by Sara Connell
“I certainly hope so,” I said, looking at the clock on the wall.
My mother brought up the issue of a C-section.
“We’re still very optimistic for a vaginal birth,” Dr. Gerber said, as if this were an athletic event and she and Dr. Socol were sports commentators.
“We do whatever we can to avoid unnecessary surgery,” Dr. Socol said, giving the boilerplate answer we’d already heard from the staff.
The baby’s heart rate was strong, and my mother’s blood pressure and vitals were steady. She continued to be free from contraction pain, thanks to the epidural, but was starting to show signs of fatigue. Her hands shook now when she reached for the ice pitcher. She’d mostly stopped drinking water. I worried about her energy; she hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours.
“When does surgery become necessary?” I asked.
“When the life of the mother or baby is endangered, or there are no other alternatives. We see people go eighteen, even twenty-four, hours and then kick into full labor,” Dr. Gerber said. Then, having completed her pep talk, she left the room.
“You’d think being sixty-one would give you some special treatment,” Bill said once she’d left.
“Seriously,” my mother said.
The sun rose orange in the sky. Streaks of light poured into the room, so much that we lowered two of the shades. The hours unfolded at a protracted pace. Each time someone came to check on my mother’s progress, they said the same thing: “More Pitocin. We’ll check in again two hours.”
“It’s not as if we can perform the C-section ourselves,” my mother said, though I thought I could hear wistfulness in her voice.
It was eleven in the morning, and no one besides my mother had slept for more than an hour during the night. We laughed at things that weren’t funny: the stick-figure icons on the TV menu; the terrible production quality of the educational videos on the in-house birthing channel.
Punchiness gave way to impatience. Adrenaline and lack of sleep distorted my reality. The hallways started to look elongated and bendy, like a fun house’s. My reflection in the mirror looked unfamiliar.
Bill’s parents stopped by again to show support. Ellen and Chris returned after an entire next day of work, incredulous that my mother was still laboring. I felt claustrophobic. The jovial atmosphere I’d enjoyed in the room the night before now felt distracting. I felt even further away from the baby and grasped to make some connection. The staff’s lack of urgency or concern began to feel robotic and disturbing. Part of me questioned whether our baby was even still inside my mother: Would he ever actually be brought out, or would we continue indefinitely in this limbo?
We won’t go later than midnight,” Dr. Gerber said when she arrived to check on us again. “If you haven’t gone into full labor by then, we’ll move to cesarean.” At least we had an end point now. My mother and I had been in the hospital for thirty-three hours. She’d been in induced labor for twenty-eight. The next scheduled check-in was at 9:00 PM.
I felt a resurgence of energy. My mother encouraged Bill and me to go out for something to eat. She felt comfortable with my father sitting with her and would welcome an hour to rest. Based on the way the past check-ins had gone, none of us anticipated anything much would change at nine.
I wasn’t sure if I could eat, but my stomach rumbled in response to the idea of food and I reached for my coat. My sister said she would join us and suggested a sushi place one block north. We bundled ourselves into coats, hats, and gloves and walked into the night. The sky was inky black, and our breath looked like white smoke in the air. The wind hit like a wall. It was so strong that we had to hold the side of the building to stay upright.
I felt strange being outside the hospital. Prentice had become an insulated pod. Out on the street and even amid the cozy warmth and tinkling of ceramic spoons against bowls of soup at the restaurant, I felt thrust into the ether.
We set our phone timers for eight fifty, giving ourselves ten minutes to return to the room. “No need to run back, though,” Bill said, eyeing his phone. “I’m sure they’re going to tell us we’re going until midnight.”
While we ate, my sister described the cesarean, a procedure she’d participated in during her obstetrics rotation.
“The ones I’ve seen are pretty fast,” she said. “It only takes maybe ten minutes to get the baby out.”
I was usually the one engrossed in medical discussions with my sister while Bill reminded us such conversations tended to ruin a meal. Tonight, however, Bill was riveted and I hummed a song in my head. I didn’t want to hear too much detail. As much as I endeavored to focus on this as a new experience, images of my own cesarean pushed themselves forward when I thought about the operating room.
I didn’t care to add any visuals to those already flooding my mind. I turned to the side and saw a wall of water running down a large slab of slate near the entrance to the restaurant. The fixture reminded me of the water feature in the solarium of our house. It was likely our baby was going to be born via C-section that night, and I was going to do everything in my power to be all there—in the OR and in life—for him.
“I’m more worried about them continuing the labor than I am about the C-section,” my sister was saying. “Thirty-two hours is long, even for a young person.”
I looked around the room for our waitress, with her long shiny hair and pressed blue-and-white kimono. She was taking a long time bringing the check. I eyed my phone, wondering if I should run back to the room and let Bill finish and pay.
“There’s no hurry,” Bill said. “I’m sure we’ll go until midnight.”
I tapped my foot under the table and tried to restrain myself until the check came.
At three minutes past nine, we rounded the corner toward the nurses’ station and I saw a mob of bodies outside the entrance to our room. The door swung open, and more doctors and nurses in lab coats and industrial scrubs swarmed the room like bees.
“Oh my god,” I said, racing toward the door.
I pushed through the crowd and slid on the polished floor. The room was unrecognizable. Glaring lights shot down from the ceiling, and Dr. Gerber was standing in scrubs by the head of the bed. At least fifteen people, including the resident who’d been on duty the night before, were moving about, checking monitors, hanging another IV bag.
“We’re going to section,” Dr. Gerber announced, a triumphant smile on her face. My mother was sitting up, radiant.
“It’s time!” my mother said.
A hospital attendant instructed us that we needed to move our things to the postdelivery room on the fourteenth floor. Another barked that whoever was going into the OR needed to change immediately into scrubs.
My body tried to catch up with my cognitive process. We’re going into the OR for a C-section. Our baby was, in fact, finally about to be born.
“This is happening,” Bill said. He grabbed my shoulders from behind. I turned to face him. Years before, the first or second year we lived in England, Bill had awakened me after having a powerful dream. We had only just been married and I was still on the Pill, still years from even trying to start a family.
“I met our child,” Bill said. “She came to me and said, ‘It’s going to be okay, Daddy.’ She took my hand. It didn’t feel like a dream, Sara. She was so real.”
We’d talked about the dream once or twice in the beginning of our fertility endeavors. Sometime after the twins died, though, we’d stopped. Trying to convince ourselves it had been a prophesy or assurance that we would have children became too painful. We had to find a way to move forward knowing that there were no guarantees.
Neither of us had mentioned the dream in a long while, but I thought of it now as we moved toward our son’s birth. I pressed myself against Bill’s chest and squeezed hard. In six years, we’d held to our promise to not turn away from each other. We had never fully lost faith.
“Only one of you can come into the room,” Dr. Gerber said. Bill and I joined my father at the foot of my
mother’s bed. The doctors had been pressing so hard for a vaginal birth that we didn’t even know the hospital protocol for C-sections. I had not really considered that we wouldn’t all be allowed in for the birth. How often did a sixty-one-year-old woman give birth to her own grandchild?
Now, I wanted with all my soul to be in that room. I was sure Bill and my father felt the same.
The three of us cleared more space around my mother’s bed. Around her was the din of a pre-OR circus. I felt a pull inside my own body, a palpable connection not just to the baby, but to my mother as well. I felt a wave of calm. Whatever she decided would be fine. A tall, angular male nurse cut through our circle and extended a set of scrubs. “We need to know who’s coming,” he said. “You need to decide now.”
“Sara,” my mother said, her eyes on mine. “Bring the Great Mother with you.”
I looked at Bill, wanting a moment with him, to find out how he felt. He smiled at me, and the nurse pushed the scrubs against my rib cage.
“Now,” he said. Dr. Gerber called to the team that it was time to move. After the creeping pace of the past thirty-six hours, action felt accelerated.
Bill and my father threw our belongings into bags. I could see Bill almost at the door, his shoulders stooping just a bit under the weight of the large duffel bag and our laptops. I ran to meet him, standing on tiptoe and grabbing the sides of his face so I could kiss him.
“Big picture, right?” I said. It was what we’d said to each other when we’d faced other obstacles or delays. “Big picture” was having our baby.
“Bring him in, Sara. Bring him in safe,” he said.
It wasn’t fair that Bill didn’t get to come with us, but I’d seen the futility of arguing against hospital policy. I swept aside the guilt I felt and pulled the gray scrubs over my clothes. I promised myself I would be in the room for both Bill and myself.
By the time we left the room for the OR, every member of the surgical team was covered top to bottom in gray. We walked en masse down the hallway. The mood of the entourage was focused, as if they were all feeling, with my mother and me, the significance of our mission.
The OR was gleaming and white. Bulbous lights beamed onto the operating table. Michael, the primary anesthesiologist, began to administer pain medication through the same tube used for the epidural. I again tried to untangle myself from memories of my previous visits to the OR.
All I could see of my mother was the strip of her eyes between her surgical cap and gown. I was afraid to ask if she was scared, but I forced myself. In what she was about to do, I believed my job was to support her and be present for the birth of our child.
She only nodded at first, yes to feeling scared.
Later she told me she was praying: Please don’t bring us all this way and leave us.
I squeezed her shoulder.
The surgical team assembled at the base of the bed. A nurse lifted a tall paper sheet and fastened it to a bar, separating my mother’s head and our view from the rest of the room. I heard a loud sucking sound as a machine came to life. Dr. Gerber called commands to her team. Michael went to work, flicking his finger on the tube of an IV that would deliver numbing medication to my mother’s body. A nurse pulled a chair next to my mother’s head and told me to sit beside her.
As my mother answered Michael’s questions about what, if anything, she could feel below her waist, my brain finally worked out the calculation that I had been resisting for six years: two years of acupuncture, six IVF cycles, three hundred injections, two stillbirths, a miscarriage. I bit down on the side of my cheek. It had all led to this moment.
“I’m beginning,” Dr. Gerber announced.
“This is it,” my mother said. I offered up a prayer to the Great Mother.
“Please,” my mother added, “please finish this in joy.”
I began to cry. A tear ran down the side of my mother’s face. Then she jerked and grimaced.
“I’m in,” Dr. Gerber said.
“Does it hurt?” I asked, forcing myself to ask this question.
“No pain,” my mother said. “But I can feel them pulling.”
“Should she be feeling anything at all?”
“You’ll feel slight sensation,” he said. “But no pain. Just before the baby comes out, I am going to tell you to push.”
I squeezed my mother’s shoulder again. Our baby was almost here. As the doctors worked, I pulled my mind into the room, tuning my ears for a specific sound—the one sound I’d been anticipating for the nine months of this pregnancy, for the 208 weeks since the twins had died: our baby’s first cry.
Minutes passed. The operation was taking too long. My sister told us it took only minutes to get to the baby.
I looked pleadingly at Michael.
“Nonemergency C-sections take longer,” he said. “Everything is going well.”
“We’re almost there,” Dr. Gerber said.
Waves of recognition of what was happening broke over me.
“One more minute,” Dr. Gerber called, her voice rising. My brain flooded.
“This is it,” my mother said. “This is the vision—you and me together, doing this.”
I cried harder.
“Okay, Kristine,” Michael said. “Get ready. In just one minute I’m going to tell you to push.”
“Ready now,” Dr. Gerber said. “I see him.” I felt as if I had been lifted up to the ceiling, stretched beyond my body. I held on to my mother’s shoulder and the side of her arm.
My breath became rapid and shallow. The room began to feel otherworldly. I locked eyes with my mother and for one second I saw something beyond our bodies, this arrangement of mother and daughter. For a moment, she and I melded and I saw only one.
I came back to my own body, buzzing with electricity. I wondered if other parents felt this sensation. It was if something had reached inside me and swirled its fingers through my essence. Some part of who I had been was no more. Who I would be now, as a mother, was yet to be revealed.
“He’s here,” someone called out. I hunched over the chair, coiled like a spring. I strained for the sound. The seconds felt stretched and hung in the air. I sensed movement but still I heard nothing. My fingers on my mother’s shoulder went white. Where was the cry?
Then it came, his first rasping sound—a wonderfully strong, hoarse little voice that filled the room. More cries came, and I heard them like the crescendo of a symphony. I saw an arm and a foot being lifted and a wriggling form being handed to the pediatric team. I reached for him, even though I’d been told he would not be passed to me until he’d been checked and cleaned off.
At the side table where the pediatric team worked I saw his foot, an exact replica of Bill’s father’s foot: wide in the middle and big, with long toes. That was all I could see of his body through the cluster of doctors and nurses: his grandfather’s foot, in miniature, on his long but tiny leg.
The team bent over our baby, moving him, poking, producing another cry. Every sound was an affirmation, a trumpet. I sat on my hands; I wanted to go to him so badly.
My mother looked agitated. She said later she felt disoriented from the medication. “I could not relax until I saw you hold him,” she said later, in the recovery room. “That’s the image I’ve held to through all of this.”
“They’ll bring him to you soon,” Michael said, attempting to soothe us.
A nurse called out stats as the team continued to surround the baby.
“Born: baby boy, February ninth, 9:47 PM.”
“Seven pounds, three ounces.”
“Eighteen inches.”
“Is he okay?” I finally called out.
“He is perfect,” the pediatric nurse said, swaddling him in a hospital-issue blanket with blue and pink stripes. “He’s just a little pale. We’re going to keep him under the lamp for another minute.”
I waited, hardly able to contain myself. The doctors had begun the restorative part of the cesarean and were now putting my mother’s
insides back in position, one layer at a time. Every few minutes she cringed as the doctors tugged or applied the next row of suturing. I tried hard not to picture the activity on the other side of the curtain. I placed my hand on the top of my mother’s head and focused my attention on comforting her.
Finally, the pediatric nurse checked something on a clipboard and began moving toward me. “Stay where you are,” she said as I half-rose from my chair. “I’m bringing him to you.”
I turned in the chair, wanting to keep some contact with my mother as the baby was brought to us. The nurse lowered him gently so we both could see. “Look at all his light hair,” she said, and she placed the baby into my arms. A low, tear-soaked moan came out of my mouth. I kept him as the nurse had placed him and sank into the chair.
He was awake! He looked up, blinking his eyes in the glare of the lights. The room became a vacuum for a moment—all I could see was myself and this baby, my baby. I rolled these words on my tongue for the first time, tasting their sweetness. His eyes were the color of blue sky over the ocean, a shade close to my father’s and mine. My mother said I had been seven pounds, five ounces, at birth. It was hard to imagine that life started this small.
I turned more toward my mother. I held my baby firmer now, securing my arms under his little body, cradling his neck in the crease of my arm. The baby-blue knit cap they’d placed on his head kept scrunching upward and threatened to fall off. He kept his eyes open for a longer stretch, looking up at me, I imagined, and then to the sides, around the room.
“He’s just like you were when you came out,” my mother said. “Alert and looking all around. He is so beautiful, Sara. He’s perfect.”
I looked down at my son and agreed.
“This is what I wanted,” she said, closing her eyes. When she opened them, tears streamed down the side of her face. “You with the baby—your baby—in your arms.”
I was crying again, fat tears falling onto the swaddle blanket.
My mother had often lamented the way many spiritual teachers talked about spiritual awareness coming only through experiences of great pain. “Kind of invalidates those of us who haven’t had some kind of big trauma,” she said.