Birth Stories
God, I'm in a talkative mood today.
Happy International Women's Day! I'm running on three hours worth of sleep because one of my teachers decided it would be super special awesome to spring a project on us when we already had two other things due in the same week! Hooray!
(Counter-productive, much? Educating about women's rights while taking away this woman's right to a decent night's sleep? Give me an A, woman!)
So aside from associated bullshit group work and poster project nonsense, we're also supposed to show up with the story of our birth.
Here is mine:
I'm the first baby. My parents are living in NYC at the height of the AIDS epidemic. All these stories are showing up on the news about nurses switching babies at birth. Moms is pregnant and terrified and is living minute by minute according to Dr. Spock's baby book.
I'm actually born 6 months before the ultrasounds become good enough to see whether or not babies have a cleft lip/cleft palate, so going in my parents and the doctors have no freaking idea.
Moms is moved to Mount Sinai hospital, which is undergoing reconstruction at the time. The paying customers delivery ward is being redone, so Moms is moved to a giant room where all the homeless moms and the crack addicts and the other paying customers are having their babies. Mount Sinai is a teaching hospital, but the paying customers have the luxury of deciding whether they want the certified doctors or the learning students to operate on them.
An uninformed kid training to be an anesthesiologist shows up to operate and Dad wails into him, saying that they are Paying and my mom is going to get a Real Doctor and pretty much makes the kid cry. The chief anesthesiologist shows up later to bitch Dad out about treating his students that way.
So I'm born and the Oh Shit moment happens. Moms is drugged out of her mind. Dad is pissed that the doctors are huddled around me without letting him see, but hears me crying and knows that I'm at least among the living. Apparently in a lot of other countries, cleft lip is a facial deformity that causes parents to either get super pissed off or abandon the baby entirely, so all my dad gets is some nurse waving her hands and going "It's fixable, it's fixable!"
Mom yanks Dad over to the bed and shrieks at him,
"Go make sure you know how to identify our baby!" Horror stories of kids switched at birth are filling up her drug-fueled brain, and she demands that Dad know exactly which kid is theirs.
Finally Dad takes a long, good look at me, and calls over his shoulder,
"Yeah, I don't really think I'm going to have much trouble telling which one is ours."
So like I said, Mount Sinai's undergoing rennovation, so there's only one working elevator in the place. Nurse is taking me down to the other babies, but on the way down, meets my Grandmother coming up.
I am also first grandchild, and looking like the blood-covered screaming spawn of Freddy Krueger. Grandmother wails on the nurse for committing infanticide, even though it's pretty clear from the way I'm screaming that I'm alive.
The nurses, wanting to show that having a cleft-lipped baby is nothing to be ashamed of, insist on placing me in the front row of the viewing area, every single time. Another new mom is already there when Grandma comes down, and comments aloud that she "wonders if the parents love that baby." Grandma nearly punches other new mom.
Mom, pleased that she's not expected to breastfeed a cleft-lip baby (which is pretty freaking hard to do depending on the severity of the case), has her first long drink of wine.
Don't know too much about Mom's own birth story, since she never asked her own parents about it when they were alive. Little brother born in pretty much the same way, sans cleft lip emergency, but he sleeps all the time instead of screaming and is pretty much always placed in the back where mom and dad can't find him. Also, our cat got lost.
Dad, however...
Same location, minus 30 years exactly (1958, in case you were wondering). Grandma and Grandpa in NYC, Dad is first baby. On the night of the birth, they're clear across town and have to have an emergency stop at Mercy Hospital, which I think was catholic at the time. Dad's born, the grandparents are rejoicing, and then a nurse pulls a priest in and asks if they want a quick, 10-minute baptizing.
Grandma says no thanks; we're all Jews here.
Nurse's smile freezes. Dad is not allowed to be with other babies in Christian viewing room, and placed instead in, I am not shitting you, a crib in the nurse's supply closet.
Dad, fifty years later, gloats, "15 years after the Nazis, and I'm discriminated and experiencing anti-Semitism since day 1!"
So! Tell me, friends, your own birth stories.
Happy International Women's Day! I'm running on three hours worth of sleep because one of my teachers decided it would be super special awesome to spring a project on us when we already had two other things due in the same week! Hooray!
(Counter-productive, much? Educating about women's rights while taking away this woman's right to a decent night's sleep? Give me an A, woman!)
So aside from associated bullshit group work and poster project nonsense, we're also supposed to show up with the story of our birth.
Here is mine:
I'm the first baby. My parents are living in NYC at the height of the AIDS epidemic. All these stories are showing up on the news about nurses switching babies at birth. Moms is pregnant and terrified and is living minute by minute according to Dr. Spock's baby book.
I'm actually born 6 months before the ultrasounds become good enough to see whether or not babies have a cleft lip/cleft palate, so going in my parents and the doctors have no freaking idea.
Moms is moved to Mount Sinai hospital, which is undergoing reconstruction at the time. The paying customers delivery ward is being redone, so Moms is moved to a giant room where all the homeless moms and the crack addicts and the other paying customers are having their babies. Mount Sinai is a teaching hospital, but the paying customers have the luxury of deciding whether they want the certified doctors or the learning students to operate on them.
An uninformed kid training to be an anesthesiologist shows up to operate and Dad wails into him, saying that they are Paying and my mom is going to get a Real Doctor and pretty much makes the kid cry. The chief anesthesiologist shows up later to bitch Dad out about treating his students that way.
So I'm born and the Oh Shit moment happens. Moms is drugged out of her mind. Dad is pissed that the doctors are huddled around me without letting him see, but hears me crying and knows that I'm at least among the living. Apparently in a lot of other countries, cleft lip is a facial deformity that causes parents to either get super pissed off or abandon the baby entirely, so all my dad gets is some nurse waving her hands and going "It's fixable, it's fixable!"
Mom yanks Dad over to the bed and shrieks at him,
"Go make sure you know how to identify our baby!" Horror stories of kids switched at birth are filling up her drug-fueled brain, and she demands that Dad know exactly which kid is theirs.
Finally Dad takes a long, good look at me, and calls over his shoulder,
"Yeah, I don't really think I'm going to have much trouble telling which one is ours."
So like I said, Mount Sinai's undergoing rennovation, so there's only one working elevator in the place. Nurse is taking me down to the other babies, but on the way down, meets my Grandmother coming up.
I am also first grandchild, and looking like the blood-covered screaming spawn of Freddy Krueger. Grandmother wails on the nurse for committing infanticide, even though it's pretty clear from the way I'm screaming that I'm alive.
The nurses, wanting to show that having a cleft-lipped baby is nothing to be ashamed of, insist on placing me in the front row of the viewing area, every single time. Another new mom is already there when Grandma comes down, and comments aloud that she "wonders if the parents love that baby." Grandma nearly punches other new mom.
Mom, pleased that she's not expected to breastfeed a cleft-lip baby (which is pretty freaking hard to do depending on the severity of the case), has her first long drink of wine.
Don't know too much about Mom's own birth story, since she never asked her own parents about it when they were alive. Little brother born in pretty much the same way, sans cleft lip emergency, but he sleeps all the time instead of screaming and is pretty much always placed in the back where mom and dad can't find him. Also, our cat got lost.
Dad, however...
Same location, minus 30 years exactly (1958, in case you were wondering). Grandma and Grandpa in NYC, Dad is first baby. On the night of the birth, they're clear across town and have to have an emergency stop at Mercy Hospital, which I think was catholic at the time. Dad's born, the grandparents are rejoicing, and then a nurse pulls a priest in and asks if they want a quick, 10-minute baptizing.
Grandma says no thanks; we're all Jews here.
Nurse's smile freezes. Dad is not allowed to be with other babies in Christian viewing room, and placed instead in, I am not shitting you, a crib in the nurse's supply closet.
Dad, fifty years later, gloats, "15 years after the Nazis, and I'm discriminated and experiencing anti-Semitism since day 1!"
So! Tell me, friends, your own birth stories.