Today is my son's 35th birthday. We had planned to be with him today, but he and his wife have been sick with something akin to pneumonia, so he asked us to wait. I'm hoping we'll be able to see them soon.
Forgive an old woman her memories. It's hard not to think about one of the biggest days in a mother's life when her older child hits a milestone. I remember the day pretty clearly. I couldn't sleep because my back was hurting so much. I got up six-ish to go to the bathroom and saw blood and mucous. Mama had warned me about the so-called "bloody show," so I expected my water to break. (It never did. They had to break it. So much for one myth!) I got a shower and woke my husband. He was a bit irritated because a friend of his had warned him about false labor. He fully expected to take me to the hospital, only for them to send me home again, so he dressed for work, thinking he'd make it in to work later.
However, I was already 3 or 4 centimeters dilated when they checked me, so to my husband's surprise, I was admitted. Back then, the pre-delivery routine was rather inhumane. Women in labor had their pubis shaved, and they were given enemas. I was not quite 24, so I knew no better. (Thankfully, five years later, when I had my son Daniel, those practices were obsolete.)
I was in labor all day long. I remember squeezing Mama's hand on the right and my husband's hand on the left. I remember my husband's sister-in-law advising me to go ahead and scream if I felt like it. (I wouldn't have screamed then, no matter what. I was determined to be as different from her as I could be.)
I remember one of my friends being there when I began to get the urge to push. Having had two kids, she knew what was happening, so nurses were called. They checked me, and apparently I was moving right along. They got the bed and stretcher tangled together (wheels), and that took a minute to sort out, then I was being rushed down the hall, watching the ceiling tiles fly by.
In the delivery room, Dr. Truly performed a "saddle block" anesthesia (again, something I did not do with my second baby) and kept threatening to spank me if I didn't lie still. It tickled. And then it hurt. It also kept me from feeling anything, so I couldn't push. Nurses mashed down on my stomach to push the baby out, and Dr. Truly used forceps to help things along. When Stephen was finally born, he had a wedge-shaped head from all that mishandling.
My husband (nor anyone else from family) was allowed in the delivery room, so he was standing there with my mother when they brought Stephen out to show him off. Doug noticed that Stephen was a boy and that he had unattached earlobes (some kind of proof of Doug being the "real" father, I guess). Mama was so busy counting fingers and toes that she didn't notice if the baby was a boy or girl.
Doug likes to joke that Stephen kept business hours. In the hospital by 8 a.m., delivery over and done with by 5 p.m. (His brother five years later was the opposite, coming to us at 3 a.m.) I was discharged from the hospital a couple of days later, feeling as if they'd forgotten to give me the instruction manual for my new baby. I had one thing, though, that no one needed to teach me or tell me about. Love. For the first time (but not the last), I realized that I truly would have sacrificed my life for someone else, that my love for this baby was so complete, it was beyond rational. It was "I'd fight a tiger for you" love.
And so the adventure began, and it's not over yet. I still love Stephen (and his brother Daniel) with such intensity that I can't begin to understand it.
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