A Birthday Story

Thirteen years ago this evening, I went to Mass pregnant and cranky. I showed up at church about 30 seconds before the opening hymn, and I was back home by the time the postlude was over.

The baby was due December 23. I had an OB appointment on December 23. The doctor said the baby was nowhere close. He said he expected a delivery date of January 6 or 8 or so. But you know how people are about due-dates anymore. Nobody seems to realize that HALF of babies are born AFTER the due date. A "late baby" is not late until he's three weeks past the due-date. Even on December 18, I had people at church asking, "Isn't that baby here YET??" So I really did not want to listen to more of that now that it was actually past my due-date. The children were given instructions to tell people that "NO, the baby isn't here yet, and if you know what's good for you, you won't eeeeven mention it to Mom until after Epiphany."

By 10 p.m. I felt "funny." I told Gary not to come to bed with intent to finish his sermon in the morning. I told him it would be wise to finish it before hitting the sack. After a while, I decided it might really be labor and not just a funny feeling. By 2 a.m. I decided it might be good for Gary to drop me off at the hospital so as to get me out of the way. I told him to drop me off, come home and sleep, do the service, and show up at the hospital in the afternoon for some baby-birthing.

Got in the car and had a contraction. No. HAD A CONTRACTION!!!! Two miles up the road was another one. Two miles up the road, when we got to town, was another. Another one leaving town. Gary asked if we should keep driving, or if we should stop at the doctor's house. "Nah, keep driving," I said. We got onto the interstate to head to the hospital (which is normally a half-hour drive, but can be reached in 20 minutes when there's a woman in labor or a child who's bleeding profusely). As we merged onto the highway, I told him to turn around and go back. Now! Go back! We'll never make it.

So he took the first U-turn, about a mile up the road. Suddenly I realized that a baby couldn't be born trying to squeeze past a seatbelt. (Duh!!) So I unhooked the seatbelt, removed a bit of clothing, and she plopped out onto the floor of the car before we got to the stop sign on the off-ramp. (Ooops. Was birthing supposed to be a sanitary thing? Botched that one up!) It was a mere-half hour from the time we'd decided to mosy on over to the hospital so that Gary would be free until the afternoon.

Rather than go to the hospital and incur all the bills, and having previously talked to our doctor about the possibility of his unofficial involvement in a home-birth, we just knocked on the door of our doctor's house. Well, that's not entirely true. We knocked on the door of our doctor's neighbor's house. At 3 a.m. on Sunday morning. The neighbors were very gracious about being dragged out of bed, and pointed us in the right direction. Our doctor pulled on some clothes, and told us he'd meet us at the clinic. His only regret was not waking his son (a med student) and dragging him along too.

So we drove to the neighboring village. He opened the clinic, and I managed to waddle indoors. Thankfully it was a warm Christmas -- in the high 30s. I was glad for the time of night too. You feel really weird walking from the parking area into the clinic (tiny trip though it be) undressed from the waist down. But not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; the children were nestled all snug in their beds, and the grown-ups had all settled down for a long winter's nap. Indoors, the doctor noticed that the baby was a bit blue, but nothing to worry about; she really had very nice apgar scores. Gary seemed to be in worse shape than either Maggie or me: until that night, I'd never actually seen a person "turn green around the gills." But he was green. We were there for an hour. The doctor was thrilled. He LOVES delivering babies, but the cost of OB malpractice insurance is just too much for a family-practice man, so he had to get out of the birthing part of his practice. The funny part was that he left rather a mess -- bloody sheets and some other messes. When the nurses and aides came in on the 26th, they knew that something interesting had happened since the time they closed the clinic on the 23rd, and unbeknownst to us, Maggie was all the talk of the clinic that day. When we got the bill, we were charged $100 for "an extended office visit." Much cheaper than the thousands upon thousands if we'd gone to the hospital after dropping the baby onto the floor of the car. (By the way, after that little adventure, the car got a goooood cleaning on Christmas afternoon!)

The doctor sent us home. The girls (left in the care of my parents and sister who were visiting for the holidays) had awoken when we left for the hospital and hadn't managed to go back to sleep, waiting anxiously for The Phone Call from Daddy at the hospital. By 4 a.m. we were back home, showing the hour-old baby to the sisters. We crawled into bed and napped for the rest of the night. My parents had snoozed through all the excitement.

The next morning, my dad wondered where I was, and why I was lazing around in bed so late on a Sunday morning. Gary said, "She's in bed with the baby." He peeked in the door, saw 2-yr-old Andrew lying next to me, and thought it was a bit much to be referring to Andrew as a baby. "No," said Gary, "she's in bed with the BABY." Dad thought we were pulling his leg until we introduced him to the itty-bitty little child that hadn't been there last night.

Most women are exhausted following childbirth. I get high for about 18 hours and then I crash. So here it is, Sunday morning, the Feast of the Holy Nativity, and you think I'm going to sit at home while the Mass is going on right next door? (Sorry. Hymn addicts just can't DO that!) And I was still on the post-birth high, with a half-day still to go before I crashed. So I went to church. I took the front pew and sat for nearly all the service, and I didn't exactly get dressed up -- LOL! But, hey, I got to go to church on Christmas. And the baby was there with her godmother who was visiting. So we had a planned-at-the-last-moment baptism. That was the year I learned (never to forget) that the passage from the catechism on baptism ("as St Paul says in Titus chapter 3...") is the epistle for Christmas Day. How appropriate!

When I was about 4-5 months pregnant, we learned that our hospital was involved with a trial program where they had social workers posing as nurses, trying to get personal information out of the maternity patients. I was ticked. It seemed so underhanded and so snoopy. There were many reasons I wanted to have a home-birth, but that was the clincher. But Gary said no. He wanted me in the hospital. I remember praying during summer for God to solve that. And it turned out that neither one of us was disappointed. I didn't have to go put up with hospital maternity-ward shenanigans. Gary didn't have to dread a home-birth. (Although the in-the-car birth did leave him green. And with that mess to clean up. A home-birth might've been easier!) But that turned out to be the small blessing.

A week or so later, we noticed that Maggie turned blue when she cried. Most babies get red in the face when they pitch a tantrum. But she got blue. When we took her in for her check-up, the doctor realized that her heart hadn't made the change-over from how it works in utero to how our hearts work now. We began the rounds of doctors and echo-cardiograms and hospitals. When she finally had her surgery (at 40 days of age, on the Feast of the Presentation), we saw the other families in NICU. They had had babies in the hospital. Because of that, their babies' birth defects had been discovered at 24- or 36- or 48-hours-old. Their children (like our god-daughter five years earlier) had been whisked away in a helicopter to a specialty hospital. The mommies were pulled away from home during their recuperation from childbirth. The siblings had never met the new baby, and here their homes were being ripped apart for weeks. It was heart-breaking to see what happened to these families. And we were spared that. We took our little one home and cuddled her, and started nursing, and had the siblings play with her, and life was nice. We got over the trauma of childbirth and began to "get on with life" before we faced the trauma of heart defects and surgeries. Furthermore, in the last year I've begun to realize that these early hospitalizations have as side-effects all sorts of other health issues and feeding problems. Those difficulties too we were spared.

And all because a putzy little goin'-nowhere labor took a BIG turn very fast. Sure seems to me that God had a boatload of temporal blessings to pour out on us, and a hospital birth would've ripped all those away. And so He made sure to work it out for our good.

And now my baby is a teenager. Happy birthday, Magdalena!