A Child Is Born: Part IV (And The End)

With the chorus of voices urging me on to the hospital growing louder, I asked David to call the midwife for me. “Tell her we’ll be there in an hour and a half,” I said. She thought that odd, she’d later tell me, but I really wanted David to have a little dinner before we left. I didn’t make it that long, though; something in me finally decided we couldn’t really wait much longer after all. My audience assessed me from across the room. “She’ll have the baby by 8:30,” David said. Pat chimed in, “I’d say midnight.” I didn’t dare hope, so I didn’t say anything at all. David helped me into my coat, pulled the van around, helped me across the icy path and into my seat, and we began our long and arduous journey down the narrow, icy, bumpy drive. (And as any woman who has ever been in labor knows, ’twas the bumps that were the most harrowing!)

This was the first time I’d been out since the storm hit nearly three days ago. I was impressed with how clear the roads were, but the roads here are narrow as it is, and the plows hadn’t cleared quite to edges, shrinking the available space by several inches on each side. Passing oncoming vehicles was scary work indeed. We drove around a few downed trees, too, and that was about all I knew of the damage around us. Between the lowering darkness, the overcast skies, the thick layer of wavery ice on my side of the window, and the contractions, it was just too hard to look out into the world.

In no time, David was dropping me off at the hospital door. I waited in the lobby while he parked, and then we walked up together. “After all this,” I remarked somewhat hopelessly, “they’re probably going to say I’m only three centimeters and send me home.” A few minutes later, I heard the midwife say, “Nine and a half centimeters. There’s just a lip.” I nearly wept for joy. I’d already been laboring for nearly 24 hours and I so wanted it to be over. But nine and a half centimeters and no urge to push? I always want to push by then and nurses are always trying to get me to not. The baby was turned a little to the side, she told me, and that was why I wasn’t pushing and probably why the contractions were so short.

At 7:30, when I said I was ready, the midwife broke my waters. It was a little while before I felt even the slightest urge to push, and when it came, it was very slight indeed. But push we did, amidst contractions so weak that I could barely feel them over the pressure of the baby. That baby was born by sheer willpower, I’ll tell you, because my body was certainly not helping any. And then, at 8:28, two minutes shy of David’s estimate, the midwife announced, “It’s a boy!”

I’m pretty sure I asked aloud, “A boy? Are you sure?”

And there he was, perfect, tiny, wrinkly and red. Thomas. In that moment, I felt so close to David, who has stood beside me and helped me birth seven children, who knows me so well, he could even guess the hour of our son’s birth. (Maybe it was just luck, but I prefer the intimacy of the other.) And I was very, very glad that it was all over.

The next morning, I bargained my way out of the hospital. They didn’t put up much of a fuss, really. They were running, after all, on backup generators and with a skeleton crew. In fact, Thomas received a letter in the mail the other day that he failed his newborn screening test and needs further evaluation, though there was no audiologist in the hospital, at his birth or for days afterward, to test him. I think they were glad to get rid of me. I was discharged so quickly that David couldn’t even get there before they were trying to shoo me out the door. It was a beautiful day, that Friday that all nine of us went home together, sunny, bright and clear, if very cold. The whole world shimmered in its coat of ice. Breathtaking.

On the way home, I saw for the first time the devastation caused by the storm. Tree limbs along the roadways lay bent or broken across power lines heavy with ice of their own. In the fields, the trees all looked like someone had come along and just squashed them from the top. Roofs were freshly draped with bright blue plastic tarps. And still now, nearly a month later, we are all still cleaning up the broken branches and limbs that litter our yards. It was staggering to me, how much damage had been done in so short a time. And then we were home, and nothing else mattered. Home with my husband and children, the only place I ever want to be.