. I had considered long and hard the first words I would say to my child. Hello? I love you? You’re beautiful?
In the end I didn’t say any of these things.
“I’m so proud of you.”
Because I was. Because he was so tiny and he just did something so big. Bigger than what I had done. And probably a hell of a lot scarier.
They took him from me to wrap him up and the midwife finished working on me. One of the more humorous moments was when I, after delivering the placenta, spontaneously shouted, “I FEEL AMAZING!” No one had asked me how I was feeling so this wasn’t a response to anything. This was me celebrating how absolutely awesome I thought I was in that moment. I felt like a fucking superhero. I felt like I just finished doing the hardest thing I had ever done in my entire life.
I had no idea what was in store for me over the following weeks.
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