when ben was born

Rain flashed, lightning pounded the night he was born.

* * *

Emotionally my wife needed Dr. Hammond to coach her through delivery. Hammond had comforted her through the loss of our first child to miscarriage. Out of an obstetrician’s practice of eight doctors with rotating shifts, however, the odds were against it. But that morning her contractions intensified, and Hammond was on call at the hospital until 8am the next day. Gleefully we hopped in the car.

“You look chipper,” Hammond said; it was skepticism. Sure enough, despite three months of contractions she was only two centimeters dilated. “Go walk some stairs for an hour,” a nurse suggested. My wife rose; I didn’t. “What, me too?” I kidded. The humorless nurse shot me a look of death.

The clock was ticking on Hammond’s shift. My nine-months-pregnant wife and I spent one hour in the stairwell – up, down, up, down, forty flights in all. “Still two centimeters,” Hammond reported. “Go home, call me back if they get worse.”

* * *

That afternoon her contractions petered out, but resumed in the evening with a vengeance. Reluctant to taste disappointment again, we resolved not to return to the hospital until we were sure.

By 9:30pm she was so feverish – throat sore, eyes aching – quivering, groaning, freezing in the warm bath we’d drawn for her, hardly able to respond intelligibly – suddenly I thought, “We’re fools, we’ve waited too long, she’s in transition!” I shook. Shiloh, the Maltese we were dogsitting, shook. My wife shook most of all, and I realized, trying to retrieve her out of the tub, that moving her to the car by myself was impossible. “You’re going to have to help me,” I said. She managed to step out, then demanded that I wrap her in as many towels as I could find. She stood there, crouched over the sink counter, quaking furiously as I wrapped two, three – “More!” – four, five towels around her.

I dialed Nonnie. “Is there any way you can pick up Kelly at the airport for us?”

“Sure.”

“Because we’re heading to the hospital. This is it.”

“Are you kidding me?”

Somehow we managed the stairs, the climb into the car. It was 10pm. The light rain threatened to downpour. Eight minutes to the hospital seemed nightmarishly long. Unable to find nearby parking, I panicked and dropped her off at the emergency room entrance, where she practically pushed through a group of idiots that didn’t get out of her way.

On the birthing floor Dr. Hammond said, “Now that looks like a labor face.”

* * *

Only three centimeters dilated.

Thankfully they still admitted her.

* * *

His pulse was high, in the 190’s. Hammond and the nurse whispered in the corner. We’d heard his heartbeat many times before, spent up to half an hour once listening to its soothing gallop as it rose and fell – but this sounded frantic. “Is his pulse okay?” we asked.

“Well, it’s not where we normally like it. We’ll keep an eye on it.” Her musical tone told us she was trying not to worry us.

It was what we’d feared all along. Our first had died; now, at the end, something utterly unjust was threatening our second. “God, don’t take this child from us,” we pleaded. “Please, Lord, don’t let it come to this. We want to see life and not death. We want to see You glorified in life. We trust You. Please calm his heartbeat, his emotions. Please let him be healthy. Please, please … don’t crush us again.”

My wife was running a fever. They treated her with antibiotics, Tylenol, and an IV drip.

* * *

Nonnie picked up Kelly from her 11pm flight and brought her straight to the hospital. Kelly’s biggest reservation about traveling that summer was the probability of missing our son’s birth – but he was arriving five days early, exactly in the tight window she would be home between trips. She waited with Nonnie and Grannie in the hallway outside the birthing room.

* * *

Gradually, over the next hour, our son’s pulse relaxed. We breathed with relief.

But the epidural didn’t take, exactly. The regular anesthesiologist was out, and the fill-in failed to warn my wife before sticking the needle up her spine. She jolted; the needle must have angled. Consequently she developed a “window” – an area about the size of an orange with zero pain relief.

Outside, rain and thunder pounded.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “If it’s so small, why does it hurt so much?”

“Imagine a vise tightening on one of your toes,” the nurse retorted. “It’s just a toe. You think it would hurt?”

After two hours the nurse and I convinced the anesthesiologist to try again. By 3am the new epidural was in and enabled my wife to fall asleep. I didn’t.

* * *

“Okay, you need to roll over.”

Two nurses had stormed into the room; already they’d reached under her sheets to help. “Alright,” my wife muttered groggily, “I’m trying –”

“Faster. We need you on your other side now.”

In her sleep she’d shifted position, and our son’s pulse had plummeted. Rolling back returned it to normal. “He’ll be okay,” they explained, “as long as you stay off that side.” Something about bloodflow through the umbilical cord.

Early miscarriage scares, now these pulse problems … he seemed fated not to make it.

* * *

At 5:30am Dr. Hammond instructed my wife to “labor down” – to sleep, rest, store up energy until it was time to push. In the meantime gravity would assist, bringing our son further down the canal. Happily my wife obliged.

Two hours later, around 7:15am, the tippy crown of our son’s head was visible. “He has hair!” I exclaimed. It was nearly black, wavy. We were thrilled: my wife had wished for a full head of hair, and I’d glimpsed an in-the-flesh replication of my own.

In all she pushed sixteen minutes. The drugs were strong and her determination high, since Hammond’s shift would end in half an hour. On the third count of the third cycle, after I counted ten, she gave a final Olympic grunt and out popped our son’s head, surprising everyone. It was 7:43am.

“Hello, Benjamin!” she kept repeating, laughing. “Welcome to the world! Hello!” I, however, was a little stunned: he didn’t look anything like I expected, as if someone had swapped him out for another child. Something about his wrinkled face reminded me of my grandfather. How beautiful he was, Hammond and the nurse bragged; what a finely-shaped head! I welcomed these compliments because I didn’t know what to make of him myself.

But he sure was cool.

While they sewed up my wife they left him on the warming table, alone and crying. I stepped over and sang for him the alphabet song I’d sung to him in the womb. His brow raised and he hushed.

* * *

He scored 9 on his Apgar test; clasped his hands together; blinked into the light; locked his knees when we touched his feet on the bed, as if ready to support his own weight. All fears about his health dissolved. He was alive, healthy, real.

My wife was recovering nicely, too. “But I didn’t expect my thighs to feel sore,” she said.

“That’s because you did forty flights of stairs!” Even my legs were sore, and I hadn’t been carrying an extra 35 pounds.

Uncle Dave served as lead paparazzi. Later, processing the photos on his computer, his red-eye remover targeted the whites of my eyes. I’d gone two nights in a row without sleep.

That first night of parenthood was my third. Over capacity, the hospital made us share a room with another family. Unwilling to send our sleepless son to the nursery but also fearful his crying would wake our roommates, we spent that night in the hallway. Fatigued, gritchy, we fought in whispers.

Around 2am I performed my first paternal diaper change. Right as I pulled his diaper away he peed in his own eyes, sending me racing to the nurses’ station to ask if he needed treatment.

* * *

They offered to cut off our identification bands when we left the hospital. We declined. After nearly three days on our wrists they seemed like badges, bonding the three of us together.

How tiny he was in his carrier. Approaching the hospital exit I said, “Okay, Benjamin, this is the world!” and choked back tears. Just having him in the back of our CR-V, finally filling his carseat, his loose head drooping lower mile by mile – we giggled and cried the whole way.

But we panicked at home. At the hospital an entire nursing staff had helped us; suddenly the responsibility was all ours. We didn’t seem to have enough hands. “You just kept running from room to room,” Uncle Dave later laughed.

That first night at home he didn’t sleep, not even after feeding. “What’s wrong with him?” Grannie, our resident expert, asked. Completely new at this, we had no idea.

His seventeen-month run of sleepless nights had begun.

* * *

Now, on the verge of our next child’s arrival, anticipation feels different. We’re excited, yes, but also bracing for the storm. Some say the two-child transition is harder than the first.

But as brutally as our son broke us down – at times I feared sleeplessness would prevent me from maintaining gainful employment – he now builds us back through his cooperative sweetness and good-natured humor. He has so many of our best qualities, so few of our worst.

Those early months he was new at life, and we were new at parenting. There’s a strange sense of connectedness in that, in having suffered and survived each other.

It’s an emotional rollercoaster, parenting. The joys and fears of pregnancy and delivery have only continued into everyday life – and veteran parents assure us they never end, even after children turn eighteen, graduate from college, start their own families. Yeesh.

But parenting’s also one of the most significant and fulfilling things we’ve ever done.

How grateful we are to our son for breaking us in.

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copyright © 2007, michael w. hobson