It’s 5 am. My daughter and I, showered and fed, are driving down the hill while all around us blackness engulfs the countryside and rolls over the truck gentle as duck feathers. We are going to get a baby.
That tuna fish casserole for breakfast ought to fuel us the marathon ahead.
As we drive toward town my daughter comments, “If I was in labor we wouldn’t have time to consider the philosophical side of having a child.”
“Such as?”
“Does a person know what a life-changing event this is?”
“Depends on the person,” I say.
“As you get older you are more set in your ways,” says my daughter. “A young person might say, ’Whatever.’
“There is advantage in being more mature…”
The trouble is when you are older they say you have “Advanced maternal age.” My kid, advanced maternal age? Ah well. Daughter’s doctor did not want her to go past her date. There is more of a chance for placental breakdown, the doctor said, and still births. Daughter D opted for an induction.
And so we are driving and talking and anxious and waiting for the sun to break through. It is surreal driving to the hospital, no labor pains, no huffing and puffing, no woman swearing or yelling “Drive faster.”
When we arrive in the hospital with her cervix 3 cm dilated. After being attached to the fetal monitor we discover that she has had two contractions within the last 5 minutes.
Can you believe it? We are going in for an induction and she is having contractions? Within the next two hours the Obstetrician comes in and breaks her amniotic sac, which causes the contractions to come on stronger, but not strong enough to get the job done. “No pain, no gain,” says the nurse, and begins a Pitosin drip.
Contractions come. Daughter D can’t imagine 12 hours of this so she requests an epidural anesthesia, which partially numbs the abdomen, but not completely her legs. She has some nausea, some break-through pain, they up the anesthesia. As I am filming the monitor the baby’s heart beat drops. The team is on it immediately. “He just took a dive into the birth canal and scared himself,” says the doctor, “Let’s have a baby.” She affixes a monitor onto the baby’s scalp, and we watch his heart rate rise.
In four contractions and maybe a dozen pushes, a little baby’s purple wrinkled head appears, a magical moment. He slides out, whole, complete, pink, plump like a rubber doll. I get the honor of cutting the cord, and daughter gets the honor of holding her son.
A life-changing moment? Definitely. He’s perfect, beautiful. His color is pink. His hair is dark with every hair affixed as though by a movie special effects team. Maybe he visited a Divine hair salon before making his debut.
That night a wonderful gentle man, a CranioSacral therapist gifted Daughter D with an examination for the baby. He treats newborns gratis because he believes the 72 hours after birth are critical. I can’t explain exactly what he does; somehow he supports the body/mind in self-correction. I do know that CranioSacral Therapy focuses on the release of any abnormal tension in the fascia (fabric of the body). The therapist uses the rhythm produced by the production and re-absorption of Cerebral Spinal Fluid to locate restrictions. Using gentle touch, the therapist assists the body’s self-corrective actions.
Baby D cried a birth cry—his wasn’t loud at birth—and he opened his eyes. Prior to that he had puffy closed eyes. I said I believed he had been rebirthed. The therapist agreed and said he only had a little swelling in the neck, and that everything was wonderful. I think he got the message that he was no longer in utero.
p.s.
This birth is the Grand Finale’ that began three years ago. At that time Daughter D said to me, "I want to adopt a child, a child for Africa.” I said, “Why don’t we make a documentary of the process.”
“I had thought of that, but dismissed it.”
We found that together we are better than the sum of the parts. What we might dismiss on our own we fan into white-hot intensity together. And so we began…
She began filming. I started writing a supplementary journal to our documentary.
We called ourselves “Two Dorks and a Camera Production Company.” The working title for my book was Beyond That Next Turning of the Canyon Walls.
“May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl...beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.”
--Edward Abbey
Now I’m calling the book if
A journal, a film, and a baby
What if heaven was a state of mind and not a physical location?
What if one could live their dreams?
What if we really could stop worrying and be happy?
The Imagineers at Walt Disney Studios say,
“The formula is there is no formula.”
p.s.p.s.
On the day Baby D was born I received, from my publisher, 5 leather bound copies of my book
It’s Hard To Stay On A Horse While You’re Unconscious.*
There was some debate whether I would get one or five, so I was delighted when five arrived. It seemed fitting, a first edition for a little first edition.
*See www.wishonawhitehorse.com
