12.21.2012

Four days past his due date.

Three days before Christmas.

We had already celebrated Christmas by the time my water broke.

My parents had been in town for weeks because I had panicked at thirty-six and a half weeks and told them this baby was coming early. My body felt like it was in crisis. Preeclampsia is not poetic. It is not glowing. Your blood pressure spikes and your thoughts feel frantic and unsteady. Your skin stretches so tight it feels hot. My hands, my face, my feet — everything was swollen. I didn’t look like a glowing pregnant woman. I looked like my body was retaining every ounce of pressure it could hold.

They came early to help.

And then he didn’t come.

Week thirty-seven.

Thirty-eight.

Thirty-nine.

Forty.

By the time December 20th arrived, my parents needed to leave soon to spend Christmas with the rest of the family. So we decided to celebrate ours that night. Just us.

My mom made it beautiful.

Appetizers laid out on Christmas dishes. Every present wrapped perfectly.  Even mine. She wrapped the gifts I had bought because I couldn’t sit on the floor long enough to do it myself. She cleaned and arranged and made it feel like a real holiday instead of a waiting room. If there was one thing about my mom, presentation was absolutely everything. It was beautiful.

I remember sitting in the leather chair most of the evening, just watching. My big boy opening presents. My husband moving around the kitchen. My mom waiting on me hand and foot. She had had five babies herself. She knew. She remembered.

We spent hours that way.

At the very end of the night, when everyone was tired and we were about to go to bed, I stood up.

Pop.

It wasn’t dramatic. It was just sudden and a relief. Finally….finally this baby was going to get out of my body. I’d never been so relieved to see amniotic fluid.

My husband got me into the car. I had prepared this time with puppy pads folded between my legs because once your water breaks, it doesn’t stop. I learned that the hard way the first time around. Lesson learned.  I remember thinking how strange it was that we had just finished celebrating, and now everything was shifting again.

It was almost midnight when we got to the hospital.

December 21, 2012.

The Mayan calendar’s “end of the world.”

The nurses were busy in a way that felt stretched thin. They checked me. I wasn’t very far along. I wasn’t even contracting much yet. They started the IV and left for long stretches.

My husband sat across the room.

With my first baby, he had been right next to me. This time, he pulled a chair to the opposite wall and opened a game on his phone. I kept waiting for him to come sit next to me. To hold my hand. To ask how I was feeling.

He didn’t.

The nausea came hard and fast. I remember gripping the sides of the bed, trying not to throw up. Hours passed like that. Just me and fluorescent lights and a monitor beeping steadily.

Around four in the morning, something shifted inside me.

I looked across the room and said, calmly, “I think you should call somebody. I actually think I might be dying.”

He looked up, confused. “What do you mean?”

And then I was gone.

I don’t remember the fade. I remember waking up to a ceiling full of faces and urgent voices. My blood pressure had completely bottomed out. They were trying to bring me back while the baby’s heart rate stayed steady on the screen.

The strangest part is that I hadn’t felt fear.

When I said I thought I was dying, I meant it. And when it happened, I felt almost peaceful. Like my body had reached its limit and was finished arguing.

They stabilized me. While the room was still full, they placed the epidural — no one wanted a repeat of that moment. After that, I was positioned on my side to try to prevent tearing again. Sixty-three stitches the first time. I wasn’t eager to relive that.

I labored like that through the rest of the night and into morning. Drifting in and out of sleep. Nauseous. Swollen. Immobile.

At 10:30 a.m., the door opened and the doctor who would deliver him walked in. Not the one I had built rapport with. Of course not. I have never once had the doctor I knew actually deliver my babies. This one looked like she had stepped straight off a medical drama. She was composed, alert, ready and stunningly beautiful.

I felt like something that had been dragged through the mud.

But she was present. And that is more than I could say for Dr. Newspaper who took thirty minutes to fetch his scrubs while the nurses told me not to push for THIRTY minutes while waiting for him to get it together.

When it was time to push, there was no waiting. Just work.

I pushed for an hour and a half.

Pressure. Regroup. Push again. Sweat and shaking and the strange clarity that comes when your body is doing something it was designed to do whether you like it or not. Pushing is exhausting. You bare down as hard as you can during the contraction and it feels like it’s not doing anything until they say, “we can see his head.” And that sentence gives you just enough energy to give the final couple of pushes.

At 11:59 a.m., one minute before noon, on the day the world was supposed to end, he arrived.

Eight pounds, eight ounces. Twenty-one inches long.

Another boy.

I had been certain it was a girl. Certain no boy would make me that miserable during pregnancy. I wasn’t afraid of a baby girl. But, I was terrified of a teenage girl. So, had I been able to choose, I would have chosen boys. I couldn’t believe that I had been given two.

When they said, “It’s a boy,” something inside me softened immediately.

They placed him on my chest, still warm and slick and smelling like birth. He didn’t scream dramatically. He rooted. Hungry. Strong.

I loved him instantly. How did I get so lucky? I still wonder that.

I asked for one hour before anyone came back to the room to visit.  With my first, born at night, I had hours alone. This time, I negotiated thirty minutes.

My big boy walked in, looked at him carefully, and said, “Oh. He doesn’t do anything. This isn’t what I meant.”

He had wanted a sister. He had wanted someone to play with right away. He suggested we could probably just leave the baby there and go home.

Within hours, a nurse commented that he looked a little orange.

Jaundice.

He was taken under the NICU lights. If I wasn’t nursing him, he was under those lights. I was actually discharged before he was. But, I refused to go home without him. They found an open room and let me stay without nurse service. I would walk to the cafeteria myself. They brought him to me for feedings, which was kind.

On Christmas Eve, the pediatrician said he still wasn’t ready to leave — but it was Christmas Eve. They ordered a bili blanket so we could take him home as long as we returned daily for blood checks.

My parents left that same day.

They had come expecting to stay for weeks after the baby was born. To help. Instead, they drove away just as I walked in with a newborn wrapped in blue light.

Two days after Christmas, my husband and my oldest both came down with the flu.

The baby and I didn’t.

So we split the house in half.

They stayed downstairs coughing and watching movies. We stayed upstairs in the quiet.

For ten days, it was just me and this precious boy.

I sanitized constantly. I listened for coughing through the vents. I washed my hands until they were dry and cracked. And then I would close the bedroom door and climb back into bed with my baby.

There is nothing like skin-to-skin with a newborn.

The weight of them on your chest. The warmth. The way they curl toward you instinctively. He would root and latch and then fall asleep with his cheek pressed against my collarbone, his tiny hand flexing and relaxing against my skin.

He was so easy then. I think newborns are the easiest stage.

I had been afraid I wouldn’t get that quiet time with him  being born at noon, family pouring in, NICU lights stealing our first hours. And somehow, life gave that time back to me in a different way.

Ten days of knowing him before the chaos really began.

And just as I had rocked my first baby in the rocker, I rocked my youngest. In those moments holding my newborn, my mind would drift to my childhood, to my mom. The one who left us. Just as she had left the day I came home from the hospital. When I needed her most, she wasn’t there. I thought about how complicated mothers can be. How we try. How we fail. How we love in imperfect ways.

And I held him closer.

Once everyone recovered and the house came back together, it felt like my two children were five hundred. One is easy. Two felt like insanity. The jealousy. The constant dividing of attention. The noise. The guilt when one felt slighted. The exhaustion of trying to be fair.

But for those first ten days, it was just us.

The end-of-the-world baby.

The one who arrived at 11:59 a.m.

The one I was so sure was a girl.

The one who started his life wrapped in blue light and daily doctor visits.

The one that made forty unforgettable.

And I memorized him before the world came rushing back.

He was never an accident. He was a decision. One of my better ones.

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