In honor of Mother’s Day, and to celebrate the birthday of my superb editor daughter, Molly, I am excerpting here my fifth book, My Summer with Molly, The Journal of a Second Generation Father (which, among other honors, won the 1990 Benjamin Franklin Award for Autobiography). For the first three months of Molly’s life, when my wife had to return to work, I stayed home and played “Mom” to her. Or tried to. I kept a diary of the experience, which is the basis of the book.
I excerpt below sections from the first and second chapters of the book, “Labor Day” and “Birth,” which describe the labor and delivery of Molly Margaret. You can read the chapters in their entirety here—and the rest of the book—as well as some others of my books here under the Bookshelf tab of my site (all free!).
The book (and this blog entry) is dedicated to: “Jeannette Elizabeth Stoebe And All the Other Great Mothers, Living or Dead.” Hats off to you all, and I hope you enjoy the read!
May 12
Labor Day
I think it's started." Timarie's voice sounds of cool grim excitement over the phone.
My watch reads 3:07 p.m., Monday, May 12. "Are you sure?" The baby girl we had taken such elaborate measures to conceive, so she would be born the week I gave final exams, wasn't due for ten days. "Remember, the first one's usually late," I remind her.
"When I saw Dr. Keel this morning, he said I was dilated to one centimeter. Now the pains are five minutes or less apart. They've been that way for about 40 minutes." Her voice is calm, but an underlying tension lets me know that the one thing I have ever seen my 26-year-old wife show any real apprehension over, labor, is close at hand.
"Hold on, I'll be right there."
Driving home from the university calls up memories more than 19 years old. Then, with my first wife, who was dilated to five centimeters and expecting twins, I drove the ten miles to the hospital on legs that handled the accelerator and brake pedals like strands of cooked spaghetti; 40 minutes after I safely delivered her to the emergency room, she was safely delivered of two boys, to go with the 15-month-old boy at home.
I have matured some since then. My legs feel numb but firm this time.
Timarie is just finishing the packing when I get home. Two suitcases holding enough for a migration to Alaska: clothes and underclothes, nightgown, nursing bra, make-up, unguents, potions, backup toothbrush-es, cassette tapes of Mozart, Dvorak, Vivaldi, a baby outfit in pink, a baby outfit in blue (why? had she lost her faith?), receiving blankets, a sock stuffed with two tennis balls....
"What are the tennis balls for?"
"You don't remember?" The look is accusatory.
"Should I?" Has she scheduled a match with the labor nurse?
"You use them as a back massager. Don't you remember them telling us that in class?"
"Forgot."
That wasn't the only thing I'd forgotten from our eight Wednesday-night lessons in Prepared Childbirth Class. I should have just taken a written final and hoped for a "Gentleman's C."
Into Timarie's creaky '69 Cougar I jam it all, including an infant's car seat that rests eerily empty on the rear upholstery, and at 4:20 p.m. we are on our way to Humana Hospital, a mere three miles away and chos en in large part for its nearness. I experience some angina, but the legs remain sound, thick, uncooked linguine…
[25 grueling hours later]
May 13
Birth
…And then-as if to make up for all the painful delay-time-in-a-rush telescopes as the birth begins. ..the disproportionately large head confronting first the outer world as Timarie orders through a cry of ecstatic pain, "Pictures!"
"We've plenty of time for pictures," the doctor says in an authoritarian voice, though I've been cooly clicking off shots through the shifting screen posed by the doctor and two nurses. "Let's get the kid out." And that he does, his hands pulling and easing the new life into the bright light, then briskly going to a suction pump to suck out mucous from the newly operational respiratory system, while I stand stilled in awe.
"Do I have a little squirmer?" Timarie asks in the same ecstatic cry.
I crane my neck, seeing first the child, then the thick, multi-colored elongated umbilical cord I mistake for a split-second as male genitalia on a gargantuan scale. At 3:26 p.m. all is clear...except for the placenta still inside.
"We have a little Molly Margaret,” I burble reassuringly.
"We do? We do? Ooooohhhh." Her moan carries the same thrill, against Molly's first beautifully loud and indignant cries at being.
The new mother is suddenly briefly businesslike. "How does she look?"
"She's fine," the doctor immediately reassures her, inured to such inquiries into the baby's physical condition.
"She's a redhead," I add, stunned by this wholly unanticipated roll of the genetic dice.
"She iiiis?!" The voice of teary ecstasy remains.
Molly continues her angry wails as the doctor cuts and clamps the cord; the nurses wipe my little girl off and wrap her in a towel-like blanket. My mind is clearer than I can remember it ever being. My eyes are seeing and recording beyond what I photograph: the baby's head molded at birth into a loaf shape, like the head of a Yoruba tribeswoman... the strange purple spectacle of the afterbirth... the red trickle-down from Timarie's episiotomy...the little red birthmark on the back of Molly's left thigh... the small patch of blood on her crown where the fetal monitor was screwed in.
"Will you put her on me?" Timarie begs. Dr. Keel sets the squawling infant on her mother's chest. "Hello, my little angel girl!" Molly's cries magically subside. "You've got your father's nose already! Larry, touch the little angel girl" is the plaintive command.
I do, the skin softer than putty. I notice her hands and feet are pale.
"Is that vernix?" I ask Sylvia, having read about the waxy substance that often covers newborns.
"No, just a lack of circulation," the nurse answers. "It takes a while for the blood to get going."
The labor pain gone, what she's worked so long and hard to deliver delivered, Timarie becomes suddenly talkative and begins reviewing the highlights of the ordeal.
"Want to do it again?" the doctor asks.
"Get funny!"
The banter, the clean up, and Tim's sewing up continues, but I leave the delivery room for more exhilarating work. The time has come for Molly to be officially measured and weighed into the world, and I, lucky guy under this new plan for parenting, get to accompany her and a nurse into the nursery. I even get to fondle her in her little plastic crib-cradle between measurings. Seven pounds, 11 ounces is where the scale stops; 19-and-a-half inches long is the tale of the tape.
The nurse affixes the identifying plastic band around a tiny ankle, telling the world that this little miracle is Molly Margaret Meyer. As I've both read and been told, most infants are most alert the hour after they are born. Anxious to meet Mom and Dad? Who's to say?
Molly is sure alert. When I put my face close to hers (and under this new plan there's no shooing Dad off because he might be carrying germs), she appears to study me, the first human face she's looked into very long.
What an honor! Her limbs are long and fair, her eyes are big and a violet-blue...I hope they stay that way.
A little more than an hour after birth, Mom and Molly and Dad are reunited for more picture taking. This time as a family. Oh joy and jubilation! Triumph over tribulation! Elation from creation! Little Molly Margaret is born!
As I'm falling asleep this night, at home alone as I must be, I ask myself what one thing of all things I've learned on this day of trials and firsts.
Curiously, it is that I finally understand woman's age-old hatred of war.
After the gory ordeal is done, after expending all that blood and sweat, fluids and feces and prolonged suffering to bring a life into the world, why spend it so stupidly, so wantonly?
We live and we learn. Some days-special days like birth days—we learn more than others.
