Primero

If April is "the cruelest month", as Mr. T.S. (as in "Tough Shit"--in college I really had to plod through "The Wasteland") Eliot says, then April 1979 was cruel AND cold--winter would not budge. Daily the temperature crept up to almost freezing, and nights sent it scuttling back down into sub-sub-zero land. Mornings, a hard sun would glitter on the blue-shadowed snowbanks that no thaw had touched yet. I started praying for snow--anything to soften the implacable sun and the iron air.

Baby was late, just like the warm weather, and we waited impatiently. Everyone around us said to enjoy the quiet before the newborn storm broke--"Once that kid comes, you'll never sleep again!"

The third week in April came and went--no baby, no spring, no contractions, no melting. I started to seriously consider castor oil. A few Braxton Hicks squeezed my abdomen, but other than that--nothing. Until April 28, just after midnight.

I woke from a deep sleep thinking I'd wet the bed--swell, I thought, the huge baby-bump was now making me incontinent. Careful not to wake my husband, I tip-toed to the bathroom. We lived in an apartment above an old converted store. The bathroom was the furthest possible distance from the bedroom--any further and it would have been across the street. In the dark, I crept through the bedroom, the living room, the dining room--aiming for the bathroom just beyond the cavernous kitchen. Once I hit the kitchen's cold linoleum, wetness gushed out in great surges.

"Uh-oh," I thought, "THIS must be water breaking." Not that I really knew what that was, any more than I knew what Braxton-Hicks were, although I liked the term--it sounded official. No, at that point, baby terms were something I knew only through theory. However, that was about to change.

I hustled into the bathroom, leaving a trail of puddles on the floor--handy in case my husband got lost on his way through the apartment. Once on the toilet, I started hollering. Being in a bathroom a building away from the bedroom meant I had to holler so loud I made myself dizzy.

I started to get mad--no one likes to feel helpless on the toilet--and was about to get up to see what was keeping my husband (let's call him Jack--why should the kids be the only ones to enjoy the protection of anonymity?) when I heard the patter of feet and a mighty thud. Jack had hit the first puddle.

"Jack?" I asked, opening the bathroom door wider. "Are you okay?"

I heard groaning. It seemed to be coming closer. Jack slowly crawled through the bathroom door. He may have been wounded, but he was moving. Good enough.

"HURRY!" I shrieked. "We need to get to the hospital NOW!"

There is an unforgettable tone that women use when motivating partners into immediacy. Just ask any husband who has heard it--he has been trained to respond to it, but lives in perpetual dread of ever hearing it.

At the time, we lived in a tiny village out in the country--it usually took forty minutes to get to the hospital in town. That night, we made it in fifteen. I remember the black road and a blur of silver--I think there was a moon, and the sky was clear, stars glittering like ice chips. Normally I would have been screaming in terror with Jack driving like that--I am not a good passenger. I am a dashboard clutcher, a ghost-braker, a hand-hold grabber.

The contractions were about seven minutes apart and were starting to assert themselves. I checked the backseat to make sure my overnight bag was there--for weeks the bag was open on the dining room table--every time I read an article or another book on natural childbirth, I ordered another item to be put in. "Did you remember the peppermint sticks?" I asked Jack, who was hunched over the wheel. "Yeah," he said as we barreled down the empty highway. "Good," I said. "What about the tennis balls--you bought some the other day, didn't you? I hope you put them in." No answer.

"Jack, did you pack the tennis balls?" I'd read that tennis balls were good for back labour--they would massage your lower back if you lay on them. (Not that I had a clue about back labour--at this point, we were still working from theory). "Jack, did you pack the tennis balls?"

"Uh," he said.

I took a deep breath and shrieked, "What'll we do without the tennis balls? What if I have back labour and we don't have the tennis balls? We have to have the tennis balls! Oh God, oh God, oh God--how could you FORGET THE TENNIS BALLS?"

A contraction hit--lucky for Jack, that one was much more than muscles tightening. It shut me up. "Whoof," I said, clutching my stomach, tennis balls forgotten.

"What?" barked Jack in alarm, not taking his eyes from the road--a good thing, considering our speed. "What? What? Is the baby coming? What? Is it time? What? Can't you wait? What? What?" The tennis balls tirade had obviously spooked him.

I was already annoyed at his forgetting the tennis balls. Now the contractions were starting to bug me--pain affects me that way. Some people cry, some people moan, some people put up with it--me, I get mad. Usually I start by getting irritated, then move to angry and wind up somewhere in rage country. I was definitely on my way there now, and Jack's "What? What's?" weren't helping. This wasn't looking good for the whole natural childbirth thing. Because, of course, we had decided to go that route--no drugs, no medical interventions, no nothing. Just us--a team approach--we'd work together and cherish the experience. After all, who wouldn't want to be completely awake and aware for every second of such a momentous thing?

Suckers.

We'd taken the childbirth course--along with fifteen other pregnant couples--and made it through the film without too many bad moments. While there was a definite ick factor at the movie's climax, we felt sure we would handle everything with grace, style and natural aplomb. Now, however, with the contractions getting serious, I was starting to rethink our decision. "Oh man," I moaned, "This is starting to hurt!"

Jack glanced over at me, white-faced in alarm. He knew pain's effect on me. He drove faster.

Finally we were at the hospital. I threw myself into one of the wheelchairs clustered at the ER doors. The doors whooshed open. I remember the light and warmth spilling from the ER into a silver mist as they collided with the frigid air--now I was going into that light.

Jack zoomed up up to the desk where a lady sat typing, looking bored. It was a slow night in the ER. Blinking in the glare of the fluorescents, Jack announced breathlessly that we were having a baby.

"That's swell," said the lady, shoving a clipboard at us. "Fill this in."

I don't believe any forms were every filled out faster in the history of humankind. I could be wrong, and there's no way to prove it, but I stand by my statement.

Maternity was on the third floor--a fast elevator ride and we were at the nurses' station. Maternity wards are the most cheerful parts of a hospital. Even in the middle of the night, there was a sense of drama and expectation. The station's counter was covered in flowers. Pictures of baby humans and animals were all over the walls. Even the fluorescents seemed sunnier on that floor. Maybe these are again misty water-coloured memories, but they're pleasant, so we'll keep them.

Things dimmed a bit when I got prepped, however.

Anyone giving birth some decades ago will remember the various indignities used to "prep" (such a chirpy little word) women for labour, as if contractions, swollen ankles and freaked-out husbands weren't bad enough. These steps have gone the way of the dodo bird, and good riddance! Some may remember clutching the back of a hospital johnny with one hand, holding up a contracting belly with the other, and attempting a knees-together speed shuffle to the bathroom (ALWAYS down the hall), trying to beat the high colonic administered minutes before by the cheery nurse.

There were also razors involved, which I will not go into here. It is sufficient to say that soon the contractions drove the discomforts of prepping far from my mind. Einstein was right. Everything is relative.

The labour room was a small, glaring cubicle. This was before comfortable, hotel-like labour-and-birthing rooms. The nurse hooked me up to a contraption that monitored my contractions and the baby's heartbeat. I'm not sure where all the parts and probes went--I wasn't interested because by this time, things were starting to seriously hurt.

Jack unpacked my bag, hauling out the various labour-saving devices we'd tossed in over the last few months. He carefully lined up peppermint sticks, cologne, candles, incense, and a small cassette player. In addition to the tennis balls, we'd forgotten to pack cassettes.

I wailed, "We forgot the tennis balls!" The nurse looked at our stuff, at Jack and at me moaning about tennis balls. "First time? Natural childbirth?" she asked. Jack nodded. I was busy riding out a contraction. "Heh, heh!" she chortled, leaving the room.

Now it was just Jack and me and a baby trying to push its way out. We looked at each other. "Do you realize," said Jack, "that this is the last time, the very last time, you and I will ever be alone? Ever? God!" He flopped back in the vinyl armchair, which made a whooshing noise. Funny the details you remember. From my experience, labour heightens all the senses, while at the same time taking you onto a plane where you don't really care about all the sensory input--you're too busy working on your output.

Before I could answer Jack, another contraction came along. A few words about contractions. My ideas of labour and childbirth came from novels and movies. At that time, these were still fairly reticent about this process. of course, the classic childbirth narrative came from Gone With The Wind and Melanie's agonizing ordeal. I was pretty sure I wouldn't have to worry about the hospital burning like Atlanta. And while Jack, just like Prissy, didn't know "nothin' about birthin' babies", there were folks who did, and they were just down the hall. In fact, they kept popping into the room.

The film that the natural childbirth classes provided showed a lot of blood and fluids, crowning heads, stretched flesh and happy parents, so it was pretty useless in conveying the real goods on contractions. Friends of mine who'd had kids said, "You have to go through it to understand it." Swell--I had no idea what to expect.

When my contractions started at home, I experienced them as a tightening and squeezing across my abdomen. "Hmmm," I'd thought at the time (oh, such a short time ago), "I can handle THIS..."

However, once the distractions of admission and prepping were over, and I could concentrate, the contractions quickly morphed into what the hospital staff liked to call "discomfort" and I liked to call "pain".

Jack pulled his vinyl chair up to my hospital bed. Decked out in hospital greens, he looked like an intern. At least they hadn't given him a mask. "Are you okay?" he asked.

(TO BE CONTINUED)