H-Belle turned three today

Too. Tired. To. Tell. You. More. Right. Now.

Well. Just this.

Overheard in our home after H’s birthday dinner:

Me: Did you just take that out of your mouth and feed it to your sister?

The answer, of course, was yes.

Oh, wow. That’s pretty short. So I’m going to all-out cheat and post H’s birth story again. Yes, reruns already. It’s my baby, I can post if I want to.

****

November 15, 2005:

Because anyone who pushes a wombat-sized creature out of her nether-regions is entitled to an annual public reminiscence.

Two years ago yesterday—November 15th, 2003—I started feeling a little weird around the middle.

I phoned my mother after lunch.

“Feeling a little crampy. Might be stomach flu,” I said.

“Might not be,” said my mother. “Keep me posted.”

By three in the afternoon, I was feeling weirder. Not stop-the-presses weirder. Just slightly weirder around the middle.

David and I had donated Sophie to some friends for the afternoon, so we could devote our full attention to monitoring the situation.

“Let’s take a nap,” I said.

David found this agreeable. He fell asleep. I did not. I lay on my side on our bed next to him, looking out the window I am so fond of. It was a lovely, sunny pre-winter day in New England, a perfectly good day for contemplating any weirdness around the middle.

If we got rid of the aluminum siding, we could paint our house like that nice house across the street, was one of the several lines of thought I was entertaining at the time. I am very fond of my bedside window because it looks out on the blue-green house across the street, which is one of the prettiest houses in town, in my opinion. I always feel sorry for the owner of that house, who must look at our home when he gets his mail. We got the better end of the deal.

The weirdness ramped up a wee bit.

“Interesting,” I said.

Our friends dropped off Sophie. I sat on a kitchen chair and watched her eat dinner, something noodle-ish, as the sun set cruelly on the day and on her peaceful, happy life as an only child.

“I think we should be timing,” said David, who was standing over by the stove. I keep him there and only let him out for naps and toileting.

“I don’t think it’s time for that,” I said.

“Still. Go.”

“I am going. You go.”

“Oh. Right.”

So he looked at his watch while I said things like now and that was one I think and no I mean it’s over now no stop timing no wait there it goes again. It was all so confusing. We have terrible timing.

He glanced up from his watch with an anxious expression.

“Every four or five minutes,” he said. “Should we be concerned?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Every four to five minutes?”

“I’m sure we timed it wrong.”

After Sophie was in bed, I phoned my brother, Joe, who, very conveniently for me, chose to grow up and become an amazing family physician who delivers a lot of babies. Joe still talks to me, even though I once convinced him to swap me his Luke Skywalker and Han Solo and Princess Leia Star Wars figures for my one lousy Jawa, who was missing his brown hoodie. Joe rocks.

“I know you’re my brother and all, but I’ve got some questions. You know. About what’s going on. Um. With my body.”

“I can handle it.”

“It’s a little embarrassing.”

“I can take it.”

“Well, I’m seeing some [too much information] and a bit of [far too much information]. And I’m feeling some crampy things.”

“Contractions?”

“Maybe.”

“How far apart?”

“David says four to five minutes, but I think we counted wrong. I’m sure we counted wrong.”

“Uh—” There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Have you called the midwife?”

“Of course not. She’s very busy. I don’t want to bother her.”

“Right.” Another pause. “So here’s what you do. Take a warm bath. If the contractions stop, it’s probably false labor. If they don’t, call the midwife.”

“Or you.”

“Or the midwife.”

“Right.”

I got in the bathtub sometime after midnight. Just like that, the contractions melted away. Gone. Zip. Nada.

“Damn! My brother is good! I would kill for a doctor like that! Why isn’t he my doctor? He should be my doctor!”

David was leaning against the bathroom sink, looking troubled. He was in between phone calls at this point, but he was still clutching the phone. “I don’t think he could be your doctor. I think there are laws. Ethics. Did they really stop?”

“Totally! Completely! I feel great! I’m going to add some more warm water.”

“I’m calling the midwife.”

“No! Don’t!”

He handed me the phone, which I tried very hard not to drop in the bathwater.

Pam the Midwife did not seem the least put out by the fact that I had called my brother first. She agreed with Joe’s strategy and told me to give her a call if anything changed. Everyone was so reasonable. Everything was so reasonable. It was a very reasonable day, and I was pleased with the world.

I hung up and called my brother.

“I’m in the tub.”

“Okay.”

“The contractions stopped! You were so right! False labor! Totally false!”

“Okaaay.”

“I’m in the tub!”

“You said that.”

“I feel great. But if anything changes, I’ll call you.”

“Or your midwife.”

“Right.”

My brother hung up. I handed the phone to David.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“Absolutely. Look at me. Calm seas.”

David left the bathroom. When he returned to the bathroom twenty minutes later, he found me squatting naked and dripping wet beside our washing machine, which I was embracing like a long-lost lover.

“It feels so cool and good against my cheek,” I said. “I can’t explain it.”

“Contractions?”

“Oof. Oof.”

“I’m calling the midwife.”

“No! Give me the phone!”

I called Joe.

“They’re back. I can’t let go of the washing machine.”

He chose his words with impressive restraint. “Although I appreciate your confidence in me and my abilities as a physician, Jenn, this is probably a good time to remind you that I live in Washington. The state.”

“I know that.”

“This would be a very good time to call the midwife. I would call the midwife. Call your midwife.”

“Right.”

“Tell David to take string and scissors in the car.”

“No string. Dental floss?”

“Fine.”

While I got dressed, David phoned our friend Blair, who’d been alerted earlier in the evening when David was not buying my calm seas bit. He arrived sleepy but willing to be Sophie’s guardian until the next day, when news of life’s latest development would squash the poor thing like a bug.

It was approaching 2AM at this point, and David, feeling grateful, was determined to make Blair feel right at home with a nice middle-of-the-night cuppa. Don’t ever underestimate the power of the Brit-Canuck connection.

“Can I make you a pot of tea, Blair?”

“I’m fine.”

“Well, let me show you where we keep the tea. We’ve got Darjeeling, English Breakfast, Orange Pekoe—”

I grunted meaningfully from the hallway. “Oof. Oof. Urgh.”

“—oh, I almost forgot, we’ve got quite a few varieties of herbal tea—”

Blair protested blearily. “Really, I’m fine—”

I tried hopping. “Getting worse over here. In case you were wondering. Oof.”

Polite Boy would not be stopped. “The blue teapot is on top of the—”

“OH MY GOD ARE YOU KIDDING ME? ARE YOU? WE HAVE TO GO WE HAVE TO GO GO GO GO GO I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO SURE OF ANYTHING IN MY LIFE! OOOOF! URRRGH! OOOF!”

We headed to the car.

“We forgot the floss and nail scissors,” I said. “My brother said to bring them.”

Dental floss and nail scissors, six bucks. Husband’s expression, priceless. Yeah, the joke’s getting old, but it wasn’t in November 2003, trust me. Hey, this is my wombat, I can tell it however I like.

For once, our ancient red Toyota station wagon cooperated with us, possibly sensing the gravity of the situation, and we hit the road, chugging up Route 7 into Vermont.

We live in Massachusetts, but all the groovy midwives seem to live in Vermont, so that’s where we were headed. At 2AM, there wasn’t much traffic, and it was a beautiful night. Brisk almost-winter air, tinged with my favorite smell in the universe— wood smoke and burnt leaves—and a sprinkling of stars overhead. Perfect. No, seriously. Perfect. I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, hey, this is my life, not bad, beats NYC up and down with a stick.

Sure, the weirdness around the middle had achieved Guinness Book Weirdness. Sure, I squirmed a lot and braced myself against the dashboard and made some peculiar, unladylike noises along the way. But it was fun. I can’t remember exactly what we talked about (unlike my usual flawless recall and verbatim recording of every conversation of my life! ha! ha ha!), but we were still smiling when we arrived on the maternity ward. This alone is worth remembering for the kid.

They handed me a rubber girdle. “For the fetal heart monitor,” they said. I tried to figure out a way to get it around my waist a la Houdini by sliding it up one leg and one leg only. Then an arm. No go. Worse than ten Lycra Tubes of Death and Spandex-and-Steel Butt Girdles. I fell over in the bathroom and started laughing hysterically.

I opened the door a crack and handed it back to them. Someone handed me another rubber girdle, this one presumably used to strap equine fetal monitors to the bellies of the mares they breed to make Budweiser Clydesdales.

This worked. I took a look at myself in the bathroom mirror and fell over laughing again.

Pam the Midwife and the labor nurse exchanged glances. “We’re probably going to send you home, but we’ll just check to see.”

If you don’t know what “checking to see” entails, this is for the best. Continue to keep your legs closed and aim them away from any latex-gloved index fingers.

They checked to see. I tried not to hit the ceiling too hard, lest I disturb the ICU on the floor above and set some poor Schmoe flatlining.

“Five centimeters.” They seemed very, very surprised.

“Five centimeters? Isn’t that good?” asked David.

“We just don’t see a lot of women laughing at five centimeters.”

I was bad-ass. Bad-ass! These hips are made for birthin’ and that’s just what they’ll do, one of these days these hips ARE GONNA BIRTH ALL OVER YOU.

I oofed a few extra times to make sure they wouldn’t send me home. “Can I get in the Jacuzzi now?”

“You sure can.” Pam the Midwife smiled and led me down the hall to a huge, dimly lit room with a massive shiny white tub. “Here you go.”

I fell madly in love with Pam the Midwife.

I pulled out my big sporty water bottle and took a deep breath. I did not have a chance to spout a birth plan with Sophie, and I was determined to be a Birth Planner, if just for five minutes before someone jammed a pair of forceps up my hoo-ha.

I showed Pam the Midwife my water bottle and began my rehearsed Nerd Girl speech. “See? An hour ago, the water level was here, and now it is here. I plan to continue hydrating, so that IV fluids will not be necessary. I am prepared to sign a waiver—”

“That’s fine. Here’s the tub.”

“Because I have a serious and debilitating IV phobia that colored my entire first childbirth experience in a very traumatic way—”

“Here’s how you work the jets.” Pam the Midwife fiddled with the controls. Water gushed into the tub.

I had read the books. I had seen the birthing tubs. I had seen the birthing tubs occupied by two types of women: embarrassed-looking women wearing wet T-shirts, and bad-ass naked women.

I had come this far. I was already slightly bad-ass for hitting five centimeters with no assistance except for the moral support of my washing machine. I was going all the way.

Nerd Girl had to announce to the room that she was going all the way. The room was only occupied by David and Pam the Midwife and the lovely blue-eyed labor nurse, but still. I Had a Proclamation of Bad-Assity to Make, and it went something like

Hear ye, hear ye, forsooth, I will hereby be removing my clothing, yea, verily

and then continued along the lines of

Here I go. I’m taking them all off. Right now. In several short moments I will be wearing nothing but this moonstone necklace that my mother gave me, which is reported to ease the pains of childbirth, and my Adidas flip-flops from the Y. I wear these at the Y. I did. When I used to swim. I am not planning on swimming at this time. I am stripping right now because I have seen the T-shirted women in the birthing tubs, and it looks very, very wrong. I will not be one of those women. I will be naked. Am I naked yet?

“No.”

“Now I am. You have seen this before. Have you seen this before? Of course you have seen this before. All of you. In your own way. With your own people. In your case, me—”

“You can get in the tub now.”

“Okay.”

Three in the morning? Three-thirty? Somewhere around this point, Father Time the deadbeat dad took a cigarette break and left us to fend for ourselves. The Jacuzzi helped. It definitely helped. In the way that a tourniquet would be a welcome approach to the bloody, spurting stump of your just-sawed-in-half leg. As in, it’s not a bad way to go, but it doesn’t really solve the problem.

Not so much fun at this point. But of course, you knew that. Even those of you who don’t know about checking to see knew that.

I forgot I was bad-ass. I wandered about on my knees in the Jacuzzi, mooing softly and wondering whose fault it would be if I pooed in the tub. It is possible that my husband touched me, as one might reach out a finger to stroke a sick pet hamster who’s clearly a goner. But it didn’t really stick.

Several times, I heaved myself out of the tub and padded my full-moon self to the private bathroom that was also part of the deal, so concerned was I that I would poo on the floor. Mooing and worrying about pooing. Much of this.

I heard Pam pop her head in. She had been leaving David and me alone, for the most part. I didn’t actually hear this conversation, but David told me about it afterwards, and I liked it so much, I decided to include it here. Again, my rice paddy, my wombat.

“She’s in the bathroom,” David said.

“I’m not worried. She’s doing great,” said Pam. “She’s really cruising along.”

At the time, I would have disagreed vehemently with her assessment of the situation, as I was hanging headfirst off the loo, quite certain that my body was not equipped to handle the stunning and profound UUURRRRRGHHness of it all.

David knocked tentatively on the door, fearing violating the single, inviolable tenet of our marriage: absolutely no pooing in each other’s presence.

“I think we’re way beyond that now,” I said.

He knelt by me. As bad as a mirror. I know I was gray in the face because he promptly turned gray in the face and began trembling.

“Very bad,” I said. “Verrrrrry. Not good. Dying.”

“You…want to get back in the tub?”

“I will poo in the tub. I will poo on their floor. I can’t go anywhere. Urrrgh. All very bad. Very bad. Urrrrrrghhh. Oooooh.”

David, at a complete loss, grabbed a hand towel and threw it around my neck. Think Rocky.

It was a sweet gesture, one of the sweetest I’d ever witnessed. I still knew that death was imminent, but I would go out looking like a prize fighter, and that was something.

“Urrrghh. Ooof. Scared. Very scared. OOOOOOF.”

The nice labor nurse stuck her head in the bathroom. “Is she pushing? Are you pushing on the toilet?”

“Don’t. Know. What. I’m. Doing. OOOOOF. URRRGH.”

“No, no, don’t push! Pam! She’s pushing on the toilet!”

Pam the Midwife rushed in. She and the labor nurse proceeded to drag me off the pot and over to the hospital bed, my hand towel still flapping about my neck.

“No, please, don’t, I’m going to poo on your floor, and I won’t be able to clean it up for a while—”

They checked to see. One flight above me, poor Mr. Schmoe kicked the bucket while his relatives shook their fists at the floor.

“Please don’t do that. I don’t want to have to poo on you or your things. Please. Please.”

“It’s not poo. That’s your baby. She’s here.”

The labor nurse grabbed my left hand. David grabbed my right. Pam set up shop in the only other sensible place. She kept calling for a doctor to come and oversee things, but everything was quiet in the hall.

“I’m scared,” is what I am sure I said to the labor nurse. This is as verbatim as it gets.

“I know. But you can do this.”

I whimpered. “It hurts.” Understatement is an elegant choice for any occasion.

“I know. But this is a good kind of hurt—useful pain, pain that you can really do something with.” Not verbatim, but as close as I can get. I got the drift. I fell madly in love with her, too.

Four pushes. Exploding [far, far too much information] that got a big laugh from the peanut gallery. And then, there she was.

How about that.

No meds, no IVs, no poo on the floor. Seven pounds, five ounces, but we didn’t find that out until later, as this was not a weights-and-measures sort of establishment. Happy Apgars, and then the still unnamed and very pink baby girl was on my chest, blinking. Time stubbed out his cigarette and snuck back in the room: the clock read 4:56. November 16th. A good day to have a baby girl.

A day later, on the way home from the hospital, I said to David, “I’m going to be talking about this for a long time, I’m just warning you. That was the least half-assed thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”

I can’t tell you if she cried at four minutes to five in the morning. All I thought at the time was, Perfect. Just perfect.

Happy second birthday, my sparkling feisty crackling fiery howling rascally snuggling Hannah-Hattie Belle. You’re driving me crazy right now—I can’t lie, kid—but I would miss you something fierce if you’d never come along. And that’s a fact.