Emerson's Birth

The morning began with the foreshadowing of a pause.

Life moves fast and in one direction for all of us, and these kids seem to make it move all the faster. With each addition, things have picked up in pace and I assume the new one will be no different. Hell, even the pregnancy has been more eventful than the others and I kind of figure that the kiddo will show up with a baseball bat in hand, telling me to buy another car and to stop telling myself, “This weekend we don’t have anything planned”.

The latest visit to the hospital, a weekly occurrence endured by women designated as ‘at-risk’, was scheduled immediately following the morning drop off for the other three children.

So of course her blood pressure was high, and the nurse would have a headache too if she had been in the minivan Thunderdome we just escaped.

The nurse removed the cuff from my wife’s arm with a startling tear and said she would be right back. My world, wrapped in mocha skin flush with the mornings activity, blew through her pursed lips and made her eyes bulge in my direction, “those damn soccer moms still have me worked up, it’s fine.”

She knows how I worry, so her voice is smooth and unbothered.

The other voice slipped in the door as it closed behind the nurse and occupied the stale air between us. The voice that reminded of the last time there had been ‘complications.

We had been college-aged and it was midnight when her headache became unbearable. When the dark room and over-the-counters didn’t help, we’d gone to the hospital and found her doctor replaced by on-call staff. We didn’t know how these things worked yet. We had trusted the professionals and faced the uncertainty of childbearing with the resolve of a young couple blanketed with the protection of a loving god.

I was no longer the child who had watched his son’s death set to the fading metronome of a neonatal heart monitor. I was no longer someone who said ‘Whatever you think is best’ when unsure or showed reverence for post-nominal letters. I no longer bowed my head in prayer or beseeched for guidance through fear.

The door reopened and the nurse was now followed by an old man with more letters behind his name and a hurried disposition. The doctor timed her pulse on a watch that seemed older than our parents and grunted as he completed his reading. He gestured behind her and she laid herself back on the table, making big eyes at me which were less playful than before. Her eyes shrank with a grimace at the doctor’s pressure as he stood to his full height and glanced around the suffocating room.

He opened his mouth and then closed it again.

Paused.

If I let my mind wonder, I was in our living room explaining to the children why we had another framed canvas with a name and birthday but no laugh accompanying it.

“How do we feel about having a baby today young lady?”, the doctor asked without eye contact.

My wife, my tether to the mortal world, locked eyes that were round and glassy with emotion. I bulged mine and blew air through pursed lips before smiling.

“We didn’t have anything else planned”, I responded with a smile without leaving her eyes.

It was too early for the baby to be born.

We didn’t have any family nearby.

Her hospital bag sat unpacked at home.

It was the same thing all over again.

This had to go well, we couldn’t bear it again.

He wasn’t her doctor.

I couldn’t let it be the same.

I let the smile melt as she eased into a wheelchair facing away from me.

We helped each other think of the good times to come and how much his brothers and sisters were going to love him and how surprised everyone would be. I tried my best to ignore the shadow of the NICU in my mind and prepared myself to cut the cord, take pictures, hold moms hand, keep myself together, and pictures, pictures, pictures.

The procedure began with a smell of burning flesh that threatened to take me to a place I couldn’t afford to go and a single tear slipped from my wife’s eyes and soaked into her hair net. From my place at her head I stroked her cheek and hated the old doctor for putting her through this.

“I have absolutely nothing”, came the call from the world on the other side of the surgical patrician separating our heads from my wife’s lower half.

In the operating room, the conversation between surgeons cut to abrupt silence and the sound of metallic tools and whispered numbers was all that was left. The smiles and carefree attitudes of their day were gone, replaced by the swarm of a neonatal team skipping the pleasantries that I had been expecting to welcome my last son into the world.

I didn’t know what they were looking for and couldn’t find but my mind screamed that it was his heart. I began to sweat down my back as I had a decade ago at my son’s funeral, the July sun beating in waves that seemed to coalesce with the sobs.

My wife was crying out of both eyes now and I imagined filling one of the plots that we had purchased beside our first son with this son. The unrelenting sun beginning the years-long task of bleaching two sets of graveside decorations, fading two bouquets of artificial flowers, two engraved passages failing to sum up two lifetimes of lost memories, and the wind tolling twice as beautifully with both of their windchimes.

They lifted his pale body to a nearby table and worked on him while the doctors hovering over my wife stayed silent.

Cord cutting and pictures weren’t going to be on the schedule. The world outside that room fell away and a doctor I hadn’t seen before called “10 seconds, still nothing”.

I stared at the backs of the women moving around my son without hearing anything but the pounding of my heart in my throat. My eyes started to hurt from not blinking and someone called “20…20 seconds”.

I wanted to go back a few minutes to when he had been moving in the womb, my perfectly ok little boy, with all of our hopes and dreams in him, and not this premature tragedy who wouldn’t breathe and I knew I couldn’t and I knew I was stuck in this time, in this room, with these consequences. I couldn’t swallow, couldn’t breathe, and they called “30 seconds”.

My wife was biting her lip like she did when she was out of breath and her tears had become rivers that coated her cheeks and pooled at the bottom of her throat.

He cried.

Then we cried together and I wouldn’t stop for an hour.

Then the weight of some alternate reality without my son that had grown in my mind in that 30 seconds that felt like an hour slipped away and I savored every decibel of those tears and held onto mom until we got to touch his skin.

I kissed my world and guided my son to his new home in the NICU where he would remain for the next forty-five days and thanked someone I couldn’t name for the days we had ahead of us.

My wife slept by his side, wiping her own tears of alternating joy and fear for the next month and a half, as she would do for me decades down the road with this fragile little boy holding her.