Bringing in Finn (40 page)

“Does it hurt?” I asked, forcing myself to ask this question.

“No pain,” my mother said. “But I can feel them pulling.”

“Should she be feeling anything at all?”

“You'll feel slight sensation,” he said. “But no pain. Just before the baby comes out, I am going to tell you to push.”

I squeezed my mother's shoulder again. Our baby was almost here. As the doctors worked, I pulled my mind into the room, tuning my ears for a specific sound—the one sound I'd been anticipating for the nine months of this pregnancy, for the 208 weeks since the twins had died: our baby's first cry.

Minutes passed. The operation was taking too long. My sister told us it took only minutes to get to the baby.

I looked pleadingly at Michael.

“Nonemergency C-sections take longer,” he said. “Everything is going well.”

“We're almost there,” Dr. Gerber said.

Waves of recognition of what was happening broke over me.

“One more minute,” Dr. Gerber called, her voice rising. My brain flooded.

“This is it,” my mother said. “This is the vision—you and me together, doing this.”

I cried harder.

“Okay, Kristine,” Michael said. “Get ready. In just one minute I'm going to tell you to push.”

“Ready now,” Dr. Gerber said. “I see him.” I felt as if I had been lifted up to the ceiling, stretched beyond my body. I held on to my mother's shoulder and the side of her arm.

My breath became rapid and shallow. The room began to feel otherworldly. I locked eyes with my mother and for one second I saw something beyond our bodies, this arrangement of mother and daughter. For a moment, she and I melded and I saw only one.

I came back to my own body, buzzing with electricity. I wondered if other parents felt this sensation. It was if something had reached inside me and swirled its fingers through my essence. Some part of who I had been was no more. Who I would be now, as a mother, was yet to be revealed.

“He's here,” someone called out. I hunched over the chair, coiled like a spring. I strained for the sound. The seconds felt stretched and hung in the air. I sensed movement but still I heard nothing. My fingers on my mother's shoulder went white. Where was the cry?

Then it came, his first rasping sound—a wonderfully strong, hoarse little voice that filled the room. More cries came, and I heard them like the crescendo of a symphony. I saw an arm and a foot being lifted and a wriggling form being handed to the pediatric team. I reached for him, even though I'd been told he would not be passed to me until he'd been checked and cleaned off.

At the side table where the pediatric team worked I saw his foot, an exact replica of Bill's father's foot: wide in the middle and big, with long toes. That was all I could see of his body through the cluster of doctors and nurses: his grandfather's foot, in miniature, on his long but tiny leg.

The team bent over our baby, moving him, poking, producing another cry. Every sound was an affirmation, a trumpet. I sat on my hands; I wanted to go to him so badly.

My mother looked agitated. She said later she felt disoriented from the medication. “I could not relax until I saw you hold him,” she said later, in the recovery room. “That's the image I've held to through all of this.”

“They'll bring him to you soon,” Michael said, attempting to soothe us.

A nurse called out stats as the team continued to surround the baby.

“Born: baby boy, February ninth, 9:47 PM.”

“Seven pounds, three ounces.”

“Eighteen inches.”

“Is he okay?” I finally called out.

“He is perfect,” the pediatric nurse said, swaddling him in a hospital-issue blanket with blue and pink stripes. “He's just a little pale. We're going to keep him under the lamp for another minute.”

I waited, hardly able to contain myself. The doctors had begun the restorative part of the cesarean and were now putting my mother's insides back in position, one layer at a time. Every few minutes she cringed as the doctors tugged or applied the next row of suturing. I tried hard not to picture the activity on the other side of the curtain. I placed my hand on the top of my mother's head and focused my attention on comforting her.

Finally, the pediatric nurse checked something on a clipboard
and began moving toward me. “Stay where you are,” she said as I half-rose from my chair. “I'm bringing him to you.”

I turned in the chair, wanting to keep some contact with my mother as the baby was brought to us. The nurse lowered him gently so we both could see. “Look at all his light hair,” she said, and she placed the baby into my arms. A low, tear-soaked moan came out of my mouth. I kept him as the nurse had placed him and sank into the chair.

He was awake! He looked up, blinking his eyes in the glare of the lights. The room became a vacuum for a moment—all I could see was myself and this baby, my baby. I rolled these words on my tongue for the first time, tasting their sweetness. His eyes were the color of blue sky over the ocean, a shade close to my father's and mine. My mother said I had been seven pounds, five ounces, at birth. It was hard to imagine that life started this small.

I turned more toward my mother. I held my baby firmer now, securing my arms under his little body, cradling his neck in the crease of my arm. The baby-blue knit cap they'd placed on his head kept scrunching upward and threatened to fall off. He kept his eyes open for a longer stretch, looking up at me, I imagined, and then to the sides, around the room.

“He's just like you were when you came out,” my mother said. “Alert and looking all around. He is so beautiful, Sara. He's perfect.”

I looked down at my son and agreed.

“This is what I wanted,” she said, closing her eyes. When she opened them, tears streamed down the side of her face. “You with the baby—your baby—in your arms.”

I was crying again, fat tears falling onto the swaddle blanket.

My mother had often lamented the way many spiritual teachers talked about spiritual awareness coming only through experiences of great pain. “Kind of invalidates those of us who haven't had some kind of big trauma,” she said.

I'd felt cracked open by our fertility challenges and the loss of the twins. But as I felt the baby move in my arms and saw my mother's body opened and laid out in sacrifice for the deepest dream of both our hearts, I was cracked open again. Perhaps knowing this feeling was part of the point of the vision.

“Wide open, Momma,” I said without context. “Wide open.”

My mother seemed to recognize the reference. She laughed, and then we were crying and laughing at the same time.

Then I did what I had wanted to do since the nurse handed our baby to me. I pressed his body against my chest, my tears wetting his blanket, and breathed him into my heart.

 

The pediatric nurse
sent a runner to the visitors' lounge to give a report to the family. Bill had spent the fifty-six minutes of the cesarean in the five-by-ten-foot square of the elevator bank outside the visitors' lounge. He'd walked in circles, counting each loop he made of the perimeter—150 circles—until he'd reached the forty-five-minute mark, whereupon he broke his private vigil. He found my sister's eyes through the lounge window, his anticipation now having transitioned to terror, overtaken by memories of the night he thought he'd lost me along with the twins. My sister, gripped with her own memory of that night, did not move, but held his gaze in solidarity.

Bill saw the nurse first, walking in her pink teddy-bear scrubs with a stethoscope dangling from her neck. He nearly tackled her.

“They're all okay: Mom, baby, Grandma,” the nurse reported. My father and Bill's parents let out a loud whoop of relief.

“They're finishing the cesarean now,” the nurse said.

“Anything else you can tell us?” my sister asked.

“The baby is a beautiful, healthy seven pounds, three ounces,” she announced. “With a head of light blond hair.”

“Sonofabitch,” Bill said. The cheering stopped. Bill's father looked at him, appalled.

Bill burst into a kind of relieved, hysterical laughter.

“He's Finn,” Bill said. “The baby's name is Finn.”

 

When the surgery
was complete, Dr. Gerber's team swarmed my mother and me with hugs. She, Miranda, and the nurses who'd been in the room for the surgery were all wet-faced and crying. The team escorted us to the recovery room, where, for the first time, now that her arms were free of the OR straps and bindings, my mother could hold Finn.

“I'm a grandmother!” she said with delight.

Since Finn's birth, people have often asked my mother if she felt bereft or empty following the birth, after carrying Finn in her body for nine months.

“I really didn't,” she's always said in response. “I wanted Sara and Bill to have a baby, and to be a grandmother.”

My mother and I took turns holding Finn, as I stood flush with the gurney where she lay. I thought of something I'd read years before, by the poet Khalil Gibran—something that having this baby through surrogacy had allowed me to experience:

“You are the son of Life's longing for itself,” I said to Finn, absorbed in the light of his eyes.

My father and Bill appeared in the doorway. They sounded out of breath, as if they'd run the distance from the visitors' lounge.

Bill ran to the baby.

“Oh my god,” he said, and started crying.

My father walked to my mother's right side, looking her over for any signs of damage.

“He has your head shape, I think, Grandpa Casey,” Bill said, holding the baby up for my father to see.

“And your dad's hands and feet,” I said to Bill, running my fingers over Finn's wide palms and long fingers.

“He is everything,” Bill said, and stopped. He looked across the room at my mother and began crying again. “You made this possible,” he said, choking on the words.

“We did this,” my mother said. “We did it as a village.”

We carried Finn back across the room toward her so that my father could get a better look.

“Maybe the baby in your dream in England was a boy,” I said to Bill. “He has the right hair color.”

“This is so much better than the dream,” Bill said. “He's real.”

Bill tugged the swaddle blanket tighter around Finn's body and held him, feeling his weight, so little and so here.

 

Before we were
released to the postdelivery floor, a lactation consultant arrived and asked if I wanted to nurse. I hadn't expected to have the opportunity to try right away. I struggled to remember the protocol we'd worked out with Jamie Simms. My brain felt overloaded, and it took me a minute to access our plan: to give the baby colostrum (my mother would pump and I would nurse) for the first two days. Then my mother would bind to dry up her milk, the way I did after the twins were born, and I would continue to nurse and hope that milk would come in.

The consultant walked us to a glider chair in the adjoining room and instructed me to sit straight in the chair. I felt afraid then, not having expected to face this moment in front of my family. For the first time since Finn had been placed in my arms, I was afraid that he would reject me.

I slipped my sweater down from my shoulders. Bill handed Finn to the nurse. He lingered a moment before letting him go. The nurse placed Finn in my arm like a football.

“You have to turn him to you, offer the nipple, and push him into the breast,” she said, miming the motion she wanted us to make.

How did babies, having just been born, know how to eat? I felt rising pressure, as if this were a test of Finn's recognition of me as his mother.

The nurse positioned Finn and squeezed my breast with a firm grip. He opened his eyes, popped open his mouth, and latched, unassisted, onto my nipple.

The force of his sucking shocked me, and I gasped.

“He's strong,” the nurse said. “This one is going to do fine.”

Finn's jaw began to move as he swallowed, sucking hard with his jaws. The room was cold, but his mouth was warm on my skin. “Oh, wow,” I said. Our baby was nursing. Our baby, a baby who was biologically made from parts of Bill and me, was sucking on my breast. He raised his hand from his side and placed it on my chest. His fingers curled on my skin, and he burrowed into the breast as he sucked.

“He's nursing!” I called to my mother across the room. Tears spilled again down my face; salty drops ran over my cheeks and neck. I couldn't know for sure what the Great Mother would have said, but this moment, with our baby feeding from my breast, felt like an initiation, too.

The nurse showed Bill and me how to feed Finn formula through
a small tube called an assisted nursing system, so we could nurse even if I did not get milk.

The rest of the family rotated through the recovery room in shifts of two or three. At 11:20 PM, a resident sent Bill and me up to the fourteenth floor with the baby.

“We'll bring your mother up right behind you,” she said.

A nurse with apple cheeks who looked so young I thought she must still be in school delivered us to an odd, octagonal-shaped room at the corner of the hallway.