Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  “Now I’m nervous,” my mother said, as we walked from the ultrasound room to meet Dr. Peaceman. “I read that the baby gains half a pound a week from this point forward. I don’t know if I can push a ginormous baby out of this old body.”

  “Weight tests can be a pound or two off in either direction,” Dr. Peaceman assured her. “Don’t worry about his size.”

  When he checked her cervix, it was high up in the back, closed tight in a thin, straight line, like a clam.

  “With so little precedent for delivery at your age,” Dr. Peaceman said, “we just don’t know if your body will go into labor on its own. We assume so, but if you haven’t started by week forty-one, we’ll do an induction.”

  “Forty-one!” my mother said, aghast. “Dr. Gerber told us we wouldn’t go beyond thirty-eight when we met with her.”

  “That was in the first trimester, before we saw how well you’ve tolerated the pregnancy,” he said. “You have yet to express a single troubling symptom.”

  As much as I wanted our baby out with us, I was grateful, right there at the end, for a little more time. “We still have so much to do,” I told my mother on the way home.

  “Well, you’d better get on it,” my mother said. “I want this baby out by February twelfth.”

  The next week, we had the fire department professionally install a car-seat base in both of our cars, something my mother thought was ridiculous (how hard could it be?) but that the teachers of our Prentice classes had implied was the only nonnegligent action to take. We attended the remaining CPR and infant first aid class, and the next night moved my mother’s things to the basement, where we’d outfitted the new guest room with a featherbed mattress and favorite items from our travels that we hoped would give it a feeling of luxury and warmth. And the last weekend in January, we finally did the nursery.

  We invited my sister and brother-in-law over for a decorating party. Bill put together the changing table and the crib. I vacuumed the carpet, washed the floorboards, and stacked linen shelves in the closet. My mother informed us that we would need to prewash all the baby’s things with a special detergent before he came home.

  Taking the tags off all the clothes and folding them into the drawers and closet shelves called up my old fears again. As the crib went up, I fought the urge to grab everything and put it back in the closet. My mother started a marathon of laundry, washing multiple loads of onesies, burp clothes, swaddle blankets, sweaters, and a quilted zip-up sack with a hood, a splurge from Nordstrom that we thought would be warm and ideal for the baby’s trip home from the hospital.

  I stacked our children’s-book collection on the bookshelf, a cheap, white IKEA basic, my own from my old bedroom at my parents’ house. It was the first piece of furniture I had bought with my own money and the one piece I had moved to college and then to my first apartment, to England, and all the way back to this nursery. I wanted our baby to have it now, a place to house his favorite books.

  By six o’clock, Bill had assembled all the large pieces, the green patterned sheets were on the crib, and I’d switched on the Japanese paper lamp Sandy had sent from New Mexico, which projected images of trucks and bicycle riders on the ceiling.

  My mother went to the kitchen with my sister to decide on something to order for dinner. I walked around the room, straightening the books, running my bare feet over the furry rug and the pile of blankets stacked six high on the changing-table shelves.

  “Do you still feel scared?” Bill asked.

  “No,” I said. Sometime in the course of the ten hours we’d been at work, I’d experienced a shift.

  “I love this room,” I said. “And you know something?”

  Bill sat down on the gray, modern foldout chair that we’d purchased so one of us could sleep with the baby whenever we wanted. He waited for me to continue.

  “This room now feels like it is what it always wanted to be.”

  On February 1, Bill and I surveyed our living room, which now contained a baby swing, a high chair, and a bouncy seat.

  “I think we’re close,” I said.

  “Good thing,” Bill said, craning his head toward the dome window, looking at the sky. “The Weather Channel predicted a big snowstorm this weekend.”

  The snow came on Saturday night and dropped hard—two feet in one night and another foot the next morning. Only the roofs of the tallest SUVs were visible along the streets. My mother’s car, a Toyota hybrid, was buried completely.

  “I guess that’s one good thing about the baby not coming early,” she said, looking at the spot on the street where her car was parked. “No need to go anywhere today.”

  For Christmas, Bill’s stepfather gifted us with an overnight at the Elysian, a sumptuous hotel in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood. When Dr. Peaceman told us that we might well go to forty-one weeks, we planned to do our overnight for February 11, the week in between our two birthdays.

  “Don’t wait that long,” Roger said. “I want you to have one more fabulous night out before the baby arrives. Once he’s here, you won’t be going out for a long, long while.” Mostly to appease him, we decided to move our stay to February 7, the Monday after the snowstorm. I worried about leaving my mother at home on her own, but she was convinced the baby was going to be late and that the doctors would make her stay pregnant through week forty-one.

  “Not a single one of you was on time,” my mother said, giving Bill the statistics of her deliveries and our lateness: me (five days), Laura (one week), and Ellen (two and a half weeks). “None of them wanted to get out. And now this little guy is staying put, too. I thought for sure a boy would come sooner.”

  “That’s why you’re the gestational host,” Bill said, as I propped a pillow behind my mother’s back. “Your uterus is like the Four Seasons—no one wants to leave.”

  I peered out our living-room window, stretching my neck up to see the sky. The streets had been plowed and no new snow was predicted, but I still felt protective.

  “Go,” my mother said. “We don’t all need to be here, twiddling our thumbs. I’m going to order mac ‘n’ cheese lasagna and watch romantic comedies all night. If by some wildness I go into labor, I can walk the half block to the fire station and they will get me to Prentice sooner than you could.”

  As I carried our single overnight bag to the car, I ordered a taxi to take my mother to our OB appointment in the morning.

  “I’ll meet you at MFM at nine fifteen,” I said. “We’ll have our cell phones on at all times.”

  “Now,” my mother said, waving her hand at me and pushing Bill by the back toward the car.

  Our room at the Elysian was a decadent suite with two fireplaces, a king-size bed, and an enormous tub big enough for two.

  “Thank you, Roger,” Bill said as he opened the closets and sniffed the neroli hand lotion in the bathroom. With the precipitous weather, the Elysian wasn’t full and the staff seemed happy to have guests to dote upon. The concierge sent the chef from the hotel’s restaurant to our room to ask if we’d like him to prepare a special tasting menu for dinner. The maître d’ sat us at a cozy table in the corner and delighted us with Dover sole, lobster with chestnuts, and a charcuterie plate that almost made Bill weep.

  “I can taste the grass from the pasture the goat grazed on to make this cheese,” Bill said.

  We reminisced about our days at the advertising agency and how we used to come to restaurants like this with clients on huge expense accounts.

  “Tonight feels like when we first started dating,” Bill said to me. “I love you now more than ever.”

  The next morning, we slept in until eight. Bill got ready quickly for a meeting, and I took a bath. The room phone rang just as I sunk into the water. I fumbled for a towel and answered the bathroom phone, water falling from my body into a puddle.

  “Honey, it’s Mom. I’m sorry to bother you. I’m completely fine. But the taxi still hasn’t come.” I pulled back the curtain in the bedroom and saw that it had star
ted to snow again. Even without inclement weather or traffic, I would not have made it to my house and down to Prentice by nine fifteen. And Francis had reminded us to be on time, as the office was booked solid for the remainder of the day.

  I pulled on a sweater and the pair of jeans I’d worn the day before and threw my dress, nightgown, and cosmetic case into my bag. I called down to the hotel concierge to have the car brought around.

  “I’m on my way,” I said.

  “I’ll call and tell them we’ll be late.”

  I drove as swiftly as I could through the streets. Flurries had begun again by the time I reached the house. My mother saw the car from the window and climbed down the front steps, taking care on the steep cement. I helped her into the passenger side of the car.

  “Drive safely,” she said. “Just because we’re late doesn’t mean we need to be in a panic.” I calmed myself, taking the turns slowly and staying off the smaller streets, which had become ice sheets underneath powdery snow. We parked in the Northwestern garage and took the pedestrian walkway to Galter Pavilion.

  Pat met us in the waiting room and said they had been able to shift some patients around to fit us in.

  When we walked into the ultrasound room, Kenisha was there, ready to go. “I feel so big I can hardly move,” my mother said, grunting as she climbed onto the table. “I just don’t know if I can take another three weeks of this.”

  “You may not have to,” Kenisha said, watching the screen. “The amniotic fluid looks low.” She tilted her head from side to side and squinted.

  “The baby’s fine,” she said quickly. “It’s just that if the fluid goes below a certain point, they take that as an indication that the baby is running out of space.”

  “What’s the cutoff?” my mother asked in a hungry tone.

  “More than five,” Kenisha said. “Under five, they usually induce.”

  “And what’s my level?” my mother asked.

  “Four point nine.” My mother looked at me, her eyes hopeful.

  “I’ll let the doctors know you’re right on the border,” Kenisha said. “They may not want to do anything.”

  Kenisha sent us to the stress-test room, where the nurses had set up my mother’s station. They had just begun stretching the band around her belly when Dr. Gerber burst into the room. We hadn’t seen her since our very first consultation with MFM. She wore a thin headband and a pressed white lab coat with the MFM seal.

  “Your amniotic fluid is lower than we like to see,” she said, glancing at the chart.

  “Are your bags packed?” My mother and I looked at each other. Our hospital bags?

  “What I mean to say,” Dr. Gerber said, pausing, seeming to enjoy the drama of her announcement, “is that you’re having this baby today.”

  Chapter 10

  We did not have the baby that day. When we heard Dr. Gerber say that we would, however, my mother and I squeezed each other in a ferocious hug, the fronts of our bodies pressed together, the baby in a warm cocoon between us.

  “Call Bill!” my mother said as we released our grip.

  I ran to the fourteenth-floor lobby, where I could get cell phone reception, and punched Bill’s number into my phone.

  I paced a strip of gray carpeting near the windows, feeling as if I might rocket out of my body. I imagined Bill in the middle of a meeting, similar to the day we had found out we were pregnant. Even though we were only a week from our due date, we’d talked about how—to some part of our brains—the idea that we were actually having a baby still felt abstract. The journey we’d taken had made us expert waiters. We had waited for this day for nine months—six years and nine months, if we counted from the beginning.

  Part of me still worried that something would go wrong. “You won’t know for sure until you’re holding the baby in your arms,” a woman had said at the fertility support group I’d attended several years before. But for the moment, I was attached to the part of me that believed we had a really good chance. I wanted to enter the hospital in this spirit, in faith.

  The phone line crackled and took a minute to ring. I caught my reflection in one of the large windows and was startled by my appearance. I looked wild, with my hair loose and unbrushed, wearing yesterday’s now slightly rumpled clothes, bouncing up and down on alternate legs.

  Bill answered, but the connection cut in and out and he couldn’t hear me well.

  “We’re having the baby today!” I nearly yelled when he asked me to repeat myself for the third time.

  “Baby?” Bill asked.

  “Our baby!” I said. “Today!”

  The line cleared and Bill sputtered, “Oh my god. Right now?”

  “Dr. Gerber said today. We’re going to Prentice now.”

  “Oh my god,” he said again. “How’s your mom? Do you think I have time to pack up our bags?”

  My mother caught up with me in the lobby. She was carrying the breast pump and her down coat. Two pink spots had appeared over her cheekbones. I put the phone on speaker so she could talk to Bill.

  “I’m not even in labor yet,” she laughed. “They’re going to induce me. We have plenty of time.”

  “Okay.” I heard him draw a ragged breath. “I’ll check in every ten minutes.”

  I put the phone back to my ear so I could say goodbye to Bill. I wished I could touch him through the phone to feel his heartbeat on my chest, the way I did when we hugged.

  “Our baby!” he said.

  “We’re having our baby!” I said, holding my hands against the glass to steady myself.

  My mother and I walked the two blocks to Prentice. We stopped just outside the main entrance so she could call my father and tell him to get on the next plane to Chicago. The day was chilly but bright, the winter sun splashing the sidewalk between the large buildings with pale light. I watched my mother: one hand on her belly, her feet in black rubber boots, legs bent in a slight squat. Her short hair, which she’d let go natural during the pregnancy, had turned salt and pepper. To me, she looked like some kind of modern fertility goddess. I felt an urge to document the moment. I pulled my phone out of my bag and began shooting video.

  “How do you feel?” I asked when she hung up her phone.

  “Ready,” she said. “Excited and scared.”

  “Me too,” I said. “This is it.”

  Anticipation churned in my stomach. I reminded myself to stay in my body.

  We waited one more moment before entering.

  My mother reached for my hand. I slid my arm protectively through hers and we walked through the revolving doorway together, into Prentice’s mammoth lobby.

  Our entrance was anticlimactic. The lobby was quiet and airy, with just a few clusters of people sitting at the café and perusing the elegant flower shop, whose orchids and towering arrangements rose up toward the three-story-high ceiling. We’d neglected to find out from Dr. Gerber where we were supposed to check in once we arrived and walked around for fifteen minutes before we found someone who could admit us.

  Once we’d registered, a staff administrator took us up to the eighth floor and admitted us to a room directly across from the nurses’ station. The room had polished hardwood floors, wood-paneled walls, and a plane of windows that offered a vista of skyscrapers and a sliver of the lake—the same view as the one the million-dollar condos nearby had.

  A young nurse named Lindsey handed my mother and me identification bracelets and a name badge for me that read MOTHER. Seeing the word stung my throat. My eyes watered, and I had to make several attempts to secure my mother’s bracelet on her wrist.

  Despite the constant reminders in our birthing classes that early labor was uneventful and long, I think I still expected the movie scene: Woman goes into labor; doctors and nurses race her down the hall to a delivery room with bright lights; baby arrives!

  Lindsey was in no rush, nor was anyone else on the floor. Both the room and the hallway had an ethereal quality, as if time did not exist. Lindsey waited for my mother
to change into a hospital gown and entered some additional information into a computer in the room. She activated a fetal monitor and turned the volume up so we could hear the baby’s heartbeat. Her prework done, she left, telling us that someone from Anesthesiology would be in within the hour.

  At our thirty-seven-week appointment, we’d met with Dr. Peaceman and an anesthesiologist from Prentice to create our birth plan. The Maternal-Fetal Medicine team remained enthusiastic about a vaginal delivery. They were thrilled to hear that my mother had had three successful vaginal births, and almost refused to discuss other options.

  At the birth-plan meeting, Dr. Peaceman asked if my mother would also like to attempt natural childbirth, since she’d done so successfully before.

  “I’m doing this so that Sara and Bill can have a child,” she’d said, “not for the birthing experience.” She told the anesthesiologist to sign her up for the drugs.

  When the anesthesiologist looked at me for confirmation, I pointed to my mother. “Are you kidding?” I said. “Whatever she wants.”

  When I was pregnant, I thought I would try for natural childbirth and be ready for an epidural should I want one in the moment. I’d worked with many clients as they considered birth plans and did not believe in there being a right way. I heard women at parenting classes, at yoga, say things like C-sections weren’t real childbirth, that epidurals were cheating. These kinds of comments were similar to what I would later hear about mothers who didn’t breastfeed or who worked outside the home. I wondered if these women had ever lost children in utero or otherwise.

  I didn’t give a rat’s ass which way our baby came out. As long as he arrived alive, with my mother healthy and okay, that was all that mattered. Loss had simplified some things for me.

  As we waited for the anesthesiologist to arrive, we explored the room. Along the window was a cushioned seat that pulled out into a bed. The room had an in-suite bathroom with an oversize shower and two sinks, and a flat-screen TV, a DVD player, and an iPod docking station synced to a central entertainment system. The medical machinery, hung tastefully on a wood-paneled wall behind the bed, like art, seemed almost an afterthought.