Wannaskan Almanac for January 18, 2018

In two days my daughter Bonny will turn 31. That January was a cold one too, dangerous windchills, subzero lows for days on end, and snow. My aunt, Irene Reese, invited us to stay the night at her home in Roseau because my wife was nine months pregnant and due anytime. Irene had been an LPN at the Roseau Area Hospital for many years and in addition to having birthed three children of her own, knew everything there was about childbirth by that time. She also knew all about living twenty miles from Roseau, five miles southwest of Wannaska, in Palmville Township in the middle of the winter, and how sometimes the car doesn’t start or the road drifts in with snow or babies decide to come earlier than they are expected. We appreciated her thoughtfulness and took her up on her offer.

I was working evening shift at that place in Roseau where I worked for nearly 34 years. The plant was about a half mile from my aunt’s house on Center Street, so it didn’t take me long to get there after the car warmed up. The kitchen light was on when I walked in. Everyone except my wife was asleep. She was standing in the living room caressing her protruding stomach, her nervousness quite apparent.

We had been to birthing classes, had read all the books, done the exercises. Minutes were ticking off when she quietly said she must have eaten something that didn’t set right with her, that she was feeling nauseous and was having some periodic pains. “Hmmm, how often are these ‘periodic pains’?” I asked her, “Maybe they are cramps instead. We should time them.” Sure enough it was time to go. Irene didn’t even wake up.

My wife later told me her water had broken by then, but she didn’t want to panic me. I went out and restarted the car to warm it as she got her clothes together. Everything was in one little spot, so we didn’t run around willy-nilly. The hospital was just as near as the factory, so we arrived in about five minutes. I don’t remember all the check-in details but can easily ‘see’ the small town hospital interior and the near absence of anyone else in the whole partially-lighted building. It seemed the only viable industry there that night was obstetrics.

The nurses wheeled my wife away, another brought me a patterned gown to put on over my work clothes, and a facemask to wear in the delivery room. I wasn’t nervous. For some reason, it seemed familiar, comforting. Preparation for this was an exercise of only nine months for me, an adjustment of minimal investment as I merely went to work every afternoon, came home, went to bed, woke up in the morning and did it all over again, day after day, night after night. My body wasn’t going through a metamorphosis, my bones weren’t readjusting to a new formation, my hormones weren’t dancing, I wasn’t creating a new life in my very being. I had it made. Being a man was easy.

My wife became increasingly uncomfortable. An attending nurse checked her dilation and dismissed her anxiousness as so much pending circumstance, but assured her the doctor was on his way. Another woman, unseen, in an adjoining room yowled low like an angry cat, a vocal expression that made my hair stand on end. Another nurse swept through and checked my wife’s dilation again, then said urgently,  “Whoa, she’s at ten! Let’s get her prepped.”

I was allowed into the birthing room, the big show. It seemed so surreal, as my early confidence was quickly replaced by a hyperconscious reality that I was in a birthing room for the birth of a child I was soon to meet, that I was alone there far from my Iowa family, that I was becoming a father and it would change my life forever. This was a very adult thing to do. Was I maturing?

When my daughter’s head appeared, and her whole little perfect body slid out of her mother’s womb with Dr. Brummer’s assistance, I was star struck. The life form that I once knew merely as a moving orb inside her mother’s stomach, whose feet or shoulder or arm or hand or head I felt beneath my hands those later motherly months was suddenly there before me, breathing the air I breathed, seeing somewhat the light that I saw, hearing somewhat the noises that I heard, our only difference being that she couldn’t conceive the wild beating of my heart, the fireworks going off in my head, the extreme joy I felt after her birth. A joy that has continued for almost thirty-one years and everyday of all our lives. What a wonderful kid, what a wonderful person.

She likes her dad, too.