ESSAYS
9/14/07
THE DAY JESSE WAS BORN
11 PAGES
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Everything about Jesse’s birth (my second-born) was a thousand times different from his older sister Allison’s. From conception through delivery (and even into infancy as we shall see), everything I thought I’d learned and prepared myself for two-and-a-half years earlier with the first went right out the window with the second. With Allison, conception happened on the very first try, BAM! Lauren had been diligently charting her surges and flows for months and knew almost to the hour when we should attempt to, ahem… hit that. Well, since Lauren was nursing Allison she didn’t actually start ovulating again until about eighteen months post-partum. And even then her cycles were so irregular that there was no real way to plot out or anticipate exactly what days to concentrate around. So it took several attempts and even some low dose hormones before we could be certain that conception had occurred and actually “stuck.” With Allison, I would spend several minutes of every day feeling Lauren’s belly, waiting for kicks. I read out loud from Dr. Seuss books every night in an effort to make sure Allison knew and took comfort in the sound of my voice. I took a genuinely active interest in preparing for and talking about our homebirth as well as following Allison’s fetal progression through the forty weeks of gestation. As the final weeks wound down, I found myself getting excited and even impatient, eager to see my little girl arrive.
This time around, I went through all those same motions but without anything resembling genuine excitement. I felt Lauren’s belly when she told me Jesse was kicking, but found myself easily bored whenever he stopped. I read books to Lauren’s belly, but sporadically, always seeming to forget until it was so late at night that neither of us had the energy for it. I went to prenatal appointments but didn’t feel that “everything for the first time” excitement I’d experienced with Allison. As far as the homebirth went, there was nothing crazy or unusual about the idea this time around. We didn’t need to defend it or hype it up to others or ourselves. It just was another “something we do” this time around. The excitement of Jesse’s imminent arrival was quite honestly the farthest thing from my mind since I had just recently quit my job and was trying to get a new writing career off the ground. To be perfectly honest, I kept willing the birth to happen later and later so that I could finish up a couple writing-related projects before he came along.
So I guess you could say I was rather disconnected from the entire pregnancy. I was excited and eager in a basic biological way to be certain, but as far as emotional engagement, I simply couldn’t point to or identify a single solid emotion for how I felt about my son’s approaching birth. The most tangible thing I can remember feeling was the hope that he would arrive before the New Year (his due date was December 29) so that we would have the advantage of an extra child credit on our 2006 taxes.
Lauren, for her part, had her own varying emotions over the course of the pregnancy that she’d never experienced with Allison – not the least of which was being scared to pieces over the idea of having a son. A week before we went in for the ultrasound that would reveal the sex of the baby, she had a dream where she gave birth to a boy and then asked the midwife if we could exchange him for a girl. It freaked her out and she broke down crying several times, apologizing to the baby growing inside her belly over and over again. But it forced her to face a fear that had gone largely unspoken, and by the time we walked into the hospital for our ultrasound a week later, she had not only accepted the idea that we might have a boy, but was actually getting excited about the prospect. As time went on, her primary worry seemed to revolve around the timing of Jesse’s birth. She was hoping for him to come before Christmas so that we could all just enjoy the holidays without the imminent birth looming over everything. As the days in December passed, her concerns became more focused on the possibility that Jesse would actually be born on Christmas, ruining holiday plans for the family and throwing a wrench into everybody’s day.
I did my best to ease her worries on this latter issue, trying to convince her that none of that would matter if things actually turned out that way. Plans would alter, the day would re-focus and nobody would think anything of it if Jesse decided to pick that particular day to be born. It finally took Lauren’s midwife, Barbara telling her essentially the same thing before Lauren could relax and accept that possibility as a possibility. Barbara told Lauren to simply visualize the birth happening on Christmas. Visualize what would really happen. Visualize how everything would transpire, what people would do, and how it would all feel. She basically told her that unless she could make peace with the fact that this birth could happen on Christmas, then she was just setting herself up for a self-fulfilling prophesy. After that last pre-natal appointment, it took Lauren all of five minutes to think it through and realize how silly she had been. She found herself, once again, not only accepting the idea but actually getting excited about the prospect of a Christmas baby.
But that didn’t stop her from still trying to do every subconscious thing she could think of to convince her body that she was, in fact, ready to go into labor. She gathered all her homebirth supplies. She cleaned the house several times over. She shopped for birth-day food. And when the weekend before Christmas arrived and still no baby, she didn’t hesitate to say yes when I suggested that we head down to her sister Lisa’s house a few days early. The plan had been to go down for Christmas Eve then stay a few days between the holidays. The way we looked at it now, why wait? All we’d be doing at home would be sitting around thinking about the birth, anticipating labor and wondering why it wasn’t coming yet – which would cause Lauren to worry, which would somehow trigger a fear response in her body, which would prevent her from going into labor. Well, what better way to trick her body into thinking that we weren’t thinking about the birth than to actually travel an hour and a half away from home? We’d go, we’d relax, we’d hang out with family, and whatever happened would happen. In the back of Lauren’s mind, or perhaps right in the forefront of it, I think she was hoping that just the mere act of getting into the car would be subconsciously or metaphysically sufficient to trigger labor. We left home for South Jersey on the evening of the 21st. Labor didn’t happen on the way down or anytime that night. It didn’t happen on the 22nd either, which was good because I ended up fighting off a cold overnight. The 23rd likewise came and went with no change.
It has been a tradition for the past few years that our family does its Christmas on Christmas Eve. So on the evening of the 24th, we all went over to Lauren’s brother Chris’s house, just down the road, for dinner and presents. Lauren’s discomfort, which had reached an apex several weeks earlier, was now moving into a realm that made it impossible to even sit on a comfortable couch without pain. As the evening came to an end, Chris’s wife Susan suggested that Lauren go upstairs and soak in their giant whirlpool tub for awhile. After the rest of the family left, she did just that. I sat there with her as she enjoyed just floating and being able to turn her body toward the ground for the first time in months. She floated for nearly an hour before getting out and drying off. By the time we went downstairs, Susan and Chris had just finished cleaning the kitchen and livingroom.
We figured we would just come down, gather our things and leave, but the four of us struck up a conversation in the kitchen. After fifteen minutes we decided to move into the livingroom so we could actually sit on couches rather than wooden chairs. Their daughter, Abigail was asleep and Lauren’s parents had taken Allison back to Lisa’s with them. The four of us sat talking for hours about nothing in particular. It’s amazing how wonderful it was to have an adult conversation without needing to stop every few minutes to change a diaper, pour some juice, break up a bickering match between Allison and her cousin Emily, or otherwise find a way to make the screaming, crying and/or whining stop. The room was dim. The Christmas tree was lit. Christmas music was playing softly on the stereo. The peace and quiet was therapeutic after nearly four days of toddler wrangling and over a month of typical Christmas season stresses. None of us really wanted the night to end, but tiredness and anticipation of the next day got the better of us, so Lauren and I packed up and headed out.
Back at Lisa’s house we took our time getting ready for bed. We nuked some frozen burritos and sat up with Lauren’s dad for a few minutes. At some point we heard Allison toddling down the stairs, her breathing wet and raspy with a croup she’d developed a few days earlier. After steaming her out in the bathroom for a few minutes, I sat on the recliner in our room with her in my lap, hoping a night of upright sleeping would help her heal. She and I settled in around midnight and Lauren settled in a few minutes later. Barely any time seemed to pass before Lauren woke me up informing me that her water had just broken.
I was awake immediately. It was just past two o’clock. “Well…” I said, “I guess we’re having a Christmas baby.”
Lauren laughed and said, “I guess we’re having a Christmas baby!”
I got her a towel to hold back the continuous gush that was now flowing from between her legs. There was some discussion as to whether we should leave for home now or wait a little while. She’d had no contractions thus far, another glaring difference from Allison’s birth where Lauren had been in good painful labor for several hours before the amniotic sac finally broke. Lauren knew from her own experience as a midwife that her labor might not even start for another several hours – quite possibly several days. Perhaps, she reasoned, we could wait until morning, do Christmas with all the cousins, eat breakfast and then make our way home after that. That idea went out the window rather quickly after I went downstairs to get Lauren’s mom, and her contractions (Lauren’s, not her mom’s) suddenly kicked in.
“Okay, I’m scared now,” Lauren said. “I want to go home.”
My excitement level never elevated. From the moment Lauren told me her water broke until well after Jesse was born, I stayed in practicality and logistics mode, figuring out where things where, what we needed and what had to be done. I started loading our bags into the car and making sure Lauren’s parents had all of Allison’s stuff since they would be following along a few minutes behind with her in tow.
As I packed, the plot began to thicken with each trip up and down the stairs. Lauren called Barbara on my first trip and learned that she had the flu. As I headed down the stairs, Lauren was trying to call Christine, her friend from midwife school who had promised to be Lauren’s “backup” should Barbara, for whatever reason, not be available. When I came back up, Lauren told me that Christine was putting in her token monthly per diem shift at the hospital and would not be able to come. As I left to bring the next load of stuff down to the car, Christine was telling Lauren that she would call Kathy, the midwife who had caught Allison, to see if she could come. When I returned, I was told that Kathy also had the flu. In the span of three trips up and down the stairs, every one of our homebirth practitioner options had been eradicated.
The question now became, “What do we do?” We really wanted a homebirth. But more than that, we really did not want to go to the hospital. Beyond all the personal reasons like avoiding unnecessary interventions, I had a much more practical reason for wanting to do the birth at home. The pregnancy rider on our health insurance only covered a couple thousand dollars, and the rest we had to pay out of pocket. We’d gotten that insurance intentionally, knowing the rider would be more than adequate to cover our homebirth expenses. But the instant we set foot inside a hospital for anything short of a life-or-death emergency, the price would escalate to something far beyond what Lauren and I could afford.
Lauren had often said, only half-jokingly, that if it came down to it she could always talk me through the delivery. I, hardly joking, asked now if she was serious. Lauren didn’t know what to do. She knew Christine would be at the hospital, so at least we would have a friendly face and pair of hands to catch the baby, but she was still worried about what would happen after Jesse was born. Since the people at the hospital knew her from the numerous births she had attended, she wondered if they would yield on some of the rules for her. Would they let her keep the baby by her side at all times instead of sending him to the nursery? Would they let her leave early? Lauren called Barbara to ask what to do. And despite the fact that she had been throwing up several hours earlier, Barbara told Lauren to head home. She would come when it was time and they would just hope for the best. “I haven’t thrown up for a few hours,” Barbara said, “so I might be okay.”
With that settled, we turned our attention briefly to who would actually be there. At Allison’s birth we’d had two official midwives (Kathy and Christine) as well as another of Lauren’s midwife friends who had merely come along for moral support and an extra set of hands. We also had Lisa, Susan, Lisa’s daughter Emily, and Lauren’s parents. We’d envisioned Jesse’s birth as an equally large family affair. In addition to Barbara and her intern/assistant Melecia, we’d intended to have Lisa, Susan and Lauren’s parents once again. Even before tonight’s set of circumstances, Christine had said that she would come if she could. There would also be Abbie, the receptionist at the birth center where Lauren and Barbara midwife’d, as well as Ellie, Lauren’s teenage cousin. Well now it was Christmas morning. Melicia, Abbie and Ellie were all out of town. Lisa said she couldn’t put off Christmas morning for her girls, but swore she would come up as soon as they had finished opening presents. We knew Susan and Chris had a full Christmas day planned too, so we only texted them on our way out of New Jersey to let them know what was going on. It looked like this birth was going to consist of only us, Barbara, Lauren’s parents, and Allison.
We’d had a lot of discussions about whether or not to have Allison present during the birth. I could obviously understand how traumatic such a thing might be for a young child to see their mother in such excruciating pain, but Lauren had seen other children at other homebirths handle it just fine. In addition to preparing Allison for the fact that she was about to become a big sister, we’d also spent a lot of time over the last several months preparing her for what it would be like during the actual birth – how, even though Jesse was in Mommy’s belly, he was going to come out of Mommy’s “tushie.” “Mommy is going to scream a lot,” we’d tell her, “but she’ll be okay. When she screams that just means baby Jesse is coming.” We read her a children’s book called Welcome with Love, which is all about a child’s experience at the homebirth of her brother, complete with illustrations of the crowning head, the baby’s umbilical cord and even the placenta. By the time Lauren went into labor, Allison was as mentally prepared as any two-year-old could be for such an event. How she would handle it in practice remained to be seen, but we knew that we would never force her to remain in the room if it was freaking her out. At the very least, we’d anticipated having a lot of hands on deck who could entertain and console her if the drama of it all became too overwhelming. Of course, now it looked as though we were going to be rather shorthanded.
Lauren kept urging me to drive faster. The contractions were already getting closer and more intense. It was almost three in the morning, Christmas morning no less, and hardly anyone was on the road. Speeding now, I told her, would almost guarantee that I got pulled over. She suggested that maybe they would sympathize with our situation and give us a police escort. I thought that unlikely. Best-case scenario, I said, they would escort us to the nearest hospital, right where we didn’t want to be. Without any traffic, we still made it home in record time adhering to the speed limit.
On the drive Lauren called up Marilyn, a woman she had hired to be our birth photographer, to let her know it was time. I had resisted the idea of paying a photographer from the moment Lauren mentioned it, figuring we’d have plenty of people on hand who could wield a camera. But as we approached home with the prospect of a very empty house, I welcomed the concept since Marilyn was also a licensed doula who could potentially assist Barbara if need be. Marilyn was waiting in the driveway when we pulled up. I gratefully noted that of the three other people who lived in our renovated hay barn / apartment complex, only one car was actually in the driveway – our upstairs neighbor, Isabelle’s. We had developed a good rapport with Isabelle and told her all about the upcoming homebirth. We trusted that she would put two and two together and not call the police when Lauren’s transitional banshee screaming ultimately started.
The next couple hours were a bit of a lethargic blur punctuated here and there by Lauren grunting through contractions, crying that she was scared and swearing that she couldn’t do this anymore. At one point it seemed as though the contractions were slowing down, making Lauren worry that her labor was stalling. She reached down to check her cervix and was deflated to discover she was still only three centimeters. At some point during the lull (if it can be called that) Lauren’s mom took Allison to her room and laid down in bed with her. My thoughts flashed back to Allison’s birth and how long it had taken for everything to progress. Lauren was in hard labor for several hours before her water broke. She was in harder labor for several more hours before she began pushing. She pushed for several more hours as the head slowly, slowly, maddeningly slow, dropped and receded, dropped and receded before finally breaking on through to the outside world. Anticipating another long and draining process, I encouraged Lauren to go lie down in bed. If her labor was in fact stalling, it was in her best interest to at least try and rest before it picked up again. More optimistically, I hoped that a change in position would get things going again – a strategy I’d picked up via osmosis from listening to Lauren tell stories of the births she’d managed over the last year and a half.
Apparently it was the right call. Almost immediately the contractions ratcheted up in frequency, intensity and duration. Lauren’s grunting was replaced by yelling, swearing and a rather irate (though comical in retrospect) mantra of, “No…no…no! No! NO!!!” She said over and over again that she couldn’t do this, that she wanted drugs, that she wanted a c-section. She went through this exact same process during Allison’s birth so I understood it to be nothing more than Lauren’s own personal method of catharsis and pain relief. She could make herself feel (slightly) better by screaming for drugs and surgery all she wanted, knowing there was nobody around who could actually give it to her. After an hour or so of this, Lauren begged me to call Barbara. She felt like she was dying but was worried that, in spite of all the pain, Barbara would arrive and tell her she was still only three centimeters. I didn’t vocalize it at the time, but I was pretty sure that was going to be the case too, still in the mindset of the way things had transpired during Allison’s birth. Barbara assured Lauren that she wasn’t dying, but that Jesse was coming soon. She pulled up twenty minutes later and to our surprise told Lauren that she was in fact six centimeters dilated. She additionally told Lauren to, “Stop midwifing yourself.”
Over the next hour Lauren’s behavior could seriously have been the inspiration for a sitcom. A contraction would hit and, rather than screaming, she would get pissed off, shouting, “Shit, this fucking sucks man, motherfucker!” (Okay, so this particular sitcom might not necessarily air during family hour, but still.) The contraction would pass and she would relax for a bit, smacking her lips and apologizing while holding me close. Then the next one would hit, she’d shove me away, arch her back, make a few high-pitched bird noises and shout, “No! No! NO! Oh god this is so fucking stupid! I feel like I’m going to die!” Then, “I mean I know I’m not actually going to die, but fuck, I just want to say it so everybody just shut up about it!” Nobody had said a word. While she laughed and apologized between contractions, sounding more drunk than laborious, I asked her, “Are you aware of how funny you’re being?” After the next contraction I voiced my observation that her labor noises were virtually indistinguishable from her sex noises. Under other circumstances I’m pretty sure that would have elicited more of a laugh. At 7:20 when Barbara told her that she was fully dilated and should start pushing, Lauren got indignant. “No, I’m not, no! Are you kidding? Are you fucking kidding me? No, I’m not pushing okay?”
After a few minutes convincing, Lauren let out a big huff and leaned up on her elbows with a look that said, “Okay fine, I’m doing it so leave me alone already.” With the next contraction, she pushed. And then she screamed. Loud. No I mean loud. So loud I was worried that, good rapport or not, Isabelle was certainly going to call the cops on us. As soon as the contraction ended, Lauren collapsed and shouted, “Whoever said pushing makes it feel better was out of their fucking mind!” None of us tried to conceal our laughter. The next contraction went the same way. Lauren pushed, but put so much energy into screaming that nothing actually changed or progressed. When I suggested to her that she focus her energy into pushing rather than screaming she told me to shut up. When Barbara told her the same thing, she looked her right in the eye and said, “I don’t want to.” But when that next contraction came she did as she was told. She bore down, stopped breathing and pushed until her face turned purple, letting slip a few not-quite-screams, “Bah…! Bah…! BAAAH!” The contraction ended with a proper full-bodied scream and Lauren collapsed on the bed.
I’ve heard Barbara state on more than one occasion that women tend to labor the same way they live their lives. Diligent, get-down-to-business types do just that while giving birth and generally have shorter complication-free labors. Wishy-washy people have drawn out labors that ebb and flow needlessly as their body and mind can’t decide what to do. By day, Lauren is a procrastinator who will bitch, moan and complain about how she doesn’t want to do something, yet when the time comes, she will buckle down and get the job done. This labor followed that mentality almost to the letter. She fought and resisted whenever anybody suggested anything that she didn’t want to do, but in the end always did what was needed of her.
The screaming had apparently woken Allison up, because the next thing we knew she was at the foot of the bed in the arms of Lauren’s mom. She was still sleepy and had no emotion on her face, but she didn’t look away when Lauren had her next contraction. She simply watched, more perplexed than anything, as Lauren clenched and BAH’d her way through it. As soon as it was over, Lauren turned to Allison and assured her that everything was okay. Back when we’d thought there would be a house full of people present for this birth, Lauren had indicated that she probably wouldn’t need me by her side quite as much as during Allison’s birth when she hadn’t let me walk away for even a second. This time she figured she would have things a little more under control and would be able to rely on people like her mom and her sister so that I could be there for Allison when things got scary. As I lay on the bed, with Lauren holding my neck in a death grip, I looked over at my daughter and felt my stomach tighten. Of course I wanted to be here for Lauren, but when I saw Allison’s sleepy face, all I wanted to do was go and be there for her. I wanted to hold her and hug her and whisper into her ear all the things I knew would make her feel better. I’m sure her grandmother was doing a perfectly fine job of this, but I was her Daddy. All I kept thinking was it should be me holding her. Instead, all I could do was offer up a few lame words of encouragement that sounded hollow and insincere even to my own ears: “Mommy’s okay sweetie. Remember Mommy has to scream, but that just means that baby Jesse is coming.”
On the next contraction Lauren pooped, as will happen when a birthing mom pushes. Barbara, an old pro, scooped it up with a tissue and tossed it into the trash next to her without a second thought. When this happened, I saw Allison sit up straight in her grandmother’s arms. Lauren pooped some more and once again Barbara scooped it up and threw it away. Allison turned to Lauren’s mom and, just this side of crying, said, “Barbara is throwing Jesse in the trashcan.”
My heart broke wide open and all I wanted to do was cry. “Baby Jesse” was still an intangible concept to her. All Allison knew was that “baby Jesse” was going to come out Mommy’s of “tushie” (our word for the female genitalia). Of course it’s impossible to expect a two-year-old to differentiate between a “tushie” hole and a butt hole, much less understand how a fully formed human could be squeezed from either one. And in that haze of not-quite-understanding, she watched as the midwife took her baby brother and threw him, bit by bit, into the trash. More than ever, I just wanted to hold her. Instead I said, “No honey, that’s not Jesse. Jesse’s coming soon, but he’s still inside Mommy’s belly.” Lauren let loose her loudest scream yet directly into my ear making it pop. Allison’s eyes likewise popped wide open in a look that could only be translated as, “Oh my God, what’s wrong?”
Three pushes later it was over. I wouldn’t have believed it beforehand. It had taken three hours and God knew how many pushes for Allison’s head to imperceptibly nudge its way out, often seeming to recede back inside more than it advanced. Jesse, by comparison, had charged down the birth canal. On one push his head came out halfway. On the second push, it crowned. On the third push Lauren told Barbara, who was already suctioning Jesse’s mouth, to get out of the way, then reached down and pulled Jesse onto her chest. Unlike with Allison who had come silently, Jesse let out with that trademark newborn baby cry almost instantly. I glanced over and saw that Lauren’s dad was in the room, on the phone with Lisa who had called just seconds before. I was also peripherally aware of Marilyn snapping pictures. It was hard to believe that less than five hours had gone by since Lauren’s water broke, signaling the onset of labor. Heck, it had taken that long just for her water to break with Allison.
I looked down at my son and tried to feel some kind of emotion, but nothing came. I remembered feeling a similar absence with Allison in those first few moments, but I’d attributed it largely to the shell shock of Lauren’s long and drawn out labor. By contrast, this whole process had finished right when I had assumed it would just finally be kicking into gear. I was completely lucid as I looked down at Jesse, and still I felt nothing. Even with Allison I can remember being struck by, and kept commenting on, how confused she seemed to be as she looked around. With Jesse I didn’t even have that. In fact, rather than focusing on my new baby boy, all I could keep thinking about was Allison. She was still with Lauren’s mom, hanging back by the foot of the bed. I said, “Do you want to see baby Jesse, Allison?”
Without any hesitation, without any indication of the fear that had registered on her face a moment ago, Allison said, “Yeah.”
She climbed up into bed between me and Lauren and immediately started petting Jesse on top of his head and cooing, “We love you baby Jesse.” She leaned down to give him a kiss, unfazed by the slimy white vernix currently drying all over his body. There was no indication so far that the birth had freaked her out, or that she had transferred her fear for Lauren’s pain into resentment for Jesse. I felt my love for this little girl balloon to five times what it was in that moment. We sat there, the three of us, just looking at our new family member when Allison, completely conversationally, asked, “Where the pacenta?”
Unlike most women, delivering the placenta for Lauren was just as painful as delivering the baby itself. We sent Allison into the livingroom with Lauren’s dad so that she wouldn’t be subject to more of Lauren’s screaming. I cut the cord, helped Barbara with a few various tasks that I can’t even remember, got Lauren some Motrin for the aching bones in her pelvis, and helped Barbara to her truck as soon as all the important stuff was taken care of. Jesse was already nursing like a pro, something that had literally taken Allison several weeks to truly latch onto. Marilyn had left just before Barbara. The house was quiet and Lauren was already dozing. I looked down at her and Jesse and could think only of Allison who was laying with Lauren’s dad on a recliner in the livingroom. She was calm and staring off into space, tired or shell-shocked, I couldn’t tell which, though I suspected the latter. She seemed to be silently processing everything that had just transpired and all I wanted to do was hold her and help her to see that everything was still okay. “Hey kiddo, do you want to go dance?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said quietly.
“Dancing” had always been a special Daddy-Daughter thing for Allison and me. Starting from when she was just an infant I would hold her to my chest, one arm under her butt and the other gently cradling her head, as I bounced back and forth across the floor to music that I either sang or played off the computer. Hernia surgery, as well as the mere fact that Allison was getting older and heavier, had all but put an end to our dancing days earlier in the year. But as the craziness of the last few hours began to clear, I felt like she needed a daddy dance again. I knew I did. I carried her downstairs, away from everybody. I didn’t have the energy to actually sing so I turned on an old bedtime mix and we bounced around the room just like when she was little(er). Even though my arms ached and my incision point started to throb, I danced with her for a good half hour, not wanting to put her down. She never fell asleep, just laid there quietly, head resting on my shoulder.
At some point the two of us joined Lauren and Jesse in bed and zonked out for a big old family nap. Lauren’s parents left while we were asleep to go about their Christmas schedule more or less as planned. Here and there I woke up and looked down at Jesse, asleep in his mother’s arms. I don’t know if I was surprised to not feel a single solitary emotion toward my son at this point in the game. The same thing had happened with Allison. I had, of course, felt some deep-seated biological attachment to her in the hours following her birth, but that overwhelming feeling of love hadn’t actually set in for several days. The detachment I’d felt all this pregnancy was still there and I had a gnawing prophetic sensation that it was going to take much longer for me to develop those same loving feelings for Jesse. I was glad he was sleeping contentedly and nursing adequately so soon, because I honestly felt no desire to hold him. All I wanted to do was be with Allison. I know it’s a common feeling for parents anticipating their second baby, but I simply couldn’t imagine loving another child the way I loved my daughter.
A few hours later, while Jesse and Lauren continued to sleep, I was laying on the livingroom couch watching a movie with Allison when I just started to cry. They weren’t tears of joy for Jesse’s arrival. They weren’t tears of sympathy for all the pain Lauren had gone through. They were, quite simply, tears of regret for Allison, and as I lay there holding her five words kept running through my head: everything is about to change. For the last two and a half years it had just been us and Allison. She was the light of our life and we had been able to shower her with one hundred percent of our love, affection and, above all, attention. We took her to the park. We walked to the river and threw rocks in the water. We played in the backyard. We threw pillows at each other and roughhoused on the bed. We danced. We sang. We read books. It was just us and her. Beyond that, it was just me and her. And now that Jesse was here, all of that, everything, was about to change.
Would she understand? Would she realize that we still loved her even though we couldn’t spend as much time doting on her? Even if she did understand, would she go through withdrawal, depression and resentment toward any of it? Would it be worse for her than for Jesse or her future siblings, being the only one who had ever known what our undivided attention had once felt like? None of these thoughts ran through my head specifically at that moment. It was more of an all-encompassing feeling of dread punctuated by that dismal mantra: everything is about to change. I hugged Allison and told her I loved her over and over again. She was facing away from me, watching the last few minutes of Annie, and never realized I was crying.
We had virtually no food in the house and no way to get more as all the stores were closed for the day. Our Christmas / Birth Day dinner consisted of a loaf of Tastefully Simple beer bread with complementary cheese dipping sauce. We were alone in the house, the rest of our family away at their respective Christmas gatherings. I resented this at first, feeling abandoned by those closest to us right when we needed them around most. Though in almost immediate retrospect I realized it had all been for the best. At least for me. I needed to experience that emotional breakdown. In much the same way that Lauren had needed to face her fears of having a son through one very vivid dream, I too needed to let all those negative emotions bubble over into tears. And had anyone else, even Lauren, been in the room with me at that moment, it never would have happened. But free of any onlooking eyes, including Allison’s, I had been able to feel what I needed to feel – namely, sorry for myself. It allowed me to realize just exactly why I had been so detached from everything these past nine months. It had nothing to do with new jobs or unfinished projects or the boredom of “been there done that.” It had everything to do with my fear of what bringing a new child into our family would do to my relationship with Allison.
I wish I could say that that breakdown was all I needed to get those negative emotions out of my system and begin loving my son the way I loved Allison. But it didn’t happen that way. That overwhelming feeling of love, which came within a week of Allison’s birth, didn’t come for a long time. And it didn’t overwhelm me all at once. In some ways, I still don’t believe it’s as strong as what I felt for Allison during those early months. It certainly isn’t as strong as the love I have for her now; a love that has had the opportunity to grow and develop with Allison’s ever expanding three-year-old personality. Part of me, a very large part, wonders if I will ever feel an equal amount of love for Jesse (or any of my children for that matter) as I feel for Allison. I think that, more than anything else, is the reason why it has taken me so long to sit down and write the story of his birth. I wrote Allison’s birth story within two weeks of her arrival. As I sit here pounding out these final thoughts on Jesse’s birth, we are much closer to his first birthday than we are to the day he was born. I think the writer in me felt bad that I still couldn’t find some kind of closure to that day. I think the father in me felt bad that, no matter how I tried to tell it, the story of Jesse’s birth never seemed to be about Jesse, or even about Lauren, but about Allison and me. I finally just decided to tell the story the way I experienced it, without dressing it up to make it sound more poetic and loving, or syrupy sweet and falsely sentimental than it actually was.
I do love my son even though it was hard at first. Adding to the fact that I began his life with emotions that ran more negative than positive, he was also a much fussier and colicky baby than Allison ever was. It’s hard to foster already non-existent feelings of love for a child who is screaming all the time and keeping you from attending to the child you really want to be with. It is getting better though. As cliché as it sounds, I find myself loving him a little bit more every day. But almost nine months now after the day he was born, I still struggle with the fact that, even though I know I’m supposed to love my children equally, I most certainly have a favorite. It makes me wonder when, or if, that will ever change… just as I wonder when, or if, I will ever show this story to Jesse or any of his current or future siblings.
