Page 75 of Remember Me

“That’s real pretty. Okay — I’m all finished here. The doctor will be in to see you shortly. Until then just try to get some rest. First labors can take a while sometimes.” We thanked her and she left.

In the next several hours, I kept nervous vigil as contractions rippled through Birdie’s body, arriving first in constant five to six minute intervals, and then four to five. Her brow pinched and her expression grew fierce with determination.

It was more hours still until the contractions heightened in tempo and intensity, arriving every three minutes and leaving Birdie in agony for a brief span.She never made a sound, though, enduring with a panting quietude that left me humbled.

At one point she flicked tired eyes in my direction. “I think I want the drugs after all, Big. It hurts.”

“Oh, baby. How many kids did you say you wanted?” I stroked her hair. This was killing me. I needed to get her mind off what was going on with her body.

She ignored me and I started to pace restlessly, long since having given up on the couch. There was nothing I could do, and it was driving me crazy. Every time the nurses descended en masse on the room to poke at buttons or look at the strip of paper that was continually printing from the monitor, I fled to the corner or the attached bathroom. I had never felt as out of place, useless, and in the way as I did here.

Finally, the nurses decided it was time to push, and a new flurry of activity began: breaking the bed down, adjusting the monitors and sensors, situating Birdie, and paging the doctor.

“Dad, why don’t you get up there by Mom’s head and hold her hand?”One of the nurses motioned me forward.

“I don’t wanna hold his hand,” Birdie grumbled. “He did this to me.”

The nurses laughed and I winced, but gamely I did as the nurse suggested.

And then things got fun.

Despite her last-minute complaint, my warrior had elected to do this without an epidural, so there was yelling.

Loud, guttural yelling.

There was cursing.

There was praying.

Moaning.

Groaning.

Crying.

There was blood, and fluids, and all sorts of other things I didn’t want to look at too closely or identify.

And then, in a final gush of mystery and miracle, there was life, held aloft in the doctor’s hands like victory claimed after a sweet and violent clash. I held Birdie’s hand and openly wept as the nurses placed the slick, squalling baby on my wife’s breast, and her shaking fingers touched a tiny cheek. Then I wept some more when the doctor handed me the shears and instructed me in cutting our son’s cord.

Our son.

It hit me when the nurses carried him to the scale to clean and take his vitals that we had a son, instead of a daughter. I was torn between staying at Birdie’s side or following to stare, in open-mouthed awe, at the human we had created. He was red, and squalling, and entirely too large to have come from Birdie’s body. He had a cap of fuzzy black hair and eyes that were currently narrowed in infant rage.

“Eight pounds, seven ounces,” the nurse announced. “Twenty-two and a quarter inches. Healthy set of lungs.”

Behind me, Birdie groaned. “Way too big, Big. I don’t forgive you.”

“Birdie. We have a boy.”

“What? No. Check again.”

“Pretty sure he’s a dude, babe.”

“But the nursery’s pink!”

“You want to send him back?”

A nurse snorted.

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