It seems like it was a lifetime ago. I woke up one morning not feeling very well. As soon as my feet hit the floor that day I headed for the bathroom and threw up. My wife, returning from her doctor’s appointment later that same day, informed me, “We’re pregnant!”
One of the most amazing transformations that I have ever gone through in my life happened while she was carrying our first daughter. My thought processes, the way I think things inside my head where nobody else knows but me, changed! I began to sound to myself like my father, which I didn’t think was possible, since I had spent most of my life trying to distance myself from the man.
Even though I slowly became reconciled to the change that was happening inside me, nothing prepared me for the actual day of my daughter’s birth. There were complications. My wife and I had practiced breathing and coaching for months, learned what the various procedures were going to be in the delivery room, and I was pretty sure I had the whole thing worked out. The first surprise for me was that the coach has very little, actually nothing, to do with anything once labor truly gets underway. The second was that her desire to have this baby naturally, without medication, did not last as long as her labor did. By the time of the actual delivery she was feeling the effects of the recently administered pain blocking medication and I expected that, once birthed, they would just clean the baby up and hand her to me.
The whole world went upside down when the baby was born blue! Suddenly nothing was where the doctor expected it to be. There were barked instructions and a serious flurry of activity in the room as certain things were located. A group was huddled in the corner over the newborn and I was standing in the center of the room, overwhelmed by more emotion than I ever remember having felt in my life. I was speechless when, after a few moments, they handed me my daughter.
When someone came in later and asked me what to put on the birth certificate, I still had not moved from the spot that I was in when they first handed her to me. I had been staring at this baby, sleeping peacefully in my arms, for probably twenty or thirty minutes without taking my eyes off of her. The closest thing that I have ever come up with in all these years to describe that moment is the word, “smitten.” I was, totally!
For me, understanding what had happened was driven home two years later when my second daughter was born. The birth was uncomplicated, un-difficult, and just plain overdue. Two weeks after the due date the doctor had decided to induce labor, primarily to avoid complications. There weren’t any. Everything went smoothly except that my wife, not surprisingly, was exhausted after the birth. She was a bit irritable and not really interested in taking the baby from the nurse right then. I heard that same nurse remark to another, somewhat under her breath, something about this woman not wanting to hold her own baby.
I said, “Hey! She’s not going to get much sleep after she gets home, so let her rest. Just give me the baby!” I reached for my daughter and the nurse placed her in my arms. I thought I was an old hand at this, it being the second time around and all. Not true! Even without all the activity and excitement that attended the first birth I was still standing there, staring down at the baby I was holding, when someone came in and asked me what to put on the birth certificate. Déjà vu. The baby was unmoved by the whole thing, sleeping peacefully, and I had fallen totally in love. Again.
