Bringing in Finn (37 page)

“I can taste the grass from the pasture the goat grazed on to make this cheese,” Bill said.

We reminisced about our days at the advertising agency and how we used to come to restaurants like this with clients on huge expense accounts.

“Tonight feels like when we first started dating,” Bill said to me. “I love you now more than ever.”

The next morning, we slept in until eight. Bill got ready quickly for a meeting, and I took a bath. The room phone rang just as I sunk into the water. I fumbled for a towel and answered the bathroom phone, water falling from my body into a puddle.

“Honey, it's Mom. I'm sorry to bother you. I'm completely fine.
But the taxi still hasn't come.” I pulled back the curtain in the bedroom and saw that it had started to snow again. Even without inclement weather or traffic, I would not have made it to my house and down to Prentice by nine fifteen. And Francis had reminded us to be on time, as the office was booked solid for the remainder of the day.

I pulled on a sweater and the pair of jeans I'd worn the day before and threw my dress, nightgown, and cosmetic case into my bag. I called down to the hotel concierge to have the car brought around.

“I'm on my way,” I said.

“I'll call and tell them we'll be late.”

I drove as swiftly as I could through the streets. Flurries had begun again by the time I reached the house. My mother saw the car from the window and climbed down the front steps, taking care on the steep cement. I helped her into the passenger side of the car.

“Drive safely,” she said. “Just because we're late doesn't mean we need to be in a panic.” I calmed myself, taking the turns slowly and staying off the smaller streets, which had become ice sheets underneath powdery snow. We parked in the Northwestern garage and took the pedestrian walkway to Galter Pavilion.

Pat met us in the waiting room and said they had been able to shift some patients around to fit us in.

When we walked into the ultrasound room, Kenisha was there, ready to go. “I feel so big I can hardly move,” my mother said, grunting as she climbed onto the table. “I just don't know if I can take another three weeks of this.”

“You may not have to,” Kenisha said, watching the screen. “The amniotic fluid looks low.” She tilted her head from side to side and squinted.

“The baby's fine,” she said quickly. “It's just that if the fluid goes below a certain point, they take that as an indication that the baby is running out of space.”

“What's the cutoff?” my mother asked in a hungry tone.

“More than five,” Kenisha said. “Under five, they usually induce.”

“And what's my level?” my mother asked.

“Four point nine.” My mother looked at me, her eyes hopeful.

“I'll let the doctors know you're right on the border,” Kenisha said. “They may not want to do anything.”

Kenisha sent us to the stress-test room, where the nurses had set up my mother's station. They had just begun stretching the band around her belly when Dr. Gerber burst into the room. We hadn't seen her since our very first consultation with MFM. She wore a thin headband and a pressed white lab coat with the MFM seal.

“Your amniotic fluid is lower than we like to see,” she said, glancing at the chart.

“Are your bags packed?” My mother and I looked at each other.
Our hospital bags?

“What I mean to say,” Dr. Gerber said, pausing, seeming to enjoy the drama of her announcement, “is that you're having this baby today.”

W
e did not have the baby that day. When we heard Dr. Gerber say that we would, however, my mother and I squeezed each other in a ferocious hug, the fronts of our bodies pressed together, the baby in a warm cocoon between us.

“Call Bill!” my mother said as we released our grip.

I ran to the fourteenth-floor lobby, where I could get cell phone reception, and punched Bill's number into my phone.

I paced a strip of gray carpeting near the windows, feeling as if I might rocket out of my body. I imagined Bill in the middle of a meeting, similar to the day we had found out we were pregnant. Even though we were only a week from our due date, we'd talked about how—to some part of our brains—the idea that we were actually having a baby still felt abstract. The journey we'd taken had made us expert waiters. We had waited for this day for nine months—six years and nine months, if we counted from the beginning.

Part of me still worried that something would go wrong. “You won't know for sure until you're holding the baby in your arms,” a woman had said at the fertility support group I'd attended several years before. But for the moment, I was attached to the part of me
that believed we had a really good chance. I wanted to enter the hospital in this spirit, in faith.

The phone line crackled and took a minute to ring. I caught my reflection in one of the large windows and was startled by my appearance. I looked wild, with my hair loose and unbrushed, wearing yesterday's now slightly rumpled clothes, bouncing up and down on alternate legs.

Bill answered, but the connection cut in and out and he couldn't hear me well.

“We're having the baby today!” I nearly yelled when he asked me to repeat myself for the third time.

“Baby?” Bill asked.

“Our baby!” I said. “
Today!”

The line cleared and Bill sputtered, “Oh my god. Right now?”

“Dr. Gerber said today. We're going to Prentice now.”

“Oh my god,” he said again. “How's your mom? Do you think I have time to pack up our bags?”

My mother caught up with me in the lobby. She was carrying the breast pump and her down coat. Two pink spots had appeared over her cheekbones. I put the phone on speaker so she could talk to Bill.

“I'm not even in labor yet,” she laughed. “They're going to induce me. We have plenty of time.”

“Okay.” I heard him draw a ragged breath. “I'll check in every ten minutes.”

I put the phone back to my ear so I could say goodbye to Bill. I wished I could touch him through the phone to feel his heartbeat on my chest, the way I did when we hugged.

“Our baby!” he said.

“We're having our baby!” I said, holding my hands against the glass to steady myself.

 

My mother and
I walked the two blocks to Prentice. We stopped just outside the main entrance so she could call my father and tell him to get on the next plane to Chicago. The day was chilly but bright, the winter sun splashing the sidewalk between the large buildings with pale light. I watched my mother: one hand on her belly, her feet in black rubber boots, legs bent in a slight squat. Her short hair, which she'd let go natural during the pregnancy, had turned salt and pepper. To me, she looked like some kind of modern fertility goddess. I felt an urge to document the moment. I pulled my phone out of my bag and began shooting video.

“How do you feel?” I asked when she hung up her phone.

“Ready,” she said. “Excited and scared.”

“Me too,” I said. “This is it.”

Anticipation churned in my stomach. I reminded myself to stay in my body.

We waited one more moment before entering.

My mother reached for my hand. I slid my arm protectively through hers and we walked through the revolving doorway together, into Prentice's mammoth lobby.

Our entrance was anticlimactic. The lobby was quiet and airy, with just a few clusters of people sitting at the café and perusing the elegant flower shop, whose orchids and towering arrangements rose up toward the three-story-high ceiling. We'd neglected to find out from Dr. Gerber where we were supposed to check in once we arrived and walked around for fifteen minutes before we found someone who could admit us.

Once we'd registered, a staff administrator took us up to the eighth floor and admitted us to a room directly across from the nurses' station. The room had polished hardwood floors, wood-paneled walls, and a plane of windows that offered a vista of
skyscrapers and a sliver of the lake—the same view as the one the million-dollar condos nearby had.

A young nurse named Lindsey handed my mother and me identification bracelets and a name badge for me that read MOTHER. Seeing the word stung my throat. My eyes watered, and I had to make several attempts to secure my mother's bracelet on her wrist.

Despite the constant reminders in our birthing classes that early labor was uneventful and long, I think I still expected the movie scene: Woman goes into labor; doctors and nurses race her down the hall to a delivery room with bright lights; baby arrives!

Lindsey was in no rush, nor was anyone else on the floor. Both the room and the hallway had an ethereal quality, as if time did not exist. Lindsey waited for my mother to change into a hospital gown and entered some additional information into a computer in the room. She activated a fetal monitor and turned the volume up so we could hear the baby's heartbeat. Her prework done, she left, telling us that someone from Anesthesiology would be in within the hour.

 

At our thirty-seven-week
appointment, we'd met with Dr. Peaceman and an anesthesiologist from Prentice to create our birth plan. The Maternal-Fetal Medicine team remained enthusiastic about a vaginal delivery. They were thrilled to hear that my mother had had three successful vaginal births, and almost refused to discuss other options.

At the birth-plan meeting, Dr. Peaceman asked if my mother would also like to attempt natural childbirth, since she'd done so successfully before.

“I'm doing this so that Sara and Bill can have a child,” she'd said, “not for the
birthing experience.”
She told the anesthesiologist to sign her up for the drugs.

When the anesthesiologist looked at me for confirmation, I pointed to my mother. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Whatever she wants.”

When I was pregnant, I thought I would try for natural childbirth and be ready for an epidural should I want one in the moment. I'd worked with many clients as they considered birth plans and did not believe in there being a
right way.
I heard women at parenting classes, at yoga, say things like C-sections weren't
real childbirth,
that epidurals were cheating. These kinds of comments were similar to what I would later hear about mothers who didn't breastfeed or who worked outside the home. I wondered if these women had ever lost children in utero or otherwise.

I didn't give a rat's ass which way our baby came out. As long as he arrived alive, with my mother healthy and okay, that was all that mattered. Loss had simplified some things for me.

As we waited for the anesthesiologist to arrive, we explored the room. Along the window was a cushioned seat that pulled out into a bed. The room had an in-suite bathroom with an oversize shower and two sinks, and a flat-screen TV, a DVD player, and an iPod docking station synced to a central entertainment system. The medical machinery, hung tastefully on a wood-paneled wall behind the bed, like art, seemed almost an afterthought.

“Whew,” my mother said, when we'd taken a full loop around the room. “Things have changed since I gave birth to you.”

 

Three miles north,
Bill entered into a frenzy of activity, taking on the completion of every task remaining on our baby to-do list in the span of four hours. He raced through the baby outfitters on the north side of Chicago like a dervish, procuring Pampers, wipes, three kinds of formula (in case my milk did not come in), and liners for our diaper disposal system.

When I finally caught up with him, his voice sounded garbled,
as if he were having trouble pronouncing certain consonants. He explained that he had a screwdriver in his mouth and was in the nursery fixing a shelf that had come loose.

“You don't have to do everything today,” I said.

“I keep thinking of things,” he said, grunting as he jimmied the shelf back into position.

He went on to tell me that he'd washed three more sets of burp cloths and blankets, and then, in a fit of inspiration, he'd driven across town to a store where we'd seen a stunning African-style baby wrap. In the store, I'd buried my face in the woven crimson fabric and commented that I thought I could feel the wisdom of the women who'd made it. We'd told ourselves it was too expensive and that we'd be just fine using the blue cotton one a friend from my yoga class had lent me.

“I wanted you to have it,” Bill said.

For the second time, I choked back tears. The wrap had become for me a symbol of my realization of motherhood, and Bill had sensed this. We'd read about the “fourth trimester,” the baby's first three months of life. Experts in the theory recommend skin-to-skin contact during this time for long periods each day. I needed no further invitation. I planned to start the moment our baby came out of the womb.

“Just a couple more things,” Bill was saying. I wanted to tell him to drop it all and come, but I stopped myself. I understood something, too: that the maelstrom of activity was Bill's own form of labor, his way of fulfilling his role as provider for his child.

“I just want everything to be perfect,” he said.

“It will be,” I said, praying that what I was saying was true.

I told him the doctors were only just preparing to start the induction and there was no real hurry. “Come soon,” I said anyway. I wanted him there next to me to count down the minutes as our baby's birth approached.

 

At 3:00 PM,
Dr. Socol started the induction process.

“I'm administering a low dose of Pitocin,” he said. “We want the cervix to dilate and kick-start the body into labor.”