By Julie Sutton-McGurk

I am sitting here on the deck in the first day of the year that has jumped over 80 degrees...listening to the birds chirping and a lawnmower as white noise from somewhere in the neighborhood, while the baby monitor is registering that my 5-month-old baby is softly protesting her afternoon nap.  My 5-month-old baby.  FIVE. 

These last months, to borrow a total cliché, have flown by.  I blinked and here she is, holding her head up, rolling over, and giggling.  Real giggles.  Giggles that come from her belly and stay in the back of her throat, so much so that when we hear them, it sounds so earthy - as though a Blues singer, not a 5-month old (!!!) baby, has just found something amusing. 

5 months old.  And I haven’t even yet written about her birth.

I won’t use this entry up on why I knew I always wanted to be a Mama (in summary - mostly because I had such a good one – one who injected magic into even the most trying of circumstances) or on the incredible man I married, and the marriage that made me excited to have a child with this wonderful partner.  I won’t write about the pregnancy either.  How many times does someone need to read about heartburn, really?  No – this is about her arrival.  That’s the most important part anyway. 

I checked into the hospital at 5:00 on a Sunday evening.  We didn’t race to the hospital because my water had broken in the middle of the night.  I never grabbed my swollen middle, gave an all-knowing, earth-mothery glance to my hubs, and said, “It’s time, honey.”  No speed limits were broken.  I wasn’t hoo hoo hee heeing on the way, eyes as big as silver dollars, digging my nails into my husband’s arm because THE PAIN, OHGODTHEPAAAAAAIIIIN!  It was so NOT the labor scenes we’ve all seen in movies.  I wasn’t even contracting within the 5-7 minute window they tell you about in the childbirth classes.  None of that drama for us.  We had actually planned that I would get induced on her due date if she hadn’t already made her grand entrance, and apparently my hostessing prowess not only extends to my kitchen, my guest bedroom, and my living room, but my uterus as well, as Little Miss got pretty cozy.  I think she even got a subscription to Elle Décor and was picking out backsplash tiles, but that is just a theory.

(I had saved that part about getting induced from being shouted from the rooftops until now, because of all the controversy around inducing labor, but there you go.  That’s the way we decided to get this here baby birthed, and whadya know – I got to bring a cute little chunk of adorable home and the earth wasn’t hit by a fiery meteor!   Chalk one up for me and mankind, both.)

So, after we grabbed some fish tacos and cilantro-laden guacamole as my “last meal” for a while, we calmly walked into the hospital, holding hands, grinning like big goofballs to each other, checked in like we were at the Marriott Convention Center, and were shown to our room by a nice woman with a clipboard. 

I was then told to get naked while a chick asked me a lot of questions about my past.  (Which got me looking around to check if this actually was the Marriott Convention Center as this really felt a lot like the last sales conference I went to.  Bad Dum Bum.  I’ll be here all week.) 

I changed into a hand-me-down nursing nightgown that had two slits over the breast area – kind of an unsexy, upper body version of crotchless panties.  I just reread that and it sounds like I think crotchless panties are sexy, which I hadn’t thought of before now, but now that I am thinking of it...my vote is no.  Glad we got that cleared up.  Before I decided on wearing this gown, (Did I think I was getting ready for the Oscars?) I had tried on the standard hospital issue that was this sad and enormous army greenish tarp with military lettering spelling out the hospital’s name stenciled on the side.  Obviously, they wanted people to know which house this number was designed by, but it kind of skeeved me out thinking that blood and guts and stuff that was once inside someone’s body may have been (strike that – definitely was because what is that stain?  EW!) on this gown.  So, yeah.  And, you know, I already felt kind of grody and exposed, and when I greeted my little girl I wanted to have something on that didn’t look like it was made by Texas Tent and Awning.

Blah blah blah and then I got an I.V. and kids, (SPOILER ALERT!) let me go on the record and say that THAT was the most painful part of my labor and delivery.  Seriously.  [Shrugging.] Sorry, ladies who went the “natural childbirth” route.  Although I respect any decision a woman makes when it comes to her own body, I truly don’t understand the need to experience your hoo-ha being stretched in such a way that the only thing that slips into your consciousness is Johnny Cash’s RING OF FIRE and you can actually taste colors, but, that’s why they make different patterned shirts.  What looks good on you isn’t in my palette, so knock yourself out.  This just wasn’t a time when I wanted to pretend I was on Little House on the Prairie. (Nope.  That’s reserved only for when I eat stew.)  As far as I am concerned, if there ever was a time during which to take advantage of modern science, my personal choice was, and ever shall remain, childbirth.  Um, yes please.  Half-pint needs an epidural.

Unlike other facets of my life where I plan everything within an inch of its existence, the extent of my birth plan was - and this is the unabridged version - “Get drugs.  Leave with a healthy baby.”  All the stuff that I hear some people dwell on like having their Ipod cued up so that Sunrise, Sunset plays at the moment the baby starts to crown...well, that wasn’t for me.  Of course, I also shave my armpits.

I told my anesthetist that I had been practicing for these kind of drugs my whole life and that in addition to my spinal cord, I had two arms with healthy veins, if they had any extra...you know, “no-pain-guarantors” they could give me.  That’s when my husband smirked at me because he knows what a Dudley do-right I am, and then was all hand-patty like, “Now, now.  This isn’t the time to practice your stand up,” and gave me a look that conveyed, “Dude.  These people are going to help us get a kid.  They don’t know you’re kidding.  Let’s not prove how crazy we are just yet.”

Then a nurse injected some [whachacalit] into my [lady bits] to [get the party started].  I believe those are all the technical terms.  It wasn’t Cervidil, but some jelly-like ectoplasm goo that softened the cervix.  That’s the step before the big guns like Pitocin get called in, and hoo, boy!  Did it work.  My water broke without the heavy drugs and, I am telling you, the Gods must have smiled upon the sacrificial lamb chops I offered a few weeks before, because that little event happened IN THE BATHROOM while I was (ahem) returning all the bags o’ fluid they had been giving me via an I.V. to the ocean.  You have no idea how happy that made me.  All toilet related activity gives me the heebie jeebies and to know that fluid (Ick.  I hate that word.  Fluid. Ughhh.) that was once inside of me was now safely (and daintily) in a porcelain American Standard instead of on my sheets or (Lord, I feel faint just thinking about it) on the floor...well, I felt like it was an omen things were going to go smoothly. 

What happened next was a lot of nothing.  It was 1am when my water broke, and aside from some minor discomfort every now and then when I contracted, I was able to sleep.  I’d wake up every so often to watch the little line graph on the monitor, but then just drift off again.

After a few hours, a nurse came in with a big cart and a doctor followed saying, “Are you ready for your epidural?”  I wasn’t too uncomfortable, but I didn’t want to be one of those chicks that is like, “no thank you, this is cake” and then, BAM!  I’m blindsided by pain in my nether-regions, and then have someone wearing scrubs inform me that “we have passed the point when we could give you an epidural.”  Um.  No thank you.

The doctor asked my husband to step around to face me rather than look at the needle.  I guess they don’t want any coaches gasping or flinching when they see that thing.  Kind of like how in Elizabethan times, when a good executioner had the decency not to let their subject see the sword.  You know.  This was like DECENT executioner style, but without all the gruesome deathiness.

The doc was all business, which is exactly what you want when a nine-inch needle is being injected into your spinal cord.   I barely felt a sting, and almost high fived the guy.

Blah blah blah, hours of contractions that I didn’t feel, so much so that I thought, “Hmmm, I wonder if I am really in labor or if these nurses are just yanking my chain.”

And then one contraction came along, and lo!  It was a doozie.  Considering that I had an epidural, I was under the impression that that shouldn’t be the case.  I believe I looked at my older sister with eyes that said, “Um...no.”   She got right on that and another doctor came in named, I kid you not, Dr. Wo. 

Like, WHOA man, Dr. Wo.  For some reason, this made me feel better, like his name had something to do with the effect of the drugs he was about to administer.

“Feeling some pain?”

[Sheepishly] “Yeeees?”  [Like I needed to be embarrassed that I could still feel after I had my ration of drugs.]

“Ok, let’s give you a bump.”

“Oh, good.  So, do you have anything that will make me wanna’ sing songs by The Doors?”

“Let me see what I can do.” 

Well, whatever he did, Dr. Wo nailed it.  I was alert and aware of everything happening, but properly numbed from the waist down.

(God, this seems so long and drawn out, but I guess 14 hours of labor calls for a bit of rambling.)

I was on oxygen a bit, which made me feel very hospitaly, and my nurses kept “checking” me to see how far along I was, but at some point, later in the game, they informed me that it was better to wait as long as I could before they checked me again - when I really felt pressure, and couldn’t take it anymore.  Apparently, if you are checked and are at 10 centimeters, they call the doctor in, and you have to start pushing, no matter how engaged the baby is.  For those of you who are less well read in pre-natal literature, “engaged” doesn’t mean how actively participatory the baby is about getting born, but rather the point in labor when the baby actually begins to descend into the pelvic canal.  So the baby could still be chillin’ in your uterus without having budged, and if you’re dilated, you have to push without its help in getting the action going, which can be for way longer than necessary.

So, we waited.  And waited.

...

Just like you have to do for the “big finish” to the story, because my little Supreme is now up from her nap, and is ooh ooh oohing.  I have to go in and add the doo wops and sha na na nas.