6/4/04
THE DAY ALLISON WAS BORN
14 PAGES

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Lauren went into labor around 5:30 on Friday morning. I didn't think she was "faking it" per se, but at 5:30, my internal clock was betting on this being more false labor like she'd been having for the past couple weeks. Plus, by this point I was trying not to get my hopes up that labor would come anytime soon. We'd tried to induce with castor oil the week before with but nothing had happened. We were so sure it was going to put Lauren into labor that we'd even had "one last night alone" the night before. When it didn't work, we couldn't help but be disappointed. Lauren spent a lot of time over the next few days watching the clock and getting progressively more and more disappointed when her contractions would go from five minutes apart to over fifteen.

Women who had experienced labor had told Lauren that she'd just know when she was in labor. It was one of those things that, "If you're not sure, then you're not in labor." I guess Lauren was pretty sure on Friday morning because by six o'clock, she told me I couldn't go into work that day. I said okay but was still expecting the contractions to just peter out the way they'd been doing over the past week.

Lauren called her midwife Kathy and told her what was going on. Kathy said to call back when the contractions were consistently five minutes apart. A half-hour later, Lauren was debating whether or not to call her back because they had pretty much been five minutes apart since she'd woken up. Instead, she called Christine, a midwife friend of hers from school who also works with Kathy.

Actually the whole thing with Christine has been kind of funny since the beginning. Lauren had picked Kathy as her midwife back when she first found out she was pregnant. Christine was still in grad school with Lauren at the time and she did her last semester's clinical with Kathy's homebirth practice. After graduation, Kathy hired her, so now Christine was also Lauren's midwife. It was always so cute. Lauren would have a question about something pregnancy-related and she would call Christine to see what it was. My thinking was always, "You both graduated at the same time. You studied the exact same things. If YOU don't know the answer, what makes you think CHRISTINE will?" But Lauren just kept saying, "It's different when it's your own baby."

Towards the end she was calling Christine several times a day to ask her questions about contractions, about induction and about pains she was feeling. I told her, "You know you're lucky Christine is a friend of yours. You wouldn't be able to just call any other midwife this much." And not just Christine. Lauren's midwife friend Talisyn was also along for the ride a lot answering questions for Lauren when she couldn't get ahold Christine. In fact, the two of them came to the baby shower and then gave Lauren an examination and perineum massage afterwards. I dare say very few women in this country have nearly as much birthing support as Lauren did. One of the big perks of studying midwifery I suppose.

Lauren was still in the early stages of labor, so Christine said she'd be over in a few hours. Lauren called her mom and sister and told them that she was in labor and would call them when she needed them to come over too. I'm sure this is quite a different experience than most people are used to. Most people call others when they're on their way to the hospital. Lauren was calling people to say, "Okay I'm in hard labor, come to my house and be with me now."

Around 7:30 or so, Lauren and I made our way downstairs. I made her some eggs with cheese for breakfast and gave her her labor present. I had bought her the two most recent seasons of Friends on DVD as well as two Nirvana CD's. Hey, Lauren likes Nirvana, what can I say? In the card I said that this was just a little something to help make her labor easier… or at least less boring. The card had a picture of a bee on it because throughout the pregnancy, we've been calling Allison "our little bumblebee" because of the way she bumbled around so much inside Lauren's belly.

We stuck in one of the Friends DVD's. Lauren breathed and moaned through her contractions while I cleaned up around the house. I called my boss to tell him I wasn't coming in. I tried to be funny about it. "Yeah, Lauren says I can't come in today because she has this really big stomach ache and she won't let me leave until it's gone. I think she's just being a big baby myself, but what can you do." Apparently the joke wasn't clear enough because later on while Lauren was pushing he called and left a message asking if I was going to be in on Monday.

By nine o'clock the contractions were stronger and each one was making Lauren have to poop. So she spent a lot of time walking back and forth to the toilet. The pain of the contractions and the pain of sitting for long stretches on a hard toilet seat was already starting to take their toll on her. She was already crying a little bit and the first claims of "I can't do this," came out through the tears.

Lisa got here around eleven. She left her four-year-old daughter Erin with her grandmother but brought baby Emily along since she had a fever that Lisa wanted to keep an eye on. Lauren was still on the toilet when they showed up. A few minutes later, Christine arrived with Talisyn. Christine examined Lauren while I continued to clean up. I made smoothies for Lisa and myself then called Lauren's mom to tell her Lauren was ready for her.

By this point we had turned Friends off and were listening to our Iz, a CD we'd bought on our honeymoon. Iz is a very large Hawaiian man who with just a simple ukulele and his mellifluous voice puts you into the most peaceful, tranquil mood. It was the perfect music for labor. I started breathing with Lauren the way we had practiced. We never took a Lamaze course or anything, but Lauren had had enough experience with labor as a midwife and labor-delivery nurse to know the basics of how you were supposed to breathe. My job was to look her in the eyes and make her follow my breathing. When she started to breathe too fast I had to breathe with her and then slow her down. I was also supposed to moan with her on the exhale because somehow that's supposed to help. (?) We'd practiced this a few times on the road trip and it was surprisingly easy to do once we got into labor. Of course, after an hour or so, Lauren told me to stop whenever I started because it was annoying her. But by then, she was getting it just fine on her own.

Lauren's mom and dad got there around noon. From about that point until the end, I pretty much didn't leave Lauren's side. I tried a couple times and she said, "No Brian, I need you." At first I was NOT allowed to leave when she was on the toilet. We had a little routine there. When she contracted, she would rest her forehead on my side and I would hold her head in my arms. Soon after that, I was not allowed to leave AT ALL. Somebody else had to do all the things that I originally thought I would be responsible for: filling her labor pool, preparing her herbal remedies, getting blankets, etc. Fortunately, Christine and Talisyn had taken all the same touchy feely classes as Lauren, so they knew that when she said she needed me she meant it. They picked up all my slack without a second thought. I would ask them to do something and they just did it with not even a thought of annoyance.

Lauren and I had talked a lot about the birth in the months leading up. We talked about how we thought it would happen, where specifically in the house she would deliver, what she would do during labor. She'd had big plans to bake cookies and organize all our pictures among other things to keep herself busy. Unfortunately (or fortunately) for her, labor hit suddenly and powerfully and didn't last for days and days. She basically woke up in pretty hard labor and was in too much pain to do much of anything else but sit, lay down and walk to the toilet.

But specifically, one of the things we'd talked a lot about was what she was going to need from me during the birth. Really there was only one thing she needed, but it was a big all-encompassing thing: support. She needed me to be there and breathe with her, to give her a hand to squeeze when it hurt, to get people out of the room when she needed privacy. But the biggest thing she needed was for me to not get annoyed with her at all. Unfortunately, one of my negative personality traits is I can get annoyed easily when I feel somebody is unjustly getting mad or snipping at me. It's something I've tried to work on and have definitely gotten better at since I started dating Lauren. But I still have my moments.

But we both knew that I could NOT have any of those moments while Lauren was in labor. Lauren knew that there would come a point, probably several points where a contraction would come on and she would need quiet all of a sudden but wouldn't have the clarity of mind to say, "Okay, could everybody just be quiet for a minute please?" She knew that what would come out through a clenched jaw would be "Shut up!" And in the months that led up to the birth, she constantly reinforced that I could NOT take it personally, that I just had to say, "Okay" and do what she needed without any attitude in my voice. She would be in labor and having a hard enough time without having to worry about soothing my hurt feelings.

By the time labor came around, I was prepared. Whenever Lauren said, "Shut up," I shut up. Whenever she said she needed me, even if I was in the middle of something, I went to her. If she wanted a CD changed, I changed it. And later on, when we got into the birthing pool together, I froze solid in incredibly uncomfortable positions when she suddenly said, "Stop moving." I was ready.

At around one-thirty, Christine told Lauren to lie down and try to get some sleep. She was still several hours away and would need at much energy as possible. By now, every move Lauren made hurt. It hurt to even try to lie down. But she made the effort anyway. I held her hand as she lowered herself onto her side on the couch. Just as she was almost all the way down, she yelled again. Loud this time. I just figured it was a particularly strong contraction, but the she yelled, "My fucking water just broke." Actually, she had been saying "fuck" a lot up until this point. As Lisa put it, "See this is what happens when you raise somebody in a house where they're not allowed to swear their entire life."

Lauren put a towel between her legs and we helped her waddle over to the toilet again. This is when the pain really started to get intense. Lauren kept looking up at me and saying, "I can't do this. It hurts so bad." Even though she had been the biggest opponent of epidurals to this point, she asked for drugs more than once. I'm pretty sure she only asked for them because she knew there was no way she was getting them. You're not allowed to have drugs at a home birth because there is no way to monitor the baby as intensely as you'd need to. Deep down she knew getting drugs meant getting dressed, getting into a car and driving to the hospital, getting admitted, getting changed into a hospital gown… I think this actually made it easier for her. She knew she could yell and scream and beg for drugs all she wanted and nobody would give them to her. Had she been in a hospital, she would have needed to keep that all bottled up. The second she asked for drugs in a hospital, somebody would have been there to give them to her. In a hospital, she would have had to keep the pain more contained to the point where it probably would have hurt MORE. Here at home with no possibility of drugs, I'm sure it was more of a catharsis to yell, "I need drugs!" fear-free.

Christine suggested that maybe it was time for Lauren to get into the pool, maybe that would help with the pain. I of course couldn't leave Lauren's side as she was now back on the toilet, so Christine and Talisyn went upstairs to fill it. The "pool" was just a little inflatable kiddie pool that Lauren had bought on-line from a pregnancy website. It was wide and deep, about five feet across and three feet deep with nice cushy walls and bottom. I had inflated it a few days before in our upstairs office.

I tell people that there was a pool and immediately most people think that its function is to have a "water birth." Actually most people go, "What the hell did you have a POOL for?" But a good number of people have heard of the idea of water birth and they naturally assumed that that's what we were doing with the pool. In our case, the pool was really more to help alleviate the labor pains. I guess it makes the body more buoyant and weightless and somehow that helps ease the pain. Lauren never had any intention of actually giving birth in the pool. She knew that by the end that water would be pretty nasty stuff, filled with blood, poop and pee. Not exactly the kind of environment you want your baby born into.

We made our way upstairs and Lauren stripped down to just her bra and got into the pool. I assumed she was just going to sit in there by herself, but she quickly said, "No Brian you need to be in here too." So I took off my shirt and got in… I left MY shorts on. We tried a couple positions before hitting on the one that seemed to work miracles. I sat down and leaned back against one side of the pool while Lauren got on her knees, wrapped her arms around my back and laid her head on my chest.

At first Lauren said that she didn't think the water was working, but I certainly noticed a difference. Even though she said that the contractions were hurting worse now, she wasn't screaming and yelling the way she had downstairs. She just breathed harder and squeezed me tighter. I told Lauren this later and she said that she actually stopped screaming when she realized it was making it hurt WORSE. I don't know if it was her having the clarity of mind to realize this or the water that helped her along, but either way, once we were in the pool, the labor became calmer.

I'd brought up the Iz CD and asked Talisyn to put it into my computer and play it. It was one of those enhanced CD's that has video and other such stuff on it and it wouldn't play right away. I tried to walk Talisyn through playing it blindly as I couldn't see my computer the way I was facing. The only thing that would play was the intro video, but all it did was repeat the same few garbled measures of the intro song over and over again. It was actually quite annoying. I told her to close the program and then tried to walk her through the process again. But then Lauren had a contraction and said, "Shhh… Brian you need to look at me." So I did and the computer lesson ended.

Ultimately that ended up being a good thing. Once Christine and Talisyn realized Lauren was settled into the pool and doing okay, everybody left the room. It was just Lauren and me alone in complete silence. By this point I had pretty much stopped talking. I was realizing that this was what Lauren needed. Not just during contractions when she needed everybody to stop talking and moving. In between contractions everybody was telling her "good job" and "breathe slowly" and offering new tidbits of advice. I sensed that she didn't need talk from me. She needed exactly what I was giving her. She just needed me to be there to hold onto and to squeeze and be close to her. There was nobody else in the world she could be this comfortable with where she could just kneel in a pool half-naked, clutching onto someone as though for dear life. I just held her as she held me. Here and there I whispered into her ear, quiet enough so only she could here, "Baby you're doing so great. I'm so proud of you. Our baby is coming." And when the contractions were particularly strong and she started asking for drugs, I whispered, "Lord Jesus please take her burden and give Lauren the strength she needs."

Lauren and I were in that pool for a couple hours. My hands were beyond pruned. By the end they looked like they had been badly burned. Here and there Lisa or Talisyn or Christine or Lauren's mom would come into the room for a few minutes, but mostly it was just Lauren and me. Every few minutes she had a contraction and would squeeze me tighter and breathe heavier. I had to talk her breathing down a couple times, but for the most part she did it on her own. When the contraction ended, she would relax her grip and rest her head on my chest again. She says she even fell asleep like that a couple times.

To occupy my mind during this stretch I allowed my mind to wander to various things. I can't remember what exactly. I'm sure they were all very trivial things not related to what was going on. That's the way my mind works. It jumps from topic to topic sometimes with no consideration for the current situation. Babies and starting a family probably never passed through my head during my daydreaming. The way I was facing I had a good view of the big wall map of the United States that Lauren had given me on our first Christmas. It had pins in it for all the places we'd been. I traced the route of our recent road trip several times. The pins are color-coded, so I spent awhile looking at a place and trying to remember what the significance of the pin there was. I realized a couple places had the wrong color in them. I had mistakenly put a yellow pin (which stands for "significant event") in some places that were only supposed to have a white pin (which stands for "just passed through").

I was pretty much trapped in an uncomfortable position. The only parts I could semi-move move were my head and my arms. My legs could only be extended if I lifted them up and rested them on the edge of the pool. But that was a big movement that ended up moving the rest of my body and Lauren with it. And it had to be done in stages. One leg had to go up and I had to compensate my balance while I stretched it out and rested it on the edge. Then the other leg would go up and I'd recompensate and extend and settle on the edge. More than once, Lauren had a contraction when I was half-way through "the move" and she would snap, "Stop moving" and I would be forced to freeze in an unbelievably uncomfortable and hard to maintain position until the contraction passed.

Talisyn kept bringing up Gatorade and I made sure Lauren kept drinking. Talisyn asked us if we were hungry. Lauren said "no" but I was starving. She brought up some brownies that they'd made earlier. I only took one bite before Lauren caught a whiff and said, "Get those away from me now." Talisyn gave me a look that was somewhere between sympathy and a smile as she took the brownies away.

My bladder was reaching its overflow point and I suggested that I get out for a minute to use the bathroom. Lauren said "no" and told me just to go. "I've been peeing in here for the last hour," she said. So I did.

The contractions got ever more intense and finally Lauren said she felt like she should push. It took her a few contractions but she managed to turn over so that she was leaning back against me. Christine put a finger in and felt that the baby's head was low and Lauren was at ten centimeters. If she felt like she should push then she should give it a try. Lauren tried and screamed. She said something felt wrong. Everyone had been telling her that pushing doesn't hurt, that it's actually a relief to the pressure. Christine stuck a finger in again and said that there was still a "lip" over the baby's head. She could reach in and try and slide it off on the next contraction if Lauren wanted. Lauren said to give it a try, but yelled and screamed and told Christine to "Get out, get out, get out!" when the contraction hit.

Her dad told me later that he'd heard Lauren yell this and thought she was trying to will the baby out of her like an exorcism.

Lauren kept asking where Kathy was. Christine kept saying, "She's on her way." After about twenty minutes of Lauren trying to push, Kathy finally pulled up. I don't know about anybody else, but for me it was such a relief when Kathy got there. It was like authority had been restored or something. Not that there had been chaos before. Christine and Talisyn had been doing a great job, but in my head I couldn't separate the fact that they basically knew about as much about this as Lauren did. And if Lauren didn't know why certain things hurt or when was a good time to push, how could THEY know? In my head, I kept thinking Christine and Talisyn were kind of making it up as they went along but didn't really know for sure what they were doing. I'm sure another part of it was also the fact that they're MY age and it's inconceivable to me that anybody my age could know the things they do. Again, it was all subconscious and not based on anything in reality, but once Kathy arrived and I saw how calm she was about everything, I was able to relax and know that everything really was okay.

Kathy checked Lauren and said that that lip was still there. She told Lauren that if she changed positions it might help move the baby past the lip. She suggested that Lauren get out of the tub and sit and push on the toilet for awhile. Lauren said no, that she wanted to stay right here. She was prepared to deliver the baby into this disgusting water full of urine blood and crap basically because it hurt to much to move, much less stand up. I whispered to her that she should trust her midwife and do what she said, but she cut me off and said, "I'm NOT moving."

I said, "Okay, no problem," as though she had just asked me to hand her a tissue.

She continued to push in this position. A crowd had gathered at the business end of the pool. Kathy, Christine, Talisyn and Lisa were all watching, telling her that she was making progress. It was about 6:00pm at this point. They were telling Lauren that she would probably have her baby by 6:30, but she'd have to push hard.

Lauren finally compromised and flipped back over onto her knees. It took her a few contractions to complete the flip, but she made it. She pushed for a few minutes this way, but it still hurt a lot. She asked Christine and Kathy several times to just cut it out of her. It was probably close to 7:00 when she finally agreed to get out of the tub and sit on the toilet for awhile.

This is about when I found myself unwittingly getting annoyed. Annoyed that it wasn't progressing as fast as the midwives were telling us. Again, I know this is completely stupid and not based on anything in reality, but I was mad because I thought they were lying to us. Actually no, not even that. I was mad that they didn't know what they were doing. If they knew what they were doing, they would know exactly how long Lauren would need to push. If they knew what they were doing, they would be able to get that lip off. If they knew what they were doing the process would be going faster. When Lauren started pushing on the toilet, they kept saying they could "see it." I looked down and didn't see anything. I got mad at that.

Mind you, these thoughts weren't quite that concrete at the moment. I had a flood of different feelings running through my head and the annoyance didn't really have a specific direction. It hasn't been until now over a week later that I have been able to pinpoint what the annoyance was about. And like I said, I know how idiotic it was.

Two new things happened while Lauren was on the toilet. Since she could no longer lean on me and squeeze me, she started pulling on my neck. I was sitting next to her on the side of the shower. I started off holding her hand, but as soon as the first contraction hit, that hand went up and grabbed me by the back of my neck and pulled… HARD. I pulled back to give her something to pull against. She apologized, but I just kept telling her to do what she had to do, that I'd be fine.

The other thing that happened is Lauren started to poop. It happens during pushing. That surprises a lot of women and their husbands from what I hear from Lauren. The muscles the woman uses to push are essentially the same muscles she uses to poop, so it's pretty much inevitable. And damn did it stink. This was not your normal, everyday excrement. I don't know if the changing hormones do something to the poo, but good LORD it was hard to concentrate on this beautiful miraculous event. I didn't want to make Lauren feel bad, and I was worried that I'd get a bad look from the midwives, but finally I just had to reach over and flush.

The crowd outside the door of the bathroom had gotten larger. Lauren's mom and our sister-in-law Susan had joined the throng. The midwives and Lisa kept saying, "Oh I can see it!" I finally looked down expecting to see the head poking out, but there was nothing. I thought maybe I was looking in the wrong place. The next time Lauren pushed, they showed me where to look (like there were a lot of choices) and what I saw was, ahem… the skin start to move ever so slightly apart.

"That's it???" I thought. Dear god, we're going to be here all night if she's been pushing for nearly 45 minutes and all that's happening is the labia are just moving a little bit.

Christine and Talisyn told me that if I reached in, I could feel the head. I REALLY didn't want to, but with everybody looking on and Lauren telling me to do it too, I guess I didn't have a choice. So I stuck in my finger and less then one finger-joint inside, my finger suddenly stopped. It was one of the weirdest feelings to feel such soft tissue all around my finger and then something comparatively solid as a rock. I nodded my head like, "Yep, that's the head" and pulled my fingers back out.

After a half-hour or so on the toilet, we all moved into the bedroom. We'd had it all planned out. Lauren had bought a fitted plastic sheet from a birthing website and we had painters plastic to both reinforce the shield and also protect the surrounding floor. We also got ahold of a bunch of old sheets that were supposed to be put over the plastic so Lauren actually had something soft to sit on. But when we got into the room, I saw that whoever had changed the sheets had put on the wrong ones. Lauren and I only own two sets of good sheets. One with a mottled design on it that we've found is very good about concealing anything that might get spilled on it. The other one, the one that was now on our bed is solid light blue. If we ever dripped ICED TEA on these things it was obvious. And now Lauren was climbing onto them to deliver our child. I was going to say something but just bit my tongue, resigning these sheets to the graveyard.

The scene I'm about to describe has got to be the poster child for natural homebirth. You could never have had a setup like this in a hospital. Lauren sat in the middle of the bed, leaning back against the headboard, propped up by several pillows. I was sitting to her right, holding one hand. Talisyn was to her left holding her other hand as well as holding up her left leg. Christine was sitting cross-legged at the foot of the bed in baby-catching position. Kathy was leaning on the bed next to me helping Christine and using her shoulder to prop up Lauren's right leg. Lisa and her mother were standing at the foot of the bed. Lisa was holding up a lightweight full-length mirror so Lauren and I could see what was going on. Walking back and forth taking pictures was Susan. And standing in the doorway holding Lisa's daughter Emily was Lauren's father. He was standing in the room just enough to see Lauren's face but not anything that was going on below the waist.

The next hour and a half is a blur. I know Lauren pushed. I know she pushed a lot. I spent that ninety or so minutes leaning in the most uncomfortable position I'd been in all day. Worse even than the position I'd been in in the pool. My feet were on the floor and I was leaning onto the bed holding Lauren's hand. But there was a nightstand next to the bed where my feet really should have been. So I wasn't just leaning in. I was also twisting my body from the waist up so as to not lean face first into Lauren. Whenever Lauren had a contraction she pulled my hand toward her. I had to again pull back to give her some resistance. Every muscle in my arm, especially my forearm was being pushed to the max. And because she was pulling me at a weird angle, my wrist was also getting twisted and abused.

The chiropractor had a field day with me the next time I saw him.

I kept looking in the mirror and saw the labia spreading a tiny tiny bit further apart with each ensuing contraction. It was hard to make out exactly what I was seeing. First of all, the mirror was a bit dirty and seeing everything in two dimensions made it harder to decipher. Then I don't know if I turned my head to a different angle or something, but I suddenly saw the head. Or more accurately, I saw the SHAPE of the head against the outer skin of Lauren's vagina. I just said, "Whoa," when I realized her entire bottom was being pushed out in the shape of a large grapefruit.

Susan had been put in charge of pictures during this part of the process. And there were several cameras for her to juggle. At one point I saw her go to put one of the cameras down on top of my dresser. The top of my dresser doubles as the display center for all my shot-glasses. I collect shot-glasses from wherever I go. It's a pretty impressive collection if I do say so myself and it nearly doubled in size during our road trip. The top of the dresser, sufficed to say, was full. I looked over and saw Susan put the camera on the dresser, sliding a few of the shot-glasses out of the way in the process. I was scared to death that one or several of them was going to fall off the dresser and break. I wanted to shout out, "Susan, watch the shot-glasses!" But Lauren was in the midst of a contraction and I knew that I would negate everything I'd done this entire day and become the most insensitive husband on earth if I said anything about my SHOT-GLASSES. I just watched with bated breath and sighed with relief when all the glasses remained upright on the dresser.

"Oh look, there's her hair!" Christine said. Apparently there was one little curly lock of hair poking through the opening. For as much as I could see in the reflection it could have been hair or it could have been just more fluid. Christine kept gently tugging at it and curling it around her finger. She had been going back and forth on whether she thought the baby would have hair or not. Right after Lauren's water broke, she'd reached in and said she felt a full head of hair. Later on she said she was wrong and it looked like we were going to have a bald baby. Now, there was no question. This little cowlick ("She's already taking after her daddy," I joked) was the first thing out the door.

Finally, after what seemed like forever, the head started to come out. With each contraction it came out a little farther. And then when the contraction ended, it receded back in a little bit. It was again, so frustrating to watch as Lauren pushed and the head would come and come and come, and just when I thought it was going to crown, it would start to slide back in and Lauren would exhale hard and stop pushing.

I tell you, the baby's head plays tricks on you. It just keeps coming. At one point I thought I could see the baby's eyes. Or more I figured we MUST be getting to the eyes because that head is pretty far out. But man the eyes looked weird. They seemed to be completely covered and sealed with white slime… and if that's really eyes, she looks kind of like an alien. Weird. Then I heard Christine say "We're almost to the forehead."

THE FOREHEAD? You mean that's just the TOP of her head sticking out? Wider and wider the opening spread and with each contraction more and more of that head came out. Good GOD where was the end of this thing? We just kept seeing more and more head.

For some reason, the next few minutes are a blank for me. The next thing I clearly remember the head and shoulders were completely out and Talisyn said, "Reach down and get your baby." In one swift motion, Lauren reached down, pulled the baby out and laid her on her chest. She didn't cry at all. As soon as she was on Lauren's chest, our baby opened her eyes and started silently looking around. Lauren's mom grabbed a warm towel and laid it on top of the baby while I undid the front of Lauren's bra to give the baby complete skin-to-skin warmth.

It was surreal. She didn't make a sound. Her face didn't even scrunch up as though she might cry. Everybody always assumes that you have to shock a baby into breathing by making it cry. That's why you have the cliché image of the doctor smacking the baby on the butt and the images of nurses sticking tubes in the baby's head and suctioning the crap out of their lungs. But they don't need any of that usually. Given the chance they just start breathing on their own. That's just what our baby did. Here and there she made a little cough, or a bitty little two-second cry, but mostly she just laid still, breathed easily and looked around.

We had decided to find out the sex of the baby from the sonogram, so we already knew it was a girl. But we also knew that sonograms are often wrong… especially when they tell you it's a girl. So before we actually started calling her by name, Lauren lifted her up and looked. "Yep, definitely a girl," she announced. Then she laid her back down on her chest and cooed, "Hi Allison."

I looked up once and saw that Susan was crying.

I started petting Allison on the head as Lauren wiped her down with the towel. I was surprised how clean she was. It wasn't nearly as disgusting as all those health class videos you see. And it wasn't just because this was MY baby that made it different. Objectively, she really wasn't all that slimy. She had some white gunk here and there, but it wasn't making her look foreign and alien the way a lot of newborns seem to look. Other than fat-wrinkled skin and a cone-shaped head, she looked just like a regular little person. She just kept looking around with wide-open eyes. I kept saying to her, "You just look so confused."

I had Lisa call my parents and tell them the news. I think she might have held the phone to my ear at one point so I could talk, but I don't remember.

Unfortunately for Lauren, the work and the pain weren't over. She still had to deliver the placenta and get stitched up. I felt bad, but I had to shush her a couple times when she yelled out suddenly, scaring Allison. "I'm sorry baby," she said immediately and then kissed Allison on the head. Amazingly though, Lauren only needed a couple of small stitches. Even though Allison weighed in at nine pounds, there were only a couple of small tears on Lauren's perineum.

I wish I could say that I was immediately overcome by an instant overwhelming sense of love for my daughter. That's always the way it happens on "A Baby Story" and in any TV show or movie. The instant you see your child, you're supposed to break down crying because you're so happy and so in love. Honestly, I think I was too shell shocked from the entire day, the entire experience. All I could keep thinking was "Wow." All I could keep saying was, "You look so confused." I think I kept saying that because it was the most tangible emotion I was sensing from any of us. My mind was a blur. I was looking to the baby for cues.

At some point I managed to slip away and call one of my dearest friends, Laura and tell her the news.

Somewhere in there I ate a sandwich. I can't remember if I went downstairs and made it myself, or if somebody brought it to me.

I went back upstairs and Lauren was trying to breastfeed Allison. They had gotten her off the bed and over to her rocking chair. At some point they handed me Allison. I took my shirt off so she could be skin to skin. That was something Lauren and I knew we wanted to do for those first couple all-important hours. Keep the baby skin-to-skin as much as possible. It keeps them far warmer than any blanket or hospital heater could and it's supposed to help them feel more secure after being ejected so violently from the serene environment they've been in for the last nine months.

At some point they changed the sheets on our bed back to the ones with the mottled design. Lauren ended up bleeding on them and on the floor when she got up or got back in bed and I thought, "Oh great, that's two. I guess we'll have to buy all new sheets."

Susan or Lauren's dad had gone to pick up Chris from the Trenton train station. He had been working in New York that day and had gotten in right as Lauren was in the middle of pushing, so nobody had wanted to leave to get him. Around the time he got here, I think Lauren was finally getting settled after her stitches, her herbal wraps and homeopathic remedies. So we laid in bed together while they passed the baby around in the hall.

It didn't last long though before the midwives brought Allison back in to us. I wondered if the family was getting annoyed that we were "hogging the baby". I apologized to them and said that tomorrow they would get more face time with her. But like I said, Lauren and I wanted her to be close, skin close, to us for these first few hours.

I laid on my back with no shirt and they placed Allison on my chest with a blanket over her. Lauren's mom made me another sandwich and put it on the table next to the bed with something to drink. Kathy gave us a few instructions. I don't remember what any of them were but the last one, "…and fall in love."

I was already feeling an impending sense of doom in my stomach. I know that sounds like I'm just trying to be funny, and in a sense I'm exaggerating. But honestly, I just felt sick to my stomach. And it wasn't because of a feeling of "Oh my god, I have a baby, now what?" Like my annoyance earlier in the day, it honestly had no real direction. I'd had a similar emotional reaction on my wedding day. I felt sick to my stomach the entire day. And not because I was scared to get married. I was actually afraid that I was pissing people off the entire day. Don't ask me why. It's of course ludicrous and I know this now. But I was actually worried that people didn't like the ceremony, didn't like how long things were taking and that they were mad at us. Maybe it was something like that on this day. I was worried that people were already mad at the way we were raising our daughter and she was only three hours old.

But again, shell shock was a more accurate description of my emotional state. Lauren and I tried to fall asleep, but our heads were still buzzing. I'm sure we talked, but I don't know about what. I kept looking down at Allison laying on my chest. I knew this was my child, but still the overwhelming sense of paternal instinct wasn't kicking in that I could detect.

My sleep was fitful. I kept waking up, afraid I was dropping her. Afraid I had somehow turned over and rolled onto her or dropped her over the side.

Half-way through the night, she woke up crying. Lauren tried to breastfeed her but wasn't sure if she took anything. I stood up with her and bounced her for awhile while she cried. She was up for maybe a half-hour before we laid back down and went to sleep. For the rest of the night (and over the next few days to some degree) I kept waking up to the sound of her crying only to realize it had just been my imagination. She was still soundly asleep on my chest.

I wish there was some concrete way to end this story. But really as soon as she was born, the next few days blurred together. Just as one episode ended, it blurred into something else. A bath, a crying fit, trouble with breastfeeding, Allison meeting her older cousin. Through it all, one thing was constant. I still didn't feel like this was MY daughter. I knew empirically of course that this was the case, but my emotions towards her were no more or less than my emotions toward my two nieces. In fact, more than once I called her Emily and referred to myself as Uncle Brian. That overwhelming sense of love hadn't come. There was definitely something there. But it was more primal and instinctual than an emotion. Maybe it was paternal instinct. I don't know. It was a sense of protectiveness I think. Even though my brain hadn't caught up to the fact that this child was my own, a hundred thousand years of human instincts was making up for it.

The overwhelming sense of love didn't hit me until about a week later. Believe it or not, it came the day after Allison had been up all night screaming. Lauren and I had gotten so frustrated and even broke down crying ourselves because Allison was inconsolable. Lauren kept trying to breastfeed her. She would suck a couple times and then start screaming again. We tried the Loboyer method of immersing her in water (up to her neck of course) but that just made her scream harder. In spite of myself I was getting mad at her because she wouldn't stop crying.

The next day I was back to work for the first time. Half-way through the day I thought about my daughter and how she had looked crying. How upset she was. How she had arched her back and opened her mouth and howled in anger, in pain, in hunger, in frustration, in an emotion that her little brain wasn't developed enough to decipher yet. And I had gotten mad at her. My heart broke. I felt so mad at myself for getting mad at her, so helpless and innocent. All I wanted to do was go home and hold her and tell her I loved her. That was when the love came. And when I got home that night, I picked her up and I held her and I said, "I'm so sorry I got mad at you last night. I know it's not your fault. I love you so much."

Since then the love has been a snap. But it's still so weird. It still doesn't seem real. This is going to sound weird, but other than the fact that there's a baby here, I don't feel any different. I don't feel like I'm a different person. It doesn't even really feel like I've suddenly entered into a new and grander station of life. All is still as it was before. There's just an extra person to take care of now. But I really do just love her so much. It took a few days to kick in, but it's there now.

Again, I don't know how to end this. How do you end a story about the BEGINNING of life? I guess I'll just say that I am so proud of Lauren. I'm proud that she did this birth the way she wanted to. She didn't let anybody talk her out of it. She didn't let anybody psyche her out about the pain. She didn't let anybody make her think that she was weird for doing it this way. She had an ideal in her head and she made it a reality. It wasn't easy, but she did it. I'm so proud of you Lauren and I love you so much. These last fourteen pages are my love letter to you.