Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  “Whew,” my mother said, when we’d taken a full loop around the room. “Things have changed since I gave birth to you.”

  Three miles north, Bill entered into a frenzy of activity, taking on the completion of every task remaining on our baby to-do list in the span of four hours. He raced through the baby outfitters on the north side of Chicago like a dervish, procuring Pampers, wipes, three kinds of formula (in case my milk did not come in), and liners for our diaper disposal system.

  When I finally caught up with him, his voice sounded garbled, as if he were having trouble pronouncing certain consonants. He explained that he had a screwdriver in his mouth and was in the nursery fixing a shelf that had come loose.

  “You don’t have to do everything today,” I said.

  “I keep thinking of things,” he said, grunting as he jimmied the shelf back into position.

  He went on to tell me that he’d washed three more sets of burp cloths and blankets, and then, in a fit of inspiration, he’d driven across town to a store where we’d seen a stunning African-style baby wrap. In the store, I’d buried my face in the woven crimson fabric and commented that I thought I could feel the wisdom of the women who’d made it. We’d told ourselves it was too expensive and that we’d be just fine using the blue cotton one a friend from my yoga class had lent me.

  “I wanted you to have it,” Bill said.

  For the second time, I choked back tears. The wrap had become for me a symbol of my realization of motherhood, and Bill had sensed this. We’d read about the “fourth trimester,” the baby’s first three months of life. Experts in the theory recommend skin-to-skin contact during this time for long periods each day. I needed no further invitation. I planned to start the moment our baby came out of the womb.

  “Just a couple more things,” Bill was saying. I wanted to tell him to drop it all and come, but I stopped myself. I understood something, too: that the maelstrom of activity was Bill’s own form of labor, his way of fulfilling his role as provider for his child.

  “I just want everything to be perfect,” he said.

  “It will be,” I said, praying that what I was saying was true.

  I told him the doctors were only just preparing to start the induction and there was no real hurry. “Come soon,” I said anyway. I wanted him there next to me to count down the minutes as our baby’s birth approached.

  At 3:00 PM, Dr. Socol started the induction process.

  “I’m administering a low dose of Pitocin,” he said. “We want the cervix to dilate and kick-start the body into labor.”

  Bill arrived at four o’clock, heaving into the room, his arms and back straining under the girth of our hospital bags, laptop computers, and air mattress and sleeping bag he’d thought to bring from the house. He dropped the pile onto the floor in the corner of the room and went straight to my mother.

  “How are you feeling?” Bill asked, taking a seat on the chair next to the bed, where my mother sat up smiling, chewing on ice chips.

  “Great. I haven’t even needed an epidural yet. When I gave birth to Sara, they wouldn’t even let me have water,” she said, crunching down on a nugget of ice. “Then again, I’m not really in full labor yet.”

  Dr. Socol returned. Since they’d begun the Pitocin drip, my mother had dilated only three centimeters.

  “The Pitocin can only do so much,” he said. “We’re trying to get your body to participate.”

  My father arrived during Dr. Socol’s consultation. He looked calm for a man whose sixty-one-year-old wife was in labor. He shook a dusting of white flakes from his coat. He wore a blue sweater my sisters and I had given him for Christmas a few years before. The curls on his head were wet where snow had melted. I hadn’t even known it had begun snowing.

  “I can see the resemblance,” Dr. Socol said, looking between my father and me. I guessed he and my father were about the same age.

  “You have a quite a wife,” Dr. Socol continued, clasping my father’s shoulder before leaving the room.

  My father leaned over the bed and kissed my mother on the forehead. “I most certainly do,” he said.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said. She looked more relaxed now that my father was here, as if now all the pieces were in place and she could focus fully on the labor.

  “This was the thing I asked him for,” she said to Bill and me, holding my father’s hand. “To be with me on the delivery day.”

  “I am here at your service,” my father said.

  An observer would have perhaps thought that my father’s behavior was expected and lovely, but I knew that his devotion was also an act of atonement. It was well known in our family mythology that when my mother went into labor with me, my father asked if he could go to his business school final before meeting her at the hospital, because the professor had told the class the only excuse for a student’s absence would be his or her own death.

  My mother had replied something along the lines of, “That could be arranged.” My father, rousted by her tone, jumped in a taxi and arrived at the hospital in ample time to see me born.

  “I was, in a word,” my father said, directing his comment to Bill, “an idiot.”

  My mother did not disagree.

  Another hour passed. Bill had begun to yawn in the corner, catching himself as he fought sleep. I still felt jittery with excitement, but disconcerted by the hospital ward’s silence and the strange floaty quality of time inside it. The only sound for minutes at a time was the whoosh of our baby’s heartbeat. The anticipation mixed with waiting started to grate on me. I offered to give my mother a reflexology treatment.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, pulling the blanket off her legs. My father and Bill asked permission to get some coffee at the café on the second floor. “I’m not doing anything tonight without asking first,” my father whispered to Bill on their way out. “Not making that mistake twice.” My mother waved them on like a queen, both of us amused at my otherwise type-A father being so deferential.

  As I massaged my mother’s feet, I kept one ear tuned to the noise that blipped out of the fetal heart rate monitor. I’d listened already for so long that occasionally the sound would appear abnormal, like a word that begins to sound strange after one repeats it many times in succession. The machine was designed to set off an alarm if the heart rate accelerated or dropped, but I still kept a close eye and ear to the screen, vowing to hear any change or fluctuation that might require attention.

  My father and Bill returned and entered the room cautiously, looking to see if my mother was asleep. My father was carrying a pitcher of ice.

  “I forgive you,” she said, as he returned to the chair next to the bed.

  “Whew,” he said, miming wiping sweat from his brow. “Thirty-five years, and I’m absolved.”

  Dr. Socol came again to check my mother’s cervix. “I’m going to up the dosage of Pitocin,” he said. “You’re still only three and a half.”

  Every doctor check-in was the same: My mother needed to dilate more.

  At 8:00 PM, she had dilated to four centimeters and could feel frequent, but faint, contractions. Bill’s father and stepmother had driven through the snow from Cincinnati to be there. They entered the room flushed and excited, dressed in wool sweaters and big coats to buffer themselves against the frigid night. The temperature had dropped twenty degrees since the morning. I took in the sight of them with joy. My sister and brother-in-law arrived straight from work, and the room now took on a festive atmosphere, everyone cheering my mother on and speculating about when the baby would be delivered.

  At 9:00 PM, Dr. Socol sent everyone home, saying it was unlikely the baby would be born before early morning. Bill’s parents left for a hotel nearby, and Ellen and Chris went home to their condo in Logan Square, making us promise to text the minute the labor became active.

  “Try to rest,” Dr. Socol said. “Our resident, Miranda, will page me the minute we’re ready for action.”

  The higher dose of Pitocin did
little to increase my mother’s contractions. The night began to feel like a repetitive dream. No one felt like sleeping.

  My father unearthed his newspaper and read in one of the chairs. I sat by an outlet near the window and plugged in the breast pump, covering my chest with a sweater. I winced as the machine pulled at my nipples. I’d forgotten to pump in the commotion of the day, and my breasts were sore from not having been pumped for six hours. In the light of the chair lamp I watched a thin film of white, like snow, appear against the plastic pump cups. The white was probably colostrum—the viscous premilk substance that contained nutrients for the baby. The lactation consultant said colostrum was a good sign, but it did not ensure full lactation.

  I felt restless when I finished, and I stepped into the hall. The wall clock read 10:20 PM. At the nurses’ station I saw BABY CONNELL on the monitor, but the view didn’t comfort me, as I’d hoped. I felt as if our baby were hooked up to an oxygen tank with a limited supply of air, and that with every hour that went by, his reserves were being depleted.

  When I returned to the room, my mother had inclined the bed and was sitting upright again.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

  “Too much adrenaline,” my mother said.

  Bill and my father stirred at their posts, too.

  “I know,” my mother said. “You could decide on a name.”

  We welcomed the task. My father, Bill, and I pulled chairs around my mother’s bed, and I pulled out our short list, which I’d been carrying in my phone for the past month.

  My mother refilled her plastic cup with ice. Bill switched on one of the overhead lights above the bed.

  It took us an hour to take the list down from five to two names. At the end of the hour, Bill and I had decided. Our son would be either Jasper, meaning “treasured one,” or Finnean, “mythical warrior poet.”

  “I want to meet him in person to make the final decision,” Bill said.

  I agreed. My mother said the activity had made her sleepy and she was ready to try and rest.

  We arranged ourselves in various positions: my father on the sleeper couch, Bill and I on the floor on the air mattress. Within seconds I heard the sounds of heavy breathing from Bill. I felt alone. I struggled not to feel scared. It had been fun to talk about names. It made it feel certain that we were really having this baby. But I felt drained from the years of uncertainty. And still, we were hanging in a place of “maybe.” Instead of feeling closer to the baby, I started to feel as if I couldn’t connect to him at all, even though he was right in the room. I remembered the way it had felt as though the twins had left my body right before the doctor said they would die. I tuned my ears to the heart monitor in the corner of the room. Steady.

  I imagined I was running toward our baby from a great distance. I believed he was coming, running to meet me as well, but I still couldn’t see him. Again, I had the irrational fear that he might run out of oxygen while we waited for the induction to achieve labor. My mother said later that she felt the pull, too. If the doctors had asked either of us, we would have opted to go for the C-section.

  In the moment, no one was offering anything except the option that offered no relief: Hold on. Not yet. Wait.

  Somewhere around 1:00 AM, I fell asleep. I awoke to see Dr. Socol’s resident, Miranda, and another figure enter the room. They approached my mother’s bed, their bodies looming and dark. Miranda woke up my mother, who looked groggy and confused.

  “You still haven’t dilated past four,” Miranda said. “We need to take the next step. Annie is here to break your bag.”

  I tried to see the time on the wall clock, but the overhead lights were still switched off and I couldn’t make out the numbers. I guessed it was about 2:30 AM.

  “That doesn’t sound fun,” my mother said. She blinked in the glare of the exam light Miranda had positioned at the end of the bed. Their movements looked tense and hurried.

  Miranda said the procedure should take just a few minutes and that Annie was the best bag-breaker at Prentice. My mother said she hoped the procedure wouldn’t hurt.

  Neither doctor answered her question; instead, they busied themselves with a tray of instruments on a table they’d rolled next to the bed. I took a step closer. The moderate surge of protectiveness I’d felt during OB appointments with my mother now swelled to a roar. If I could not carry this baby myself, I could at least protect her. If they hurt her, I would stab them with their own instruments.

  I wondered if the aggression was easier to feel than guilt. My mother wouldn’t be in this position if Bill and I hadn’t needed help.

  “Are you prepared to see your mother in pain during labor?” Pat had asked me at one of our final OB appointments.

  “We’re having an epidural,” my mother had replied, keeping the tone light. “We’re going for pain-free.”

  I’d felt Pat still looking at me and I’d pretended to find a speck of dust or paint on the wall fascinating. I was not comfortable seeing my mother in anguish.

  Thinking about my mother in pain was only a short skip to How would I feel if my mother died? Ironically, it was easier for me to talk myself down from that thought than it was to think about her in pain. I think because we’d talked about it once, my mother and I, when I’d forced myself to bring up the subject with her, at the very beginning of this process, right after she’d made the offer to be our surrogate.

  “I am sure you’d feel really, really sad if I died,” my mother had said. “That would be awful. But that’s no reason not to pursue this vision. First, because I don’t think I am going to die. Second, because doing this is my calling. You know the worth of that—you talk about it in your workshops. I live my callings now. Period.”

  In the OB appointment with Pat, I had finally muttered that I would think about it so she would stop looking at me. I knew that physical pain would be involved in delivering our child. I’d found a way to make peace with seeing her tired and nauseous and swollen and sore during the pregnancy; I told myself I would be able to do the same in delivery if the issue arose.

  The sight of those instruments now and my intimate knowledge of their destination were causing me to bristle like a cornered cat. I squared my body between the bed and the doctors.

  “Breaking the bag is necessary to advance toward delivery,” Miranda said, as much to my mother as to me. “We need to take greater measures to trigger the body into full labor.”

  Bill poked his head out from under the sleeping bag on the floor and then ducked down again when he saw my mother’s legs in the stirrups. My father was curled under his winter coat, either asleep or pretending to be asleep on the sleeper couch at the window.

  “We’ll try to be as gentle as possible,” Miranda said.

  I fixed my eyes on my mother, and Annie scooted herself closer to the bed. Miranda handed her a thin stick that looked like a knitting needle.

  I gripped the chair next to the bed as a feral screech emerged from my mother’s mouth—it was an awful sound, somewhere between a moan and a cry, the sound of a wounded animal.

  Bill sprang from his place on the floor and grabbed my hand, keeping his eyes averted from my mother’s body. Annie bent over my mother, maneuvering the stick. My mother moan-cried again, sounding more human this time, and I lurched for the bed.

  “Are you almost done?” I asked.

  “We just haven’t quite been able to break it,” Annie answered, her voice sounding strained.

  Miranda stepped in and gave one final torque of the needle, and my mother yelled again. I heard it before I saw it—water, spilling out over the medical pads under my mother and onto the polished wood floor.

  Annie and Miranda looked relieved. A nurse came in to clean up the station. My mother told her to let the doctors know she would take that epidural now. With the water released and the epidural ordered, my mother revived quickly. She was like a rescued shipwreck victim, who now, out of peril, was eager to share the tale. She took a long swallow of ice wate
r, and I took in large gulps of relief. My father, who’d remained crouched on the sleeper sofa, approached with trepidation. Bill stood closer, next to me, by the bed.

  “You know something?” my mother said, slapping her palm on the mattress. “This baby is incredible! The only reason I was induced was for low fluid. I think he really took those Harry Potter books to heart.” She looked at the three of us to see if we were following her. “He performed an illusion—by hiding the water at the ultrasound.” I nodded, with her completely.

  Bill and my father looked pale and disturbed. My father wiped the sides of his face and his forehead with a handkerchief. He let out a low sigh and then sank into the chair, shaking his head at my mother.

  “This is what we get for letting the two of them hang out every day,” he said to Bill.

  Once he was sure my mother was fine, Bill went into the hallway to “get some air,” he announced, “and probably have a nervous breakdown.”

  On his way back to the room, he overheard Annie describing the bag-breaking incident to the some of the nurses at the station.

  “You should have seen it in there when the water broke.”

  “Big one?” one of the nurses asked.

  “It was like Lake Michigan,” Annie said.

  Dr. Socol returned at seven in the morning. My mother had still not dilated past four centimeters and had now been in labor for sixteen hours. We were hoping for another doctor from the practice, thinking someone new might offer alternatives. Dr. Gerber stuck her head through the door to say good morning and that she would be back at the hospital again around 6:00 PM. “But you’ll probably have had the baby by then,” she said, giving my mother a wink.