The first early morning text says, “I’m at the hospital. I’m at five centimeters.” By the time I shower and clear the fog from my brain, she is at seven centimeters and I know I’d better hurry if I want to make it into the delivery room before the baby does.
I’ve been teasing her since I found out she was pregnant. “Delivering a baby is on my bucket list,” I tell her. “Have it on a weekend and I’ll deliver it, or at least take you to the hospital.” She’d gone by ambulance to the hospital at 4 a.m. though and didn’t want to bother me that early.
I hurtle up Telegraph praying no cops will be out on a Saturday morning with radar guns aimed my way. Arriving at the hospital I park crookedly and fly out of the car, almost as nervous as a first-time father. She warned me her labors were quick and I don’t want to miss the magic moment.
When my own children were born, my labors were long and arduous. I freely confess to having been a whiny crybaby during the birth of my daughter, begging for an epidural or a caesarean section or for the pain to somehow just stop. I declared to anyone who’d listen that I’d changed my mind and didn’t really want to have a baby after all. I spent hours whining, “It hurts.” I gobbled popsicles and then promptly threw up technicolor rainbows.
I was a little more restrained during the birth of my son; my birth plan included an epidural administered practically in the parking lot of the hospital. My husband was an amazing birth partner, despite having refused to read a book, watch a video or take a class to prepare. I asked him afterward how he knew so instinctively what to do. His answer?
“I’ve seen many animals born en el rancho.” I’d have been annoyed by the comparison had I not been so grateful.
This woman is much tougher than I, however. When I enter the delivery room I bend over the bed to hug her. She holds up a finger to stop me, puffs through a contraction without so much as grimacing and then raises her arms to hug me.
She is at nine centimeters and her contractions are coming more and more quickly. We joke and talk, and periodically she holds up a finger again, signaling for me to hold that thought as she breathes through a contraction.
She never utters a sound. Her body tenses; she arches her back and grips her thighs, puffing until the contraction is over. I don’t know whether to take her hand, pat her back or stay away, and I am too shy to ask. I stand awkwardly until the contraction ends and then go back to wisecracking, suggesting extravagant baby names and admiring her toughness. I remember my own whiny antics while giving birth and am filled with shame.
Her water breaks and havoc reigns. Nurses dash into the room ordering, “Don’t push, Mama!” and “Close your legs, Mama,” but a body in labor does what it wants and suddenly here he is. I lean over a nurse’s shoulder to see him come into the world, to see his shock of dark hair, his tiny wrinkled face, his slippery little body. He is beautiful.
I am in tears at what I have witnessed. It is the most amazing moment I have seen in a long while. “The miracle of life” is a cliché, and an overused one at that, but at this moment it is truth.
Under the bright lights of the hospital room, the tiny blanketed bundle in my arms is a clean slate, a life full of promise.
It is easy at this moment to forget the life that awaits this child.
It is easy to forget the exasperated sighs this pregnancy provoked. Another pregnancy? Another child?
It is easy to forget that his father has been deported and that if this baby had been born on a weekday his mother would have labored alone.
It is easy to forget that a handful of brothers and sisters wait for him at home in their one-room apartment.
It is easy to forget that he will likely struggle to have enough food and money and time and space.
It is easy to forget that life will be hard for him.
At this moment, however, he is beautiful and perfect and anything is possible. His exhausted mama has labored like a champion; now she snuggles him to her chest and murmurs words of love.
It is easy to believe, for just a moment, that this will be the child for whom everything will be different.
