Bringing in Finn

by Sara Connell

  I’d felt cracked open by our fertility challenges and the loss of the twins. But as I felt the baby move in my arms and saw my mother’s body opened and laid out in sacrifice for the deepest dream of both our hearts, I was cracked open again. Perhaps knowing this feeling was part of the point of the vision.

  “Wide open, Momma,” I said without context. “Wide open.”

  My mother seemed to recognize the reference. She laughed, and then we were crying and laughing at the same time.

  Then I did what I had wanted to do since the nurse handed our baby to me. I pressed his body against my chest, my tears wetting his blanket, and breathed him into my heart.

  The pediatric nurse sent a runner to the visitors’ lounge to give a report to the family. Bill had spent the fifty-six minutes of the cesarean in the five-by-ten-foot square of the elevator bank outside the visitors’ lounge. He’d walked in circles, counting each loop he made of the perimeter—150 circles—until he’d reached the forty-five-minute mark, whereupon he broke his private vigil. He found my sister’s eyes through the lounge window, his anticipation now having transitioned to terror, overtaken by memories of the night he thought he’d lost me along with the twins. My sister, gripped with her own memory of that night, did not move, but held his gaze in solidarity.

  Bill saw the nurse first, walking in her pink teddy-bear scrubs with a stethoscope dangling from her neck. He nearly tackled her.

  “They’re all okay: Mom, baby, Grandma,” the nurse reported. My father and Bill’s parents let out a loud whoop of relief.

  “They’re finishing the cesarean now,” the nurse said.

  “Anything else you can tell us?” my sister asked.

  “The baby is a beautiful, healthy seven pounds, three ounces,” she announced. “With a head of light blond hair.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Bill said. The cheering stopped. Bill’s father looked at him, appalled.

  Bill burst into a kind of relieved, hysterical laughter.

  “He’s Finn,” Bill said. “The baby’s name is Finn.”

  When the surgery was complete, Dr. Gerber’s team swarmed my mother and me with hugs. She, Miranda, and the nurses who’d been in the room for the surgery were all wet-faced and crying. The team escorted us to the recovery room, where, for the first time, now that her arms were free of the OR straps and bindings, my mother could hold Finn.

  “I’m a grandmother!” she said with delight.

  Since Finn’s birth, people have often asked my mother if she felt bereft or empty following the birth, after carrying Finn in her body for nine months.

  “I really didn’t,” she’s always said in response. “I wanted Sara and Bill to have a baby, and to be a grandmother.”

  My mother and I took turns holding Finn, as I stood flush with the gurney where she lay. I thought of something I’d read years before, by the poet Khalil Gibran—something that having this baby through surrogacy had allowed me to experience:Your children are not your children.

  They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

  They come through you but not from you . . .

  You may house their bodies but not their souls . . .

  You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

  “You are the son of Life’s longing for itself,” I said to Finn, absorbed in the light of his eyes.

  My father and Bill appeared in the doorway. They sounded out of breath, as if they’d run the distance from the visitors’ lounge.

  Bill ran to the baby.

  “Oh my god,” he said, and started crying.

  My father walked to my mother’s right side, looking her over for any signs of damage.

  “He has your head shape, I think, Grandpa Casey,” Bill said, holding the baby up for my father to see.

  “And your dad’s hands and feet,” I said to Bill, running my fingers over Finn’s wide palms and long fingers.

  “He is everything,” Bill said, and stopped. He looked across the room at my mother and began crying again. “You made this possible,” he said, choking on the words.

  “We did this,” my mother said. “We did it as a village.”

  We carried Finn back across the room toward her so that my father could get a better look.

  “Maybe the baby in your dream in England was a boy,” I said to Bill. “He has the right hair color.”

  “This is so much better than the dream,” Bill said. “He’s real.”

  Bill tugged the swaddle blanket tighter around Finn’s body and held him, feeling his weight, so little and so here.

  Before we were released to the postdelivery floor, a lactation consultant arrived and asked if I wanted to nurse. I hadn’t expected to have the opportunity to try right away. I struggled to remember the protocol we’d worked out with Jamie Simms. My brain felt overloaded, and it took me a minute to access our plan: to give the baby colostrum (my mother would pump and I would nurse) for the first two days. Then my mother would bind to dry up her milk, the way I did after the twins were born, and I would continue to nurse and hope that milk would come in.

  The consultant walked us to a glider chair in the adjoining room and instructed me to sit straight in the chair. I felt afraid then, not having expected to face this moment in front of my family. For the first time since Finn had been placed in my arms, I was afraid that he would reject me.

  I slipped my sweater down from my shoulders. Bill handed Finn to the nurse. He lingered a moment before letting him go. The nurse placed Finn in my arm like a football.

  “You have to turn him to you, offer the nipple, and push him into the breast,” she said, miming the motion she wanted us to make.

  How did babies, having just been born, know how to eat? I felt rising pressure, as if this were a test of Finn’s recognition of me as his mother.

  The nurse positioned Finn and squeezed my breast with a firm grip. He opened his eyes, popped open his mouth, and latched, unassisted, onto my nipple.

  The force of his sucking shocked me, and I gasped.

  “He’s strong,” the nurse said. “This one is going to do fine.”

  Finn’s jaw began to move as he swallowed, sucking hard with his jaws. The room was cold, but his mouth was warm on my skin. “Oh, wow,” I said. Our baby was nursing. Our baby, a baby who was biologically made from parts of Bill and me, was sucking on my breast. He raised his hand from his side and placed it on my chest. His fingers curled on my skin, and he burrowed into the breast as he sucked.

  “He’s nursing!” I called to my mother across the room. Tears spilled again down my face; salty drops ran over my cheeks and neck. I couldn’t know for sure what the Great Mother would have said, but this moment, with our baby feeding from my breast, felt like an initiation, too.

  The nurse showed Bill and me how to feed Finn formula through a small tube called an assisted nursing system, so we could nurse even if I did not get milk.

  The rest of the family rotated through the recovery room in shifts of two or three. At 11:20 PM, a resident sent Bill and me up to the fourteenth floor with the baby.

  “We’ll bring your mother up right behind you,” she said.

  A nurse with apple cheeks who looked so young I thought she must still be in school delivered us to an odd, octagonal-shaped room at the corner of the hallway.

  The room looked like a Holiday Inn. The walls were brown and green. There was a pullout coach, a flat-screen TV, and a wooden cart topped with a clear plastic bassinet for the baby. She handed us some diapers, the assisted nursing kit, two-ounce bottles of formula, and an extra swaddle blanket.

  “Push the button if you need anything,” she said, gesturing to a remote control mounted on the wall.

  “That’s it?” Bill and I asked.

  “Good night,” she said, and closed the door. We placed Finn, who was sleeping now, into the bassinet. I looked around for some kind of equipment. Where was the heart rate monitor to ensure he would continue breathing? Who was ov
erseeing things from the central desk? The hallway was silent. The entire maternity wing seemed hollow, like a cave. The lone light, a dim floor lamp, eked out a stingy yellow glow in the corner. We were on our own.

  Bill and I pulled the bed out and perched on the end, eye level with the bassinet. In all our years of waiting, I couldn’t have imagined the magnitude of this moment. We could not sleep. All we wanted to do was look at the baby. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes for a moment, he could disappear, like a mirage.

  We decided to take turns standing guard, just to make sure. But neither of us was able to sleep while the other kept watch. I’d lie down and start laughing as I thought of Finn’s tiny Connell feet, or the look on his face when the nurse had pulled him away from my breast after feeding.

  “He looked like he was pissed,” Bill said, gazing at Finn’s sleeping face. “He wanted more food.”

  We stayed on our knees like that, watching Finn sleep, from 2:00 until 5:00 AM. When he awoke, hungry again, I nursed, fumblingly changed his diaper, and reswaddled his tiny body, which trembled every hour or so, the way the doctors had said it would, as his nervous system assimilated to his new world.

  At 5:00 AM, I went to find my mother’s room. If she was awake, I knew she’d want to see Finn. I peeked out into the hallway. The floor looked deserted, the only sound a soft hum from some kind of generator or central heater. It took me a few minutes to find a nurse. She informed me that my mother had never come up from the recovery room. Fear sounded in my head like an alarm. Shoeless, not even sure if my chest was covered, I ran to the elevator and jammed the DOWN button. On the eighth floor, I flashed my ID bracelet and raced through the whitewashed corridors to the room where I’d last seen my mother.

  One of the nurses I recognized from our cesarean stopped me near the entrance. I inquired frantically after my mother.

  “She’s stable,” the nurse said.

  I searched her expressionless face, my fear rising to a scream.

  “Stable?” I said. That was a word people used in the ICU. “What happened?”

  The nurse gave me some cryptic words about Dr. Gerber’s not being happy with my mother’s urine content, about needing to monitor her kidney function.

  “Can I see her?” I asked, my voice raspy and hoarse.

  “Wait until she’s been cleared,” she said.

  I walked back to my room as if I were wading underwater. How could no one have told us something was wrong? Kidney malfunction was serious. My mind swirled.

  Back in our room, Finn was awake again and ready to eat. Bill and I set up the assisted nursing system, and I tried to keep calm. “They’re probably just being extra careful,” Bill said, stroking the top of Finn’s head and the side of my arm.

  He didn’t sound convinced. His brow was furrowed into an arrow, and he moved his jaw back and forth several times, the hinge making a clicking sound. I tried not to imagine catastrophic scenarios. I wondered if the risk we’d taken was too great. I was looking into the chasm of my worst fear: that we could not have this healthy, alive child without some kind of trauma.

  I turned to our baby, his wisps of blond hair, a nose that turned up like Bill’s. His little hands rolled into balls. He went back to sleep in the bassinet, a feeling of grace emanating from his body. I tried to emulate him.

  I asked the nurses to notify me immediately when my mother was cleared. With each hour when we heard nothing, I plummeted several times into terror and despair.

  At 9:30 AM, I heard voices in the hallway. I put Finn in the bassinet (a requirement for taking him outside the room) and rolled the cart into the hallway, waving to Bill to follow. A nurse with wide hips and long gray hair, with a badge on her scrubs marking her as HEAD NURSE, greeted us.

  “I’m Jane,” she said, introducing herself. She balanced a tray of food and a bottle of water in her hands. I asked if she knew anything about Kristine Casey, who was due up from Recovery.

  “You’re the daughter!” she said, as if she’d met a celebrity. “Brought your mom up thirty minutes ago.” Bill caught up to us in the hallway. “This food is for her. She said that she is really, really hungry.”

  Bill took Finn in the bassinet, and I ran past Jane down the hallway. My mother was sitting in bed, eating breakfast on a large tray. Dr. Gerber came by later and explained that there had actually not been anything wrong with her kidneys; my mother’s urine output had simply been very low from dehydration during labor. In the ecstasy of relief, I forgave the staff for not telling us what had been happening all those hours. I wrapped my arms around my mother’s shoulders, an awkward motion over the rails of the hospital bed. I put my face in her hair, drawing my cheek down next to hers, reveling in her physical aliveness and the fact that I was right there to touch it.

  “I thought—” I said, my heart still stomping in my chest from the terror of the last few hours.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “Better than okay. The Great Mother brought us through. Jane is treating me like a queen. Do you know I can order room service twenty-four hours a day here? And the food is good.”

  I laughed as she showed me the menu. My father walked over and put a hand on my head.

  “Congratulations, Momma,” he said. His eyes looked both joyful and strained. I’d seen the same look on his face the day Bill and I were married.

  My mother looked radiant, as if she’d just won a race.

  “Now, let me see this grandbaby again,” my mother said to Bill, who was pressing Finn against his chest.

  By 4:00 PM, my mother had eaten two more meals from room service and slept for several hours. My father slept, too, rolled up in his coat, his eyes covered with a towel, on the pullout couch against the window.

  Our visits continued like this all day. As soon as my parents woke up, my mother would have Jane race down the hall to get us. We’d pack the breast pump and clean onesies and swaddle blankets in Finn’s bassinet and roll down the hall to spend the next several hours in their room, until it was time for my mother to rest again. She and I squished ourselves into the hospital bed together so we could hold Finn and marvel at the blue of his eyes, his perfect unlined forehead, his gangly legs.

  Jane and her nursing team brought vases of flowers in from the nursing desk, apologizing for the frequent interruptions. I closed my eyes, leaning into the sunlight that trickled into the room through the open blinds. A feeling was working its way to the surface, something important and desirable. I reached for it inside me, my inner fingers feeling as though they were touching air. The sensation caught in my chest, in the center of my heart: the realization that there was no more crisis, that I no longer needed to keep holding my breath. All parties were accounted for. We’d set out on a voyage, and we’d all come back safe. I shuddered as my body released what I had been holding. Finn moved in his blanket. He opened one eye and I smiled at him.

  My cell phone screen lit up, and I was startled to see I had seven new messages, several from the same phone number. Dr. Colaum and Tracey had heard about Finn’s birth and wanted to visit. They’d already driven into the city from Evanston and were now standing in the lobby at Prentice. I smiled to hear Tracey’s voice: “Would it be too intrusive for us to come see you and meet Finn?”

  Dr. Colaum hugged and congratulated my mother, held Finn in a practiced embrace, and then encircled me in her arms at the side of the room. Since we’d seen her, Dr. Colaum had had her nineteenth grandchild. She spoke so quietly, I could not hear what she said over the noise in the room. I like to think it was, “I’m proud of you.” I leaned into her soft body and let her hold me for a minute. It was like hugging a part of the Great Mother.

  Someone in the media had heard about our story, and by noon, reporters from news stations and papers all over the country were bombarding our voicemails with messages. A local station picked up the story for the evening news. International media began to call, asking if we would do radio and television interviews via satellite in Australia, India, and the UK. My m
other was identified as the oldest woman in Illinois to give birth. We declined any interviews, saying we wanted to spend this time focusing on being together as a family.

  A news station in Ireland called and said the nation was celebrating the birth of Finnean—due to his Celtic name, we guessed. This call impressed my father, who had felt repelled by the media interest up to that point. I’d finished nursing, and he was now rocking Finn in the green glider chair. He whispered, and I could not hear his words, only see his lips moving as he rocked. Finn stared, his eyes riveted on my father’s face. The generator in the hallway kicked off then, allowing me to hear my father speak.

  “Your birth was heard ‘round the world,” he said, as he pushed the glider with his foot, holding Finn close as they rocked back and forth.

  Epilogue

  Three weeks after Finn was born, my mother, Finn, and I were together in the downstairs guest room. My father and Bill were upstairs, watching a basketball game on TV. I could hear the announcers commenting on the game, and an occasional shout from my father when his team scored. We’d been in to see Dr. Gerber that morning, and my mother had been cleared for the drive home to Virginia that my parents would make the next day.

  Finn lay next to us, looking like a baby cub on the fur throw that my mother and I had snuggled up under all those days during the pregnancy. He was dressed in a white long-sleeved onesie with hand mitts, and a small blue knitted cap to keep his head warm. It was still February, and cold in the basement. I’d moved our large space heater beside the bed and turned the heat on high, shooting warm air toward our faces. I’d carried Finn downstairs in the red Moby wrap Bill had brought to the hospital. I’d worn it constantly since we’d come home, carrying Finn around as I walked around the house, made phone calls, and folded laundry. Bill worked from home as much as he could, peeking in at Finn on the way to and from phone calls and meetings. He was fascinated by the way Finn curled into a crescent, as if he were still in the womb. When he fell into a deep sleep, he would lift up his head a few times, then drop down, making a sound that Bill swore was a purr.