Possibilities - Part Ten
Yes, here we are, the final part of this story - although there may be an epilogue if anyone is interested in one. It's been wonderful to write this story, despite what's been going on in my own personal life, and I have to say that the support of my readers has been a huge comfort to me.
As far as my own fertility goes, this last cycle was unfortunately another failure, and so now I will be going through IVF. It's been a bumpy road, emotionally, and I'm trying to be positive now without getting my hopes up too much.
Okay, now on to what you came here for!
X.
Four weeks before her due date, Allison gets serious about names. She’d been moving the name book around the house for the past six months, but now there were actually post-it notes sticking out from between some pages and a highlighter clipped onto the front cover. While lying in bed one night, the two of you had happened to start discussing naming styles and you were grateful that yours seemed to mesh.
After meeting one too many atrociously named children in the clinic, you each have particular dislikes. Your pet peeve is made up names like the ridiculous Navaeh. Parents’ penchant for adding Mac to anything and calling it a name ranks a close second. Apparently those people don’t care about the fact that their precious little princess MacKenzie is carrying around a name that means “son of Kenneth”. Allison admits that she gets a bit affronted every time a girl with a masculine name is brought into the clinic. As if a woman couldn’t possibly be taken seriously unless her name is something like Ryan or Elliot or Jaymes.
Unfortunately, despite being on the same wavelength as far as definite “no’s” are concerned, you still haven’t picked out a definite winner. She’s tossed out names like Eleanor, Ava, Kathleen and Margaret, and while you don’t hate any of them, none of them feel quite right.
After another night of watching television while she periodically blurts out a name, only to have it shot down, Allison gives up in a huff and tosses the book into your lap.
“Okay, you find one you like and then let me know,” she tells you.
Your mouth twists into a grimace. This was not on your agenda for the evening.
Reluctantly you open the book, thumb through a few pages and then flip back to the beginning.
“Alice,” you say a few minutes later.
“Al-you just picked a name off the first page!” she says indignantly.
“No, I didn’t, I like the name Alice.”
“Alice? Really?”
“Yeah, really, what’s wrong with Alice?”
“Isn’t it kind of close to Allison?” she asks with a cocked eyebrow.
“Maybe that’s why I like it,” you grumble, and Allison looks shyly pleased and a blush touches her cheeks.
“Alice is a nice name,” she accedes, but if you get to pick first name, then I get dibs on middle name.”
You look at her with suspicion before agreeing.
“Blythe,” she says with a determined jut of her chin.
An amused smile curls at the corners of your mouth.
“You realize that the kid is already going to be spoiled silly,” you tell her.
She doesn’t agree or disagree, she just smiles at you with a hint of the smugness you’ve grown to accept at times. Then she grabs the baby name book from you and walks across the room to the bookcase and squeeze it in between your battered old college dictionary and a volume of John Donne’s poetry. Your daughter has a name.
Three weeks before Allison’s due date, two things happen. Your mother closes on a house ten minutes away, and Sarah throws Allison a surprise baby shower. Naturally the shower is not really much of a surprise. You’ve known about it for weeks, and the information was wheedled out of you when she held your iPod hostage. Apparently your wife doesn’t like surprises.
Your mother, of course, is invited to the shower, and you are not. No, you and Wilson are kicked out and told to come back after five with a Christmas tree. Five o’clock is five hours away, and getting a tree will take you approximately fifteen minutes, so the two of you head back to your place to watch football.
Wilson has turned into a total girl over the past five years, and he ends up spending a lot longer than fifteen minutes picking out what he calls the perfect tree. You remind him that he’s Jewish and that the tree is not even going to be in his house, but your words fall on deaf ears. It’s close to six-thirty by the time you get back to the Wilsons’ house with a six foot evergreen strapped to the top of Allison’s car.
Allison, Sarah and your mother are in the living room cooing and exclaiming over all of the baby things. It’s sickening in a way, but the stuff is pretty cute. Not that you’ll ever admit that. Your private cache of baby things has grown to include a number of stuffed toys that are supposed to represent various microbes (you’re particularly fond of The Common Cold), a t-shirt featuring a New Orleans jazz club and a onesie with the periodic table across the chest. It’s never too early to make the kid a genius, you figure.
“Look at the carseat!” Allison exclaims to you. “It’s from Sarah and Jimmy.”
It is grey and pink. You glare at Wilson, who holds up his hands.
“Hey, I wanted to go with the orange flames, but you know women.”
You roll your eyes.
Wilson helps you take all of the boxes and bags out to the car, and then after Allison has given a round of hugs and kisses to the Wilson family, you head home with her and your mother. The pregnancy hormones are really making Allison a sentimental girly-girl and it’s a little bit strange. You hope it will wear off after she pops the kid out.
The following day is spent putting up the tree and going over a moving check-list with your mother. She won’t be moving down until the end of January but she’s going to sell some of her furniture and wants to make sure you take anything you want. Before you can even say that you don’t need anything, Allison pipes up requesting your father’s old desk and antique globe.
Your mother looks surprised, but you nod your head and she writes it down. You remember now, that during your vacation you told Allison a few childhood stories, including one about how you used to sneak into your father’s office to sit behind his desk and spin the globe, stopping it with your finger and then running to the atlas to look up whatever country you’d landed on if it was one you hadn’t lived in. It is a bittersweet memory. Your father probably would have been happy to know that you were so interested in things like that, but you were too stubborn to tell him, and he was too stubborn to offer to share them with you without being asked. You think that Alice will like the globe.
Two weeks before Allison’s due date, Christmas arrives right on schedule.
Despite being hugely pregnant, Allison has decorated the house beautifully. It looks like something from one of her Martha Stewart magazines. You started off the month griping about all of the decorations, but that sent Allison hurrying to the bathroom, and you knew she was going there to cry where you wouldn’t see. The feeling of guilt from that incident kept you from making any more negative comments. In a moment of weakness, you even brought home three decorative stockings from a cutesy gift-store near the hospital. When you look at them now, you realize that they are a completely different style - more country kitsch, and less elegant - than everything else, but Allison beamed when you gave them to her and she hung them proudly from the mantle.
The two of you spend Christmas morning in bed with coffee and toast. You figure you’ve got years ahead of you to get up at the crack of dawn and rush to the tree. Allison does waddle out to the living room and bring back your stocking. You can feel an orange shoved into the toe and when you unwrap the rest you find CDs, an iTunes giftcard, and a silver picture frame with a copy of the ultrasound picture.
“You can put her first real picture in there,” she tells you. “I was going to get you one that said ‘Daddy’s Girl’ around the edge but I figured this one had a better chance of actually making it to your desk.”
She’s right about that.
“I didn’t do the stocking thing,” you say.
“That’s okay,” she replies with a smile that lets you know you really are off the hook.
Then she pats your hand and says, “I don’t expect you to go from Grinch to Santa just because I’ve got a bun in the oven.”
Little things like that are what give you some relief from the thought that she’s secretly imagining you turning into Ward Cleaver or Bill Cosby. Homer Simpson is closer to likely.
Still, a little bit of Allison’s sentimentality must be rubbing off on you because you rummage around in your nightstand drawer, pull out a small box and toss it towards her.
“Forgot to wrap that one,” you say.
She looks at you with a mixture of skepticism and pleased surprise. Inside the box is a gold necklace with a simple garnet pendant. It came from the same gift store as the stockings.
“Garnet’s going to be the kid’s birthstone,” you explain. “They had a bunch with cheesy mother and child symbols, but I couldn’t make myself buy them.”
“It’s perfect,” she whispers.
Okay, so maybe you’re slightly above Homer.
Your new bathroom features a walk-in shower big enough for two, for which your leg is eternally grateful. Allison went through a brief period of self-consciousness around the time it started looking like she was smuggling a beach ball under her clothing, but she is past that now and back to showering with you in the mornings.
Most of her extra weight is still in her belly, but her chest has also filled out, and her hips are slightly rounder. She made a vague comment a month ago about hoping her body recovered after pregnancy, which told you she’d probably been obsessing over it for days. You were able to reassure her that you’d find her attractive even with slightly more curves. Your exact words, were nearer to “I’ll still want to jump you even if you keep the boobs and hips,” but they seemed to do the trick. Now she leans against you as you wrap your arms around her and rub a washcloth over the taut skin of her stomach. You are warm and comfortable and content and you haven’t even gotten to the presents under the tree.
On the week before Allison’s due date, she goes into labor.
You are at work and have just finished a diagnostic session and sent Mason off to run a CAT scan on your patient when you get the call.
You are not expecting it. You don’t know why, but you had it in your head that she’d have false labor a few times and then go into full-blown labor sometime after her due date. The idea of her going early had not occurred to you. In fact, you make the mistake of asking if she’s sure it’s not Braxton-Hicks contractions. You have to hold the phone away from her ear when she shouts that she’s been having Braxton-Hicks contractions for weeks and knows the difference between that and real labor and by the way, she’s went to medical school too, in case you forgot.
Then she lets out a horrible groan and you clutch the phone tighter and call her name.
Sarah is the one who answers. They’d been out at lunch when Allison started having contractions and now they’re at your house because Allison insisted on getting her things. She’s had a bag packed for weeks because, unlike you, she considered all possibilities.
You ask how far apart the contractions are and are told that they’re almost fifteen minutes apart, but strong. You want to call an ambulance to pick them up, but realize that makes you sound like a frantic husband, so you just tell Sarah to hurry the hell up and get to the hospital. She’ll probably forgive the swearing.
By the time they arrive, you’ve been pacing around the lobby for fifteen minutes and have called Wilson to make him pace with you. When the sliding doors open to admit your wife, you’re beside her before they have a chance to close. Sarah is on her other side, holding her bag, and you yell at a passing nurse and tell her to bring a damn wheelchair.
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Allison protests, but she is pale and lets herself be situated in the chair without a fight.
Sarah hands you Allison’s bag and says that she’ll come up to see you both when you’re settled in a room. Wilson is grinning from ear to ear, and says he’ll stop by too. Apparently you’re the only one who doesn’t think this is a party. You roll your eyes before rolling Allison towards the elevators.
You already stopped by admitting to get her checked in, so the nurses on the OB floor are ready for you when you arrive. They chat to Allison and try to make small-talk with you. You are definitely not in the mood for small-talk as textbooks-worth of birth complications flash through your mind.
Soon, Allison is in bed in one of the relatively luxurious birthing rooms. It looks more than a bed and breakfast than a hospital room, with a folk-painted armoire holding the television, a cozy rocking chair in the corner, and a daybed covered in a quilt off to one side, presumably for father-to-be. You remain standing, and tap your cane against the floor.
“You know, it could be a while,” Allison tells you. “You may want to get comfortable.”
“You want your music on?” you ask, and she looks at you with surprise.
You fish around in her bag and pull out a CD she burned.
“What, you think I haven’t been paying attention?” you ask, as you put the disk into the player beside the television and try to look offended.
You’ve given her every reason to think that, of course, but you secretly stashed her hypno-birthing DVD into your bag one morning and watched it on your computer at work. You can’t say you think it’ll work better than an epidural, but at least it doesn’t sound as off the wall as some birthing methods. After all, she could have opted for a water birth.
“Thanks,” is all she says before her face contorts into a grimace and her fist crumples the nice smooth blanket over her lap.
“Still fifteen minutes apart?”
“Feels closer to ten,” she replies. “I thought first babies were supposed to take longer to arrive.”
Those words seem to jinx her, because the contractions stay steady at ten minutes apart for the next two hours, and she remains only two centimeters dilated. Her doctor comes and goes, giving a quick look, a pat on the leg and some cheerful, placating words. It’s all you can do not to verbally attack her and the only reason you restrain yourself is because Allison warned you to be nice.
Allison starts trying to convince you to let her go home and labor there, but you refuse. You are taking no chances, not with her life and not with the baby’s. She argues with you, but then a particularly strong contraction steals her breath and then she tells you to turn off the music and turn on a movie.
Another six hours and Allison has progressed to active labor. She’s five centimeters dilated and her contractions are five minutes apart and lasting almost a minute each. Sarah and Wilson have both been by to visit but left after only a few minutes. They went home after you promised to call as soon as the baby arrives. You’ve called your mother and she told you she’ll drive down first thing in the morning. She thinks the baby won’t be coming for a while, but when you look at Allison, you hope she’s wrong. It’s only been eight hours but she’s starting to tire.
“You know, I could fix you up with some good drugs,” you tell her.
She looks at you with mild annoyance. You’ve already been down this road once already.
“No epidural. I’m fine.”
You roll your eyes and pop a Vicodin. At least one of you can be relatively comfortable.
A few minutes later, she decides that she needs to walk, and you limp along beside her, up and down the hallway, feeling completely ineffective. When the contractions start getting stronger, she says she wants to take a hot shower, and you just follow her into the bathroom, biting your tongue to keep from mentioning an epidural again.
When a contraction hits in the shower, and she lets out a short, pained gasp of breath before grabbing the handrail, you feel even more helpless. You hate this feeling, and you realize that a large part of the reason why you keep pushing her to medicate, is selfishness. You can’t stand seeing her in pain. All of your medical knowledge, the fact that billions of women have given birth before her, the fact that her body knows what it’s doing… all of those things mean nothing now as she reaches out and squeezes your hand for support.
“I’m right here,” you reassure her, and that seems to be enough.
You help her back to bed just as a nurse comes in to check on her.
“Looks like you’re in transition,” the nurse says, sunny disposition firmly in place.
“No kidding,” you snap. “She just had two contractions in three minutes.”
The nurse glares at you before saying a few more positive things to Allison.
“You’re supposed to be nice, remember?” Allison says after the nurse has left.
“Sorry, I have a hard time being nice to idiots,” you tell her.
She doesn’t have time for a sarcastic comeback, because another contraction hits and takes all of her concentration.
For almost an hour, you watch as contraction after contraction saps Allison’s strength. She asks for ice chips and a cold cloth but then gets chilled and asks for a heated blanket. The nurses become a constant presence, but you ignore them. Allison’s music is on again and you try to remember everything from that DVD and say comforting things about what her body is doing, but you feel like a complete fake.
That’s when Allison looks up at you and tells you that she’s scared. It’s like your nightmare is coming to life, but after one horrified moment, you take control of yourself and silently swear that you are going to walk out of the hospital with your wife and your daughter safe beside you.
“You’re going to be fine,” you say. “You’re both going to be fine.”
You hold her hand and stare into her weary eyes and will her to believe you and focus on you. Even as another contraction rips through her belly, she keeps her eyes on yours. Neither of you notice that the doctor has arrived until she loudly proclaims that it’s time for Allison to start pushing.
Earlier in the pregnancy, Allison made you promise that you would stay by her head during delivery. She didn’t want you as her doctor, she wanted you as her husband. At the time, it had been a tough thing to agree to, but now you can’t tear yourself from her side.
The doctor and nurses are calling for Allison to push harder, and you support her shoulders and feel like you want to shout right along with her as she works through another contraction.
“She’s crowning!” the doctor announces, and then everything goes extremely quickly.
Two more pushes and your daughter is being raised into the air and you are being asked to cut the cord, and then the tiny red, wrinkled, screaming infant is placed on Allison’s chest. Allison is crying, and it takes you a minute to realize that she’s not the only one. Little Alice squirms in Allison’s arms, and you help her push aside her gown so that your daughter can nurse. You hardly notice that the room is still buzzing with activity as Allison delivers the placenta and the nurses clean her up as much as possible. You don’t know how much time has passed when the nurse says that it’s time to clean the baby up and run the standard battery of tests. Allison doesn’t look like she wants to let Alice go, but when you say you’ll carry her to the nursery, she smiles a watery smile up at you and agrees.
You expected holding a newborn to feel awkward and uncomfortable, but when you lift Alice into your arms it feels like the most natural thing in the world. She just fits, as if she was uniquely made to nestle in the crook of your arm against your chest, and you know that Allison was right when she said that you would never doubt your ability to love this child. She’s less than an hour old and you are already wondering if your love for her will ever stop growing. You’ve become a stereotypical smitten father, and you don’t even care.
When you return to the room with Alice in your arms, but now diapered and swaddled and wearing a tiny knitted hat, Allison is propped against the pillows waiting for you.
“You should sleep,” you tell her.
“I don’t want to sleep, I want to look at her,” she tells you, and you settle Alice into her mother’s embrace.
Alice’s little eyes open, and mother and child study each other while you look at them both and think about how it has taken you over fifty years to finally have the best day of your life.
Comments and criticism welcome, as always!
As far as my own fertility goes, this last cycle was unfortunately another failure, and so now I will be going through IVF. It's been a bumpy road, emotionally, and I'm trying to be positive now without getting my hopes up too much.
Okay, now on to what you came here for!
X.
Four weeks before her due date, Allison gets serious about names. She’d been moving the name book around the house for the past six months, but now there were actually post-it notes sticking out from between some pages and a highlighter clipped onto the front cover. While lying in bed one night, the two of you had happened to start discussing naming styles and you were grateful that yours seemed to mesh.
After meeting one too many atrociously named children in the clinic, you each have particular dislikes. Your pet peeve is made up names like the ridiculous Navaeh. Parents’ penchant for adding Mac to anything and calling it a name ranks a close second. Apparently those people don’t care about the fact that their precious little princess MacKenzie is carrying around a name that means “son of Kenneth”. Allison admits that she gets a bit affronted every time a girl with a masculine name is brought into the clinic. As if a woman couldn’t possibly be taken seriously unless her name is something like Ryan or Elliot or Jaymes.
Unfortunately, despite being on the same wavelength as far as definite “no’s” are concerned, you still haven’t picked out a definite winner. She’s tossed out names like Eleanor, Ava, Kathleen and Margaret, and while you don’t hate any of them, none of them feel quite right.
After another night of watching television while she periodically blurts out a name, only to have it shot down, Allison gives up in a huff and tosses the book into your lap.
“Okay, you find one you like and then let me know,” she tells you.
Your mouth twists into a grimace. This was not on your agenda for the evening.
Reluctantly you open the book, thumb through a few pages and then flip back to the beginning.
“Alice,” you say a few minutes later.
“Al-you just picked a name off the first page!” she says indignantly.
“No, I didn’t, I like the name Alice.”
“Alice? Really?”
“Yeah, really, what’s wrong with Alice?”
“Isn’t it kind of close to Allison?” she asks with a cocked eyebrow.
“Maybe that’s why I like it,” you grumble, and Allison looks shyly pleased and a blush touches her cheeks.
“Alice is a nice name,” she accedes, but if you get to pick first name, then I get dibs on middle name.”
You look at her with suspicion before agreeing.
“Blythe,” she says with a determined jut of her chin.
An amused smile curls at the corners of your mouth.
“You realize that the kid is already going to be spoiled silly,” you tell her.
She doesn’t agree or disagree, she just smiles at you with a hint of the smugness you’ve grown to accept at times. Then she grabs the baby name book from you and walks across the room to the bookcase and squeeze it in between your battered old college dictionary and a volume of John Donne’s poetry. Your daughter has a name.
Three weeks before Allison’s due date, two things happen. Your mother closes on a house ten minutes away, and Sarah throws Allison a surprise baby shower. Naturally the shower is not really much of a surprise. You’ve known about it for weeks, and the information was wheedled out of you when she held your iPod hostage. Apparently your wife doesn’t like surprises.
Your mother, of course, is invited to the shower, and you are not. No, you and Wilson are kicked out and told to come back after five with a Christmas tree. Five o’clock is five hours away, and getting a tree will take you approximately fifteen minutes, so the two of you head back to your place to watch football.
Wilson has turned into a total girl over the past five years, and he ends up spending a lot longer than fifteen minutes picking out what he calls the perfect tree. You remind him that he’s Jewish and that the tree is not even going to be in his house, but your words fall on deaf ears. It’s close to six-thirty by the time you get back to the Wilsons’ house with a six foot evergreen strapped to the top of Allison’s car.
Allison, Sarah and your mother are in the living room cooing and exclaiming over all of the baby things. It’s sickening in a way, but the stuff is pretty cute. Not that you’ll ever admit that. Your private cache of baby things has grown to include a number of stuffed toys that are supposed to represent various microbes (you’re particularly fond of The Common Cold), a t-shirt featuring a New Orleans jazz club and a onesie with the periodic table across the chest. It’s never too early to make the kid a genius, you figure.
“Look at the carseat!” Allison exclaims to you. “It’s from Sarah and Jimmy.”
It is grey and pink. You glare at Wilson, who holds up his hands.
“Hey, I wanted to go with the orange flames, but you know women.”
You roll your eyes.
Wilson helps you take all of the boxes and bags out to the car, and then after Allison has given a round of hugs and kisses to the Wilson family, you head home with her and your mother. The pregnancy hormones are really making Allison a sentimental girly-girl and it’s a little bit strange. You hope it will wear off after she pops the kid out.
The following day is spent putting up the tree and going over a moving check-list with your mother. She won’t be moving down until the end of January but she’s going to sell some of her furniture and wants to make sure you take anything you want. Before you can even say that you don’t need anything, Allison pipes up requesting your father’s old desk and antique globe.
Your mother looks surprised, but you nod your head and she writes it down. You remember now, that during your vacation you told Allison a few childhood stories, including one about how you used to sneak into your father’s office to sit behind his desk and spin the globe, stopping it with your finger and then running to the atlas to look up whatever country you’d landed on if it was one you hadn’t lived in. It is a bittersweet memory. Your father probably would have been happy to know that you were so interested in things like that, but you were too stubborn to tell him, and he was too stubborn to offer to share them with you without being asked. You think that Alice will like the globe.
Two weeks before Allison’s due date, Christmas arrives right on schedule.
Despite being hugely pregnant, Allison has decorated the house beautifully. It looks like something from one of her Martha Stewart magazines. You started off the month griping about all of the decorations, but that sent Allison hurrying to the bathroom, and you knew she was going there to cry where you wouldn’t see. The feeling of guilt from that incident kept you from making any more negative comments. In a moment of weakness, you even brought home three decorative stockings from a cutesy gift-store near the hospital. When you look at them now, you realize that they are a completely different style - more country kitsch, and less elegant - than everything else, but Allison beamed when you gave them to her and she hung them proudly from the mantle.
The two of you spend Christmas morning in bed with coffee and toast. You figure you’ve got years ahead of you to get up at the crack of dawn and rush to the tree. Allison does waddle out to the living room and bring back your stocking. You can feel an orange shoved into the toe and when you unwrap the rest you find CDs, an iTunes giftcard, and a silver picture frame with a copy of the ultrasound picture.
“You can put her first real picture in there,” she tells you. “I was going to get you one that said ‘Daddy’s Girl’ around the edge but I figured this one had a better chance of actually making it to your desk.”
She’s right about that.
“I didn’t do the stocking thing,” you say.
“That’s okay,” she replies with a smile that lets you know you really are off the hook.
Then she pats your hand and says, “I don’t expect you to go from Grinch to Santa just because I’ve got a bun in the oven.”
Little things like that are what give you some relief from the thought that she’s secretly imagining you turning into Ward Cleaver or Bill Cosby. Homer Simpson is closer to likely.
Still, a little bit of Allison’s sentimentality must be rubbing off on you because you rummage around in your nightstand drawer, pull out a small box and toss it towards her.
“Forgot to wrap that one,” you say.
She looks at you with a mixture of skepticism and pleased surprise. Inside the box is a gold necklace with a simple garnet pendant. It came from the same gift store as the stockings.
“Garnet’s going to be the kid’s birthstone,” you explain. “They had a bunch with cheesy mother and child symbols, but I couldn’t make myself buy them.”
“It’s perfect,” she whispers.
Okay, so maybe you’re slightly above Homer.
Your new bathroom features a walk-in shower big enough for two, for which your leg is eternally grateful. Allison went through a brief period of self-consciousness around the time it started looking like she was smuggling a beach ball under her clothing, but she is past that now and back to showering with you in the mornings.
Most of her extra weight is still in her belly, but her chest has also filled out, and her hips are slightly rounder. She made a vague comment a month ago about hoping her body recovered after pregnancy, which told you she’d probably been obsessing over it for days. You were able to reassure her that you’d find her attractive even with slightly more curves. Your exact words, were nearer to “I’ll still want to jump you even if you keep the boobs and hips,” but they seemed to do the trick. Now she leans against you as you wrap your arms around her and rub a washcloth over the taut skin of her stomach. You are warm and comfortable and content and you haven’t even gotten to the presents under the tree.
On the week before Allison’s due date, she goes into labor.
You are at work and have just finished a diagnostic session and sent Mason off to run a CAT scan on your patient when you get the call.
You are not expecting it. You don’t know why, but you had it in your head that she’d have false labor a few times and then go into full-blown labor sometime after her due date. The idea of her going early had not occurred to you. In fact, you make the mistake of asking if she’s sure it’s not Braxton-Hicks contractions. You have to hold the phone away from her ear when she shouts that she’s been having Braxton-Hicks contractions for weeks and knows the difference between that and real labor and by the way, she’s went to medical school too, in case you forgot.
Then she lets out a horrible groan and you clutch the phone tighter and call her name.
Sarah is the one who answers. They’d been out at lunch when Allison started having contractions and now they’re at your house because Allison insisted on getting her things. She’s had a bag packed for weeks because, unlike you, she considered all possibilities.
You ask how far apart the contractions are and are told that they’re almost fifteen minutes apart, but strong. You want to call an ambulance to pick them up, but realize that makes you sound like a frantic husband, so you just tell Sarah to hurry the hell up and get to the hospital. She’ll probably forgive the swearing.
By the time they arrive, you’ve been pacing around the lobby for fifteen minutes and have called Wilson to make him pace with you. When the sliding doors open to admit your wife, you’re beside her before they have a chance to close. Sarah is on her other side, holding her bag, and you yell at a passing nurse and tell her to bring a damn wheelchair.
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Allison protests, but she is pale and lets herself be situated in the chair without a fight.
Sarah hands you Allison’s bag and says that she’ll come up to see you both when you’re settled in a room. Wilson is grinning from ear to ear, and says he’ll stop by too. Apparently you’re the only one who doesn’t think this is a party. You roll your eyes before rolling Allison towards the elevators.
You already stopped by admitting to get her checked in, so the nurses on the OB floor are ready for you when you arrive. They chat to Allison and try to make small-talk with you. You are definitely not in the mood for small-talk as textbooks-worth of birth complications flash through your mind.
Soon, Allison is in bed in one of the relatively luxurious birthing rooms. It looks more than a bed and breakfast than a hospital room, with a folk-painted armoire holding the television, a cozy rocking chair in the corner, and a daybed covered in a quilt off to one side, presumably for father-to-be. You remain standing, and tap your cane against the floor.
“You know, it could be a while,” Allison tells you. “You may want to get comfortable.”
“You want your music on?” you ask, and she looks at you with surprise.
You fish around in her bag and pull out a CD she burned.
“What, you think I haven’t been paying attention?” you ask, as you put the disk into the player beside the television and try to look offended.
You’ve given her every reason to think that, of course, but you secretly stashed her hypno-birthing DVD into your bag one morning and watched it on your computer at work. You can’t say you think it’ll work better than an epidural, but at least it doesn’t sound as off the wall as some birthing methods. After all, she could have opted for a water birth.
“Thanks,” is all she says before her face contorts into a grimace and her fist crumples the nice smooth blanket over her lap.
“Still fifteen minutes apart?”
“Feels closer to ten,” she replies. “I thought first babies were supposed to take longer to arrive.”
Those words seem to jinx her, because the contractions stay steady at ten minutes apart for the next two hours, and she remains only two centimeters dilated. Her doctor comes and goes, giving a quick look, a pat on the leg and some cheerful, placating words. It’s all you can do not to verbally attack her and the only reason you restrain yourself is because Allison warned you to be nice.
Allison starts trying to convince you to let her go home and labor there, but you refuse. You are taking no chances, not with her life and not with the baby’s. She argues with you, but then a particularly strong contraction steals her breath and then she tells you to turn off the music and turn on a movie.
Another six hours and Allison has progressed to active labor. She’s five centimeters dilated and her contractions are five minutes apart and lasting almost a minute each. Sarah and Wilson have both been by to visit but left after only a few minutes. They went home after you promised to call as soon as the baby arrives. You’ve called your mother and she told you she’ll drive down first thing in the morning. She thinks the baby won’t be coming for a while, but when you look at Allison, you hope she’s wrong. It’s only been eight hours but she’s starting to tire.
“You know, I could fix you up with some good drugs,” you tell her.
She looks at you with mild annoyance. You’ve already been down this road once already.
“No epidural. I’m fine.”
You roll your eyes and pop a Vicodin. At least one of you can be relatively comfortable.
A few minutes later, she decides that she needs to walk, and you limp along beside her, up and down the hallway, feeling completely ineffective. When the contractions start getting stronger, she says she wants to take a hot shower, and you just follow her into the bathroom, biting your tongue to keep from mentioning an epidural again.
When a contraction hits in the shower, and she lets out a short, pained gasp of breath before grabbing the handrail, you feel even more helpless. You hate this feeling, and you realize that a large part of the reason why you keep pushing her to medicate, is selfishness. You can’t stand seeing her in pain. All of your medical knowledge, the fact that billions of women have given birth before her, the fact that her body knows what it’s doing… all of those things mean nothing now as she reaches out and squeezes your hand for support.
“I’m right here,” you reassure her, and that seems to be enough.
You help her back to bed just as a nurse comes in to check on her.
“Looks like you’re in transition,” the nurse says, sunny disposition firmly in place.
“No kidding,” you snap. “She just had two contractions in three minutes.”
The nurse glares at you before saying a few more positive things to Allison.
“You’re supposed to be nice, remember?” Allison says after the nurse has left.
“Sorry, I have a hard time being nice to idiots,” you tell her.
She doesn’t have time for a sarcastic comeback, because another contraction hits and takes all of her concentration.
For almost an hour, you watch as contraction after contraction saps Allison’s strength. She asks for ice chips and a cold cloth but then gets chilled and asks for a heated blanket. The nurses become a constant presence, but you ignore them. Allison’s music is on again and you try to remember everything from that DVD and say comforting things about what her body is doing, but you feel like a complete fake.
That’s when Allison looks up at you and tells you that she’s scared. It’s like your nightmare is coming to life, but after one horrified moment, you take control of yourself and silently swear that you are going to walk out of the hospital with your wife and your daughter safe beside you.
“You’re going to be fine,” you say. “You’re both going to be fine.”
You hold her hand and stare into her weary eyes and will her to believe you and focus on you. Even as another contraction rips through her belly, she keeps her eyes on yours. Neither of you notice that the doctor has arrived until she loudly proclaims that it’s time for Allison to start pushing.
Earlier in the pregnancy, Allison made you promise that you would stay by her head during delivery. She didn’t want you as her doctor, she wanted you as her husband. At the time, it had been a tough thing to agree to, but now you can’t tear yourself from her side.
The doctor and nurses are calling for Allison to push harder, and you support her shoulders and feel like you want to shout right along with her as she works through another contraction.
“She’s crowning!” the doctor announces, and then everything goes extremely quickly.
Two more pushes and your daughter is being raised into the air and you are being asked to cut the cord, and then the tiny red, wrinkled, screaming infant is placed on Allison’s chest. Allison is crying, and it takes you a minute to realize that she’s not the only one. Little Alice squirms in Allison’s arms, and you help her push aside her gown so that your daughter can nurse. You hardly notice that the room is still buzzing with activity as Allison delivers the placenta and the nurses clean her up as much as possible. You don’t know how much time has passed when the nurse says that it’s time to clean the baby up and run the standard battery of tests. Allison doesn’t look like she wants to let Alice go, but when you say you’ll carry her to the nursery, she smiles a watery smile up at you and agrees.
You expected holding a newborn to feel awkward and uncomfortable, but when you lift Alice into your arms it feels like the most natural thing in the world. She just fits, as if she was uniquely made to nestle in the crook of your arm against your chest, and you know that Allison was right when she said that you would never doubt your ability to love this child. She’s less than an hour old and you are already wondering if your love for her will ever stop growing. You’ve become a stereotypical smitten father, and you don’t even care.
When you return to the room with Alice in your arms, but now diapered and swaddled and wearing a tiny knitted hat, Allison is propped against the pillows waiting for you.
“You should sleep,” you tell her.
“I don’t want to sleep, I want to look at her,” she tells you, and you settle Alice into her mother’s embrace.
Alice’s little eyes open, and mother and child study each other while you look at them both and think about how it has taken you over fifty years to finally have the best day of your life.
Comments and criticism welcome, as always!