“Why don’t you come around front now, Mike,” says Leah. Mom takes my place at Anneliese’s shoulders. I’m feeling relatively calm, and thinking clearly enough to actually recall something from one of the books Anneliese had me read: OK, yes, this is the part where it is important for me to maintain eye contact with Anneliese, to pay attention to her breathing, and I should…
“Would you like to hold the baby’s head?”
Fhuzawhaaa?!?!
But yes! There it is, the head crowning already. Leah’s hands are strong and steady as she guides mine down to the slimy little skullcap that fits perfectly to my palm. Leah is coaching Anneliese to push between contractions, but the coaching doesn’t last for long, because the head is rapidly emerging, and what I will remember forever is the fierceness of my beautiful wife as she made that final push, her teeth set, her animal cry and her blue, blue eyes locked dead onto mine and suddenly the baby was out and in my hands beneath the water.
From my reading about water births, I know there is no rush, but looking down through the water at the creature in my hands, instinct takes over and I try to lift it to air. Anneliese’s eyes pop wide. “Hey, that’s still attached,” she says. The baby is still submerged. I hear Leah’s voice, calmer, gentler: “It’s fine, it’ll be OK, just wait,” and she presses my hands back down.
I’m only half OK with this. I trust Leah and her apprentice, and I know Anneliese is at ease, but there is a mighty strong part of me that wants that baby above the waves and drawing oxygen. When Leah finally nods, I hand the baby—more carefully this time, with an eye to the cord—up to Anneliese, and she takes it to her breast with an ineffable motherly oh! and then the slimy blue bundle cuts loose with a wail in the outraged key of life and I feel a flush of relief.
Donna brought Amy up the stairs just as the baby cleared the water. Now Anneliese turns the infant to verify what she has felt, and yes, we have a little girl. “You’ve got a little sister, Amy,” she says, and any trace of trepidation washes away in the wide smile that breaks across Amy’s face. I’m tickled about this. For months Amy has been saying she wants a sister, and then very dutifully tacking on, “but a brother would be good too.” So it is wonderful to give her the gift of a sister.
I move back around behind Anneliese and now we are all gathered: Leah kneeling beside the tub in her scrub top and gloved hands, the apprentice also in gloves and wearing her Midwifery Today T-shirt, my mom standing smiling in her long skirt, Donna and Jaci in the stairwell leaning over the rail, Amy still in her wood-gathering sweatshirt with one arm around me, and there at the center of it all, Anneliese holding the baby to her breast. Sunlight is streaming through the window, unimaginably bright to the baby I suppose, even behind her squeezed-tight eyes.
We linger around the tub. Donna kneels beside me and greets her new granddaughter. Mom tells the story of how when I was born I scuffed my nose during passage, and when the nurse—a battleship matron—dangled me for all to see, Mom took one look at my abraded schnozz, laughed, and said, “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer!” at which point the matron drew me back protectively and gave Mom a stern talking-to.
I palpate the strong pulse of the cord. Jaci circles the tub taking photographs. In this digital age we get to check them out right away, and I am surprised to see Anneliese and I both have flushed, rosy red cheeks. Amy watches closely as the baby tries to suckle, and I am happily flabbergasted at the sight of the infant’s lips twisting reflexively toward the target. In time Leah clamps the cord, and I am surprised at the tough feel of it when the shears cut through.
When Anneliese is ready, we move to the bedroom. It is a walk of maybe ten feet. The midwife’s apprentice has the baby wrapped in a cloth and dangling from a spring scale. She’s squinting at the markings and trying to get a reading. “Eight pounds? Or eight pounds one ounce?” I jump right in: “Make it eight!” Round numbers, you see. Easier to remember. Anneliese’s sister Kira has arrived, and joins my mother, Donna, and Jaci in the room. Amy is sprawled on the bed, head propped, watching the midwife rewrap the baby. I wonder what Amy will take from this moment, cupped as she is in a strong half circle of women observing new life.
I hike out to update Mills. He’s in the saggy green chair nursing his Big Gulp, reading the papers grandpa-style, each section neatly folded and stacked beside the chair as it’s finished. I suppose he can tell just from my face that things have gone fine, but I have to say so anyway.
“Everything’s 10–2,” I announce. Old-school emergency radio code. We learned it together twenty years ago. “10–2” means everyone’s safe and everything’s OK.
If Mills had grinned any bigger he’d have sprained his ears. He stood up, grabbed my hand, and shook it good.
He walks to the house with me. Climbs the stairs, says a quick, gentle hello to Anneliese, peeks at the baby, and takes his leave. At the top of the stairs, he stops. “Need anything?” “Nope,” I say. And away he goes. Among the bedrock gifts of time are friendships expressible in five syllables or less.
When Anneliese gave birth to Amy, there were no afterglow moments—torn and hemorrhaging, she went straight to surgery. Today she has a small tear but instead of surgery another local midwife drives out to the house and sews her up right there on our own blankets. As I hold Anneliese’s hand while the sutures are placed, I am grateful that we have been allowed this gentler transition. When the repair is complete, there is brief happy chatter. Then someone hands the baby back to Anneliese. Amy snuggles in between us, and we—we four—are left in quiet.
By dusk everyone has cleared out and left us alone in our old house. A local man who came here turkey hunting once told me his grandfather was born between these walls, and I try to imagine the birth scene then. No blue tub, I think, as I unspool the garden hose and siphon the water down the laundry room drain. Amy helps me break the tub down and scrub it clean while Anneliese and the baby rest. Donna has made food for supper and several prepared meals for the days ahead, and in the fridge I see food containers left by my mom. Leah stayed to do several rounds of vital signs and assessments of Anneliese and the baby, and set us up with a bedside checklist of our own, including a sheet of paper listing every imaginable perinatal complication broken down in two categories: “Yellow Flags” and “Red Flags.” I dared not read it, but I kept it close. Before she departed, Leah left a large jar of homemade bran muffin batter in the refrigerator. Donna baked a batch, and I thought it was a fine thing to be given the gift of a house filled with the smell of fresh baking.
Being in our own home on this, the first night of our child’s life, is comforting, but without the official interruption of a hospital trip I am left with a formless sense of unreality—up the stairs we came without a baby, and now looky here. It’s a soft-focus Shazam! Naturally, mingled with the glow in our hearts there is some trepidation, but at 10:45 p.m. the child poops. I take this as an affirmation of life.
At midnight, she poops again.
In the morning there is snow on the ground.
Leah and her apprentice return the following day to perform the newborn screen, and when they make the foot imprints to accompany the birth certificate, we get a taste of exactly what we have unleashed in this world. Unhappy with being dangled feetfirst in the air, the baby skips past crying and rockets straight to the furthest purple fringe of outrage. Such blaring. Not howling, not wailing, but a full-on sustained brass note fit to raise a regiment. Golly. It sounds like a blowout in the bugle factory. Today when Leah leaves, she reinforces something she has been telling us since we first met with her: Keep the week following the birth for yourself. Let the mother rest. No outside visitors. Not even well-wishers. It seems extreme, but we soon learn what precious advice it is. Donna stays to make meals the first couple of days, then she and Amy leave to visit relatives. Anneliese and I spend every day together. Nothing but us and the little one, for a week. We don’t answer the phone. I stay out of the office and don’t check e-mail. We learn the rhythms of the
baby. Change diapers. Celebrate the glorious day of transition when the baby’s poop changes from black to yellow.
It isn’t a vacation by any stretch. There are some concerns early on—the baby is a shade jaundiced (Donna fixes that by sunning her in a chair beside the window), she has trouble with sucking (failing to establish, as I come to learn, a proper “latch”—what an apt application of the term!), and I am on the phone to Leah more than once this week with concerns about the comfort of both baby and mom.
There is also the matter of naming the child. We’ve been waffling for months. While Anneliese does her best to invest the decision with spirituality and ancestral reverence, I am largely concerned with scansion and assonance and the potential for naughty playground rhymes. Furthermore, it has always seemed to me that a child’s name should be reducible to one crisp syllable for what I call the “freeze-factor,” to be used when you wish to arrest the progress of the child in a precipitous manner, like when he is about to stick his fingers in the fan or she is sneaking out the bedroom window, in which case you want a name you can crack like a whip. “Pollyanna!” for instance, has no freeze factor. It got to be a bedtime game, the name list: Anneliese would read her latest choices, and one by one I would bat them down. Then she would do the same for me. There were some doozies, but I will not reveal the list of rejected monikers, because somewhere out there is someone else who dreams of naming a child Ezekiel Storm. Zeke! (I practiced.) On day five or six of our young child’s life it becomes a matter of some embarrassment, and so we take the form the government provides, and—in honor of a family member—write “Jane.” Then I try it out: “Jane!” The kid doesn’t flinch.
Within the hour of Jane’s birth, I snapped a photo of Amy holding her newborn sister. It wasn’t posed or arranged, I just pushed the button. When I looked at it later, it took my breath away. Without realizing it, I had captured Amy just as she inclined her head to kiss her sister’s brow. Her arms encircled the baby, her eyes were closed, and her lips were just brushing the crown of Jane’s head. For her part, Jane is asleep in a nest of blankets, her chin resting on the curled knuckles of her left hand. I stare and stare at the photograph, my eyes wet. I am feeling blessed, blessed. But I think too of how so much of this world is the equivalent of busted concrete and twisted rebar, and I am jolted at what parents are charged with, and how limited our powers may be. Thankfully, Amy has a way of perforating my direst pretensions and lightening my worldview through the application of humor, intentional or not. Shortly after the beatific image was taken, she phoned her father Dan in Colorado, and fairly busting with pride, announced, “Well, you’re a dad again!”
One lives in the glow of the miracle of new life and then rather harshly discovers that the electric bill is due again. We had our wonderful cocooned week, and even in the wake of that I was able to skirt deadlines and remain mostly home, but now real life presses back in. I have a raft of backlogged writing deadlines, volumes of unanswered e-mails, the usual stack of bills to pay, and I am returning to the road soon. I have always loved the road, and am still eager to feel the wheels beneath me, but nowadays my heart turns homeward sooner than in the past.
We plan to get the pigs when I return from this next round of travel, so I’m trying to finish up the pen. I’ve got it mostly enclosed with panels, but my brother Jed has recommended that I run a strand of electric fence all around the perimeter about six inches off the ground. The panels will hold the pigs fine, he says, but they are capable of generating great upward force with their snoot and shoulders, and if they get to rooting around the base, they’ll boost the panels, posts and all. He grins when he tells me this, and you can pretty much picture him chasing pigs.
First I have to clear the way. I put most of the panels up when everything was still winter-dead. Now the nettles and burdock are knee-high. I don’t own a scythe or a grass whip, so I have at them with a hoe, which is not pretty but gets the job done. I’m slashing away like a grass-stained Sweeney Todd when Amy ambles down. “Oooh, nettles!” she says. “Yum!” She watched Anneliese drink nettle tea throughout the pregnancy, and the two of them regularly collect nettles and bake them in our lasagna. This is all a reflection of our friend Lori the wild foods expert. Lori has taken her daughters and Amy on several foraging expeditions, and as a result Amy is forever eating dandelions straight from the yard or bringing me fistfuls of wood sorrel. The wood sorrel is evocative (as a kid I plucked it from a damp patch out where the sump pump drained) but a little too sour for my taste. The back of my hands and forearms are sweaty and tingling with nettle-sting, so it’s nice to have Amy remind me of its happier attributes.
Once I’ve cleared away the foliage, I begin placing insulators. To save money on posts, I planned to secure the insulators directly to the panels, but first thing I discover is there is no way to do this without seriously modifying each insulator. I do a quick calculation of time and gas money versus the price of a bag of plastic insulators and decide to forge ahead. The required modifications involve profound misuse of a tree pruner, but it works (if necessity is the mother of invention, I am its ham-fisted stepchild), and before long I am placing the insulators while Amy follows along behind, happily hand-tightening each threaded retainer ring. During this time our old friend Mister Big Shot reappears, squawking and flapping around the perimeter. Amy rolls her eyes. I quietly hope she will learn to recognize similar chest-puffing inanity in the males of her own species and react with the same disdain. It’s a long sail from six years old to safe harbor.
By the time we get all the wire strung and snug, it’s nigh on suppertime and I decide I’ll hook the power up another day. Returning the tools and fencing equipment to the shed, I see my beloved International pickup sitting over in the corner. The carburetor is leaking. I need to fix it. Another day. I notice the lawn needs mowing. Another day. I’d like to fence off a big chunk of the yard and get sheep. Another day. Through the screen, I can hear Jane blaring.
We’ve been slowly emerging back into the world as a family. Relatives begin stopping by, and for the first time Anneliese’s grandmother holds the baby. Grandma Scherer is ninety-four years old and has only recently traded world travel for the Internet. A preacher’s wife who raised five children while holding down a teaching job after her husband died young, Grandma is one of those women who makes you feel sluggardly. When I leave the room to get the camera, I return to find Grandma rocking Jane and singing a lullaby in the original German.
Nearly once a day now someone will hold up Jane, look at me, and say, “So—what do you think of the baby?” and what I want to say and sometimes do is how above all the arrival of this tot has only expanded the love I feel for my wife. The vision of her pushing fiercely, then the sound that rose from her when first she held that baby close—there is something of an eye-opening ear-tweak in there for a man. I remember thinking, lioness.
Now, however, she is drawn and pale. After months of pregnancy-induced insomnia, she had been longing to sleep. And indeed, she has been able to sleep at night when the baby isn’t waking her, but during the day, during those times when she is desperate for a catch-up nap, she simply can’t doze off. Other mothers are giving her plenty of advice, and at one point she says, “If one more woman tells me to ‘sleep when baby sleeps’…”
Sometimes to keep the house quiet during the day when Anneliese is trying yet again to sleep I strap Jane into a red quilted baby sling Anneliese’s mother used to hold her babies. I checked the label and it was made in the 1970s. It has clunky stainless steel clips. But it works great, and I am able to write for long stretches with the baby asleep against my chest. Recent research has cast some doubt on the benefits of playing classical music for unconscious infants, but I have my own ideas, and today while she snoozes, we are edifying ourselves with a rotating mix of Dwight Yoakam, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Mark Chesnutt, Greg Brown, Loretta Lynn (for spirit), and Iris DeMent (for unvarnished holiness). And in the interest of imbuing more ineffable femini
st sensibilities, I pulled Cinderella’s Long Cold Winter and replaced it with Shawn Colvin’s A Few Small Repairs. Jane sleeps peacefully, rousing only to move her lips and make a noise somewhere between snoring and drooling best described as snurgling.
Not so long ago I stepped through the front door to find Amy in the middle of the kitchen unrolling a flag-sized poster of me. It was from a book tour stop somewhere back along the line. My visage was full-color and big as a cheese platter. Amy held the poster unfurled before her, and I admit I savored the moment right up until she turned and laid it faceup on the bottom of the guinea pig cage. I am well aware that on a scale of one to Britney, I peg the fame meter roughly three notches below the lieutenant governor of Maine, but even so this was a severe calibration. “WHAAAAT?!?!” I said, theatrically feigning great dismay. Amy giggled and scattered wood chips over my gap-toothed mug.
Now it’s another cage-cleaning day. When Amy finishes, I help her place the guinea pig back inside with his bowls and purple plastic igloo. After securing the lid we return the cage to its customary spot in a corner of the living room and go outside to check the progress of the seeds we planted in the cold frame. The radishes and lettuce came up two days ago, and today we find the spinach sprouted. We’re in a run of cool breezy days but the sun is out and condensation has formed on the glass, so I prop it open to let it breathe. Amy and I meander across the yard and down a slight slope to a lane formed between a dense row of spruce trees and the south-side wall of the pole barn. The spruce block the breeze, allowing the steel to gather heat from the sun. We press our shoulder blades against flat spots between the vertical corrugations and slide down to sit and soak up the warmth. The buffer zone of spruce muffles the rest of the world. “There was a place like this out behind Grandpa’s barn,” I tell Amy, thinking of a nook between the silos where I loved to hunker as a child. There were weeds and a patch of sand. I liked to sift the sand through my fingers, the flowing tan grains speckled with bits of bright green shingle grit dislodged from the barn roof by generations of rain. I tell Amy I sought the silo spot on early spring or late fall days when you need a windbreak if you want to feel the sun.
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