I married Jason a few weeks before I turned
twenty-four. I was attending graduate
school, and I was finally learning to relax and trust after working out my
issues and my fears. I was enjoying
setting up house for the two of us and learning to cook. Basically, I was just having fun being
young. And I had clear plans for my
future. I was going to get my counseling
license. I was going to work a few years
to pay down school loans. I was going to
enjoy the unbridled freedom that comes with being on my own.
I was going to get a big surprise!
After feeling “not quite right” for a little while, I
took a pregnancy test one day as my husband played video games in the other
room. I didn’t tell him that I was
taking the test. I was taking it just in case, to rule out
pregnancy.
I stood there at the bathroom sink the entire two
minutes, holding my breath, watching the color develop, trying to decipher as
early as I could if there was a hint of color where the second “you’re
pregnant” line would be.
And after two minutes, it was glaringly obvious. One tiny, little line of color changed
everything. Four months after getting
married, I was pregnant. Yes, I know how
it happens. But I was young and thought,
Hey, it won’t happen to me till we are ready. We just got married. And we have plans!
But God had plans, too.
I must’ve looked at the test at least five times just to
make sure I wasn’t seeing things. There
were two lines, right? My hand
automatically went to my belly, and I chuckled in disbelief.
After standing there a few stunned minutes, letting the
shock wear off, I froze . . . Oh, dear!
I have to tell Jason!
I mean, this is probably the biggest news you could drop
on someone, besides something like, “Hey, guess what? Did you know that I am actually an alien and
can change forms? Wanna see me turn into
a platypus?”
His world was about to go from relaxation and freedom to
responsibility and financial catastrophe.
(Okay, not really! But I knew
that’s how he’d see it.) I, at least,
already had a “maternal” mindset since I was the oldest of six. And I was used to changes. I didn’t like them, but I could roll with
them. But even last minute changes, like
which night we grocery shopped on, would leave Jason feeling
discombobulated. (That’s one of my top
two favorite words – discombobulated.
Along with the word ‘creepy.’
Cracks me up.)
Jason is the baby of the three kids in his family. And he lived at home until we got
married. So he had only been on his own
for four or five months. And Jason, as
anyone who knows him will agree (and I love it about him), is pretty much a big
kid himself. He loves toys and games and
mischief, just as any kid would. How
would he take the news that he was going to be a father? We had thought for sure that we would have at
least a couple years before kids arrived.
I stood there in the bathroom for a few more seconds,
trying to wipe the smirk off my face. I
didn’t want to alarm him with my expression before I could deliver the
news. (Oh, yeah, cold and stone-faced
was so much better!) For him, this would
be coming out of nowhere because, as I said, I hadn’t told him that I was taking
a pregnancy test. I don’t remember if I
even told him that I thought I could be pregnant.
Well, I walked over to the room where he was busy playing
his computer game, and I solemnly and rather robotically asked him, “Would you
turn off the computer, please?”
“Okaaaaaay?” he said, with one eyebrow cocked in a
quizzical expression. I couldn’t think
of any words to deliver the news, so I just raised the test up in the air and
stood there giggling (I do that when I’m embarrassed or nervous) with an “Oh my
goodness, I don’t know how this happened” smile.
A fleeting look of confusion came over his face, followed
very closely by one of wide-eyed terror.
(I will always remember that face!
Seriously, I don’t think he could have looked more terrified if my head
had exploded while I stood there.) His
hands flew to his mouth and he stumbled backward as he yelled, “NO, NO, NO,
NO!”
But YES, YES, YES!
It was God’s plan and nine months later we welcomed our first child into
the world. Within thirteen-and-a-half
months, we were blessed with a new marriage, a new rental home, and a new baby
boy who (Thank God!) had made it into the world safely. That, in itself, was a blessing from
God.
The pregnancy itself wasn’t that bad. Other than the morning sickness, which, oddly
enough, started the day after I found out I was pregnant. And it hit several days out of each week for
a couple months. There’s nothing quite
like leaping from a still-moving car, holding your hand over your mouth, struggling
to unlock the door, rushing through the house to the bathroom, and barely
making it to the toilet so that you can throw up everything you ate that
day. (The only meal I could stomach at
those times was Burger King fries with a Sprite. And I didn’t even like Burger King fries.)
It’s even more fun when you have absolutely nothing in
your stomach, yet you still have to throw up, and so you run to the kitchen to
get a glass of water so that you can chug as much as you can while you are
gagging so that at least you have something to throw up and your body doesn’t
have to strain as hard.
I also became majorly repulsed by chicken. What is it about pregnancy that causes
irrational, uncontrollable repulsions or cravings? It is a physical urge stronger than the need
for sleep or to go to the bathroom.
I remember being so sick one week that I had to go to the
store for some soup. But I began to grow
terrified on the way there because I knew that somewhere in that store . . .
was chicken. And I knew that chicken germs and chicken
scent and tiny particles of chicken were floating through the air and were
going to make me spontaneously throw up all over the aisle. I avoided any aisle that took me by any kind
of meat as I ran to the canned soups, grabbed what I wanted without barely
looking, paid as fast as I could, and got outta there.
I only really had one craving with that pregnancy. One day, I realized that I just had to have
something that I never had before . . . strawberry cheesecake ice cream. Nothing else besides “strawberry cheesecake
ice cream” would do. And I just knew
that it had to be out there somewhere.
So I scoured the ice cream case at our local store and . . . there it was . . . in all its glory. I bought it, took it home, opened it, took
one bite, and put it away and never touched it again. But it was the best bite ever! (With another pregnancy, I craved grapefruit,
even though I never ever bought grapefruit before. And I have been a grapefruit eater since, as
have my children.)
The only other hard part about pregnancy was trying to
stay awake when my body wanted sleep.
That was actually my first clue that something was up. I would fall asleep in my graduate school
classes, as if some evil spell in green smoke wound around me and forced my
head down and my eyes closed. I couldn’t
fight it if I tried. And if there is one
place you do not fall asleep, it is in a graduate class that you are paying
thousands for. I remember thinking,
“What the heck is wrong with me?”
After we found out we were pregnant, we decided it was
time to move back to our hometown. But
we were still close enough that I could commute the next year to finish my last
year of graduate school. So we left our
cute little apartment and moved into a tiny rental house that my parents
owned. I had said, “Yes” to my
step-dad’s offer before seeing the place.
And as it turned out, it was filthy, filthy, filthy. (Think crack-house
with pets.)
So for my eighth month of pregnancy, we lived with my mom
and dad (I go back and forth between referring to him as “dad” or “step-dad”)
while the place was being cleaned. And I
tell you, nothing is more wonderful
than being twenty-four years old, eight months pregnant, and having to live at
your parent’s house for any amount of time, with several younger brothers. Especially when one parent loves to scream
all the time. It was a magical, magical
time! (Note the dripping sarcasm.)
Actually, there was one thing more wonderful than
that. One day, very late into my
pregnancy, Jason decided to take me out to dinner as a special treat. I had been feeling hugely fat and hadn’t
dressed up and gone out for a nice relaxing meal in months. And I was excited.
I did my best to find a tent that could pass as a nice
dinner dress and I prettied myself up for my husband. And as my husband opened the door of the
restaurant and placed his hand on the small of my back to usher me in (I love
that!), I actually felt quite feminine for the first time in months. A little desirable. And I smiled to myself.
And then, as we sat there, waiting to be seated . . . a
gorgeous, thin girl in a skimpy little outfit walked by.
And then another.
And then another.
I kid you not, it must have been “Gorgeous Girl Night” at
the restaurant, as groups of them walked by us.
Not just one or two girls, but groups
of them. Herds of them! All right in
front of us. I got fatter and shorter
with every girl that paraded past us. By
the time they called our names to be seated, I felt like an Oompa-Loompa-sized
Violet after she ate the gum in Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and turned into a blueberry. I was an Oompa-Loompa blueberry. I should have laid down on my side and let my
husband roll me to our table. It wasn’t
the best meal for my self-esteem!
Anyway, we eventually got out of my parent’s house (not
fast enough) and into the rental. (And
eventually, those skinny girls will be hugely pregnant, watching new skinny
girls parade past them. It’s a beautiful
“circle of life” kind of thing.) And we
had several weeks to finish projects before the baby came, to try to make the
house more livable.
A bit of advice:
Do not try the old-fashioned way of getting a baby to come out (which is
doing the same thing you did to get the baby in) when it is 11 p.m. and you are
exhausted and your house still isn’t ready for a baby but you don’t care
because you just want the baby out now. Because it works!
Moments after our “just for fun, let’s see if it really
works” attempt, I felt a huge ‘pop’ and a rush of warm water. My water had broken.
“UMM, HONEY!” I
yelled, as I held a shirt under me and waddled from the bed to the
bathroom. “I THINK MY WATER JUST
BROKE!” Yeah, the rushing stream of
fluid all over my hand was a dead giveaway.
We both froze in terror when we realized what we had
done. Stupid, stupid people! We weren’t ready for it. I take
it back! We were just kidding! It wasn’t supposed to work! It’s just folklore, an old wives’ tale!
As we scrambled around to call the doctor and get
everything in order for the homebirth, I realized that I just blew my chance of
getting the last good night of sleep I could have gotten before the baby
came. I wouldn’t be getting any sleep
that night (or for many months after), and after a whole day of being up
already. Stupid, stupid me! Next time, wait till after I had a good
night’s sleep. (Actually, next time, no
old-fashioned attempt during the whole last trimester. That sounds much better.)
We had planned on a homebirth. But since our house was in no condition yet
to deliver a baby, we went to a friend’s house (a husband and wife) to deliver
there. It was also the house we would be
staying in for the week after. The nurse
showed up and we all got ready. And
since my water broke first, I figured it would go quickly.
Apparently, the baby never got the message.
For twenty hours, I writhed in pain. I walked around the house in pain. I sat and stood in pain. And for the last several hours, I couldn’t
stand any sounds at all. I needed it
completely silent so that I could concentrate on the pain. So when my husband said something quietly
from the corner of the room while I sat on the bed with my eyes closed and
concentrated on making it through another contraction, I shushed him. It wasn’t mean or anything, just a simple, raspy,
hissed “Shut up!”
And you know what he did?
He got offended and pouted, telling people, “She yelled
at me and won’t let me talk.” He didn’t
like being shushed.
I wanted to punch him in the throat!
I wanted him to lean in close so I could grab him around
the neck and remind him of why I was in this condition in the first place!
He also got miffed when I borrowed his t-shirts when my
clothes stopped fitting my ever-expanding belly. I wanted to reach around his neck then, too,
and remind him of why my belly was growing!
“YOU did this to me,” I wanted
to yell. “That is why my clothes don’t fit anymore. I’m sharing my body with a whole person
because of YOU. The least you can do is
share your t-shirts, you child!”
(Honestly, when you’re pregnant, take those opportunities
to say things you wouldn’t normally say but that feel so good to say. Because you won’t get them again, especially
if you are too nice like me. Pregnancy
is the perfect excuse. Unfortunately, I
never took the chance to let it all fly.
I was still too nice, even in the throes of labor. During the awful transition stage of labor
with my second pregnancy, instead of swearing up a storm like I wanted to do,
all I could get out was, “Gosh, golly, gee, this hurts! I hate Eve!”
In a calm, hushed, strained tone.)
Anyway, so I had been in labor for about twenty hours by
this point, and the nurse decided it was time to go to the hospital and see
what was going on, especially since my water broke almost a day before and
infection can set in.
At this point, I was obviously afraid of taking an
hour-car-ride to the hospital. I had
visions of me on the side of the road in a major city, giving birth as
motorists drove by and took pictures.
And I was afraid of being strapped in a car with no place to go, in the
pain that I was in. This can’t be
good.
But we had no choice.
So I settled my 46-extra-pounds body (Yep! On a 5-foot-and-3/4-inch tall frame.) into
the car and we started off, at rush hour, to make it to the hospital an hour
away, while the nurse drove behind us so that she could be there to deliver the
baby on the side of the road, if need be.
Yeah, thanks. Very comforting!
But you know what?
Oddly enough, it was the best part of the whole labor. I relaxed like I hadn’t relaxed in twenty
hours. And in the hour-long-drive, I
dilated from four to nearly ten centimeters.
It was wonderful. Really, it was.
We made it to the hospital okay, and I walked from the
car straight into the hospital while Jason parked the car. I had no idea where I was going, but I just
kept walking on auto-pilot, assuming that I’d end up where I was supposed to be
eventually. If I didn’t drop down on the
floor and give birth in the hallway, that is.
Finally, someone rolled a wheelchair up to me and, even
though I didn’t really look at him to see if he was a hospital worker or a
patient, I climbed in and let him push me wherever he wanted. I remember thinking, I hope this guy knows where to take me and I hope that Jason can find
me because I have no idea where I am going or who is taking me there.
When you are having a baby, you are so out of it that you
don’t care about the little details, like who is wheeling you where. Or how many people see you naked. Or how big that needle is that they are
shoving in your back. Or how the nurses
have to wipe up your delicate areas when they change your “diaper.” And how terrifyingly big and ugly that
stretchy, mesh “underwear” is that they make you wear after having a baby. Tiny, insignificant details.
[Although, I did get a little bothered when my doctor
invited Jason to come see things from his view when I was getting an exam
once. I was spread eagle in front of him
with those duck-bill things holding me open.
And my doctor said, “Hey, Jason, come here and have a look up
there. I like to involve the husbands
and let them see these things so they can really understand what is going on
with their wives.”
Umm, yeah, thanks a
lot, says the woman laying immobile on the table who wants to leave certain
things up to the imagination. My husband
has now seen more of me than any husband should. It’s a wonder that he ever wanted to be
intimate again.]
Well, I eventually got to where I should be. I guess the wheel-chair-driver knew where to
take me, given my giant belly and my panting and all. And Jason caught up with us just after I stripped
out of my clothes and put on one of those “dignity-preserving” hospital
gowns. I think they make you wear these
so that you feel weaker in their presence, making them feel stronger. And so that they know you are not going to
just get up and run from the hospital in the middle of an uncomfortable exam or
procedure.
(Oddly enough, as I was changing out of my clothes and
standing there butt-naked, a nurse walked in on me and actually looked
embarrassed and apologetic. And I
thought, Why are you embarrassed and
apologetic? You see naked people all the
time and you are about to see all of me in ways I never have. I’m the one standing here in all my super-fat
glory. I’m the one who should be
embarrassed! And yet, I really
wasn’t. Tiny, insignificant details.)
I spent the next four or five hours in the hospital in
labor, on top of the twenty hours of labor I already went through. And thankfully the drive was so nice and
relaxing because those four or five hours were worse than the previous twenty.
I couldn’t stand the feeling of the oxygen mask on my
face. I felt suffocated. So I kept swatting it off, and they kept
scolding me and putting it back on. And
I couldn’t stand the feeling of the baby-heart-monitor strapped to my belly, so
I kept pushing that off. They didn’t
like that either.
And then, there is a wonderful thing that happens after
getting an epidural and a shot of pitocin.
I began vomiting up bile (I didn’t have any food or water in my stomach
to throw up) into a little dish next to me, as my husband watched. And even when there was nothing left to throw
up, I threw up some more, with every muscle in my body straining and
contorting. I’m sure it was lovely to
watch! (I tell you, you have no dignity
left after having a baby!)
And while I couldn’t necessarily feel the acute pain of
the contractions anymore after the epidural, the pitocin made my contractions
so strong that I felt like I would split wide open from the inside out with
every contraction, like filling a basketball with so much pudding that it
bursts a seam and spills its contents everywhere. It was awful.
And it still didn’t do the trick.
During this time, even though I was at ten centimeters, I
never really got to the pushing stage.
But I was done! I was fed
up. I wanted this baby out NOW! And by golly, I would just do it myself if I
had to. So when the doctor was out of
the room, I tried to push on my own. I
seriously envisioned the doctor walking in and me sitting there holding a
newborn and saying to him, “See what I did when you were out, you unhelpful,
worthless blob of flesh.”
But the nurses caught me.
They came into the room and said, “Are you pushing? Because the baby’s heart rate keeps dropping
on our monitors.” (Bossy, nosey
nurses!) It was then that the doctors
decided that something must not be right and that we had to do a
C-section.
And at 1 a.m. in the morning – twenty-five-and-a-half
hours after my water broke, twenty-five-and-a-half hours of painful labor, a
soothing hour-long car ride, suffocating mask and monitors, and violent
vomiting spells - they wheeled me into the operating room. And
in a few short moments, I would be holding my baby - the one who made me
violently ill for the first few months of pregnancy. (Don’t worry, kid! I won’t hold it against you! But I do reserve the right to use “the guilt
card” if ever I need to. And your poor
father had months of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches for lunch because the
mere smell of food cooking made me run for the bathroom. And if he so much as mentioned the word
“chicken”. . . !)
Anyway, months of sickness and back pain and struggling
to get my shoes on my swollen feet and young, gorgeous girls parading past me
as I grew fatter and shorter would be over in moments. Hours and hours of exhausting labor were
coming to an end, and I was looking forward to meeting this new little
person. And as they wheeled me into the
operating room, I only had one burning question that I just had to have
an answer for. Just one!
“Will the contractions stop immediately after you
cut me open?”
Seriously, nothing else mattered to me at that
moment! I’d have done it myself on the
trip through the hallway if I had a pocket knife.
[And guess what the first thing was that I asked after
they took him out, let me look at him for all of three seconds, whisked him
away, stitched me up, and sent me to recovery?
I tell you, it felt like they wheeled me off to the other end of the
hospital and opened some closet door, shoved me in, and called it
“recovery.” I didn’t hear any noise or
see hardly any lights. Okay, so it was
one o’clock in the morning and I was on a lot of medication. And there was someone there with me,
some disembodied voice that came from the other end of the room. I don’t remember ever seeing his face,
though.
But as I laid there in this lonely . . . room? . . .
closet? . . . morgue? . . . who knows? . . . all I could think was that I just
had a baby and he was floating somewhere out there in the hospital and no one
would remember where I was. And how long
were they going to leave me in “recovery” when I was wide awake and
coherent? Okay, not really coherent, I
guess. It felt like I was swimming
through a swamp in my head.
Anyway, so I had these thoughts going through my swampy
head, and then I called out to the disembodied voice and asked one question. Now, if you asked one question to a
mysterious disembodied voice just after delivering a baby by C-section, you
would think that it would be something like, “When can I see my baby?” or “How
is he? Is he healthy and doing
well?” Maybe, “Where are we and how long
do I have to be here?” or even, “Can I have more drugs, please?”
No, the one and only
question that I remember asking is, “Do you guys take Blue Cross
BlueShield?” It dawned on me as I laid
there that we hadn’t expected to end up at the hospital and that we just had an
unscheduled C-section. And since I was
already at ten centimeters by the time I got to this hospital, I never thought
to check about our insurance, you know, being so busy having a baby and
all. “Yes,” the voice said, “we take
Blue Cross BlueShield.” And then I heard
him snicker.]
Well, after they took him out, we found out that the cord
was triple-wrapped around his neck and that he was curled up in a contorted,
sunny-side-up position. (Thus the back
labor I apparently had. So much worse
than regular labor!) He would not have
made it out alive had it been a natural birth.
So God, in His grace and wisdom, allowed the labor to progress slowly
enough that I ended up at the hospital and barely made it into the pushing
stage.
And while I was still laying on the table, splayed open
like a gutted deer, the doctor asked my husband, “Do you want to see your
baby’s home for the past nine months?”
And then he lifted up my uterus and held it for Jason to see, like a
prized fish that he just caught. What is
it with male doctors showing off parts of my body to my husband, like a trophy
fish? I just caught a whopper. Look
how big it is!)
It was a rough labor and delivery. But God was good. And we had a healthy baby boy!
Unfortunately for us, though, the hospital badly needed
our room.
“You don’t mind leaving right now, do you?” they
asked.
Well, I guess not!
And so not even a day and a half after being sliced open
from hip to hip, we were kicked out with a brand-new baby. Another word of advice: If you ever have a
C-section, bring a pillow with you so that you have something to hold against
your stomach on the drive home. Every
little bump is torture. Not to mention
going over train tracks!
And we went to our friends’ house to spend the next week.
However, after a day there, the wife began to get really
upset with having other people in her house.
And we felt like such an imposition and burden that we left there,
too. (We did not stay friends with her
after her divorce from her husband, not even a year after their wedding.)
Thankfully, though, Jason’s sister and her family were
out of town and let us stay there for the week, while Jason returned to our
crack-house every day after work to fix it up so that we could move in. And finally, we had a chance to enjoy our new
little family without any interruptions or disturbances. (But I really, really missed having the
hospital staff bring me my meals and being in a hospital bed that goes up and
down with the push of a button. In the
normal bed at my sister-in-law’s house, I tore a stitch trying to sit up. That really hurt!)
But other than all that, everything was good. And D. was beautiful and healthy and just
perfect. In fact, he barely made a peep
when he was born (which momentarily scared us all), and he immediately assumed
a wide-eyed, innocent look that is characteristically him. He also assumed the look of an alien, with
his large, cone-shaped head. That really
terrified Jason, who didn’t know that it was normal after a baby has been
wedged in the birth canal for over a day.
“I’ll love him anyway,” he said.
I looked at that tiny, little bundle that first day in
the hospital and thought, Wow! What
an amazing blessing!
And then I immediately thought, Oh, no! He’s going to leave someday and go to
college, and I won’t be there to protect him or help him know what to do. (I’m a catastrophizer. I do that!
I can ruin any situation by finding the worst in it.) He was so innocent and helpless that the
thought saddened me. And it scared
me! Time began to speed up. I only had eighteen years to mold him before
he would be set free into the world. And
eighteen years is not a lot of time!
I was determined to do things right. I devoured the parenting books. I was going to do everything by the book,
from feeding the right kinds of food, to discipline, to toilet training. I was prepared and confident. And being the oldest of six, (Yes, there’s
that annoying phrase again. Trust me,
I’m not bragging about it. It just has a
lot to do with who I am.) I was rather comfortable as a new mom.
And my first son proved to be a breeze. He was incredibly content and easy
going. He loved nothing more than just
being in the same room as us and watching life go on. Compared to other more “busy” children, his
mild, good-natured attitude made it easy to feel smug. I couldn’t help but think, Wow! I must really be doing something right! (This thought is actually a prayer in
disguise - a challenge to God to send you more difficult children. My third child was the answer to that
prayer!)
He did have a fit when I had to leave to go to work, even
though it was only part-time and he stayed with his Daddy or Grandma. And he would scream till his whole body was
red when he was in his car seat. But
other than that, he was a charmer!
Having children changed my world. Life was good before kids. But looking back, I realize that it was like
living in various shades of gray. But
having kids lit up my world like a rainbow.
Life became vibrantly colored.
The highs were higher and the lows were lower. And while there was more love than I ever
knew possible, there was also more fear.
I’m not kidding.
Your heart will be ripped out of your body every time you hear about a
tragedy involving a child. Every time
your child looks at you with an expression that says, “Please, make the pain
stop,” you will be reduced to a pile of helpless blubber. (Seriously, you can’t do this “parent thing”
unless you are on your knees in prayer all the time.) As soon as D. was born, every bad news
story about a child had my child’s face on it.
And I would get a profound, tangible feeling of anger and sadness that
would make my stomach churn whenever I heard the word “abortion.” (They don’t prepare you for this in the
parenting books. I had to stop listening
to the news for a long time.) Even my
wonderful Grandma K would tell me about sad baby stories she heard, not
noticing the shudders than ran through my whole body. (Really, Grandma, I love you. But you gotta stop that.)
