Torsdag 20 januar 2022

 

  Not Just Any Date of Birth

"Love you daughter ..."

    Today is my daughter’s 35th birthday. My daughter was born in 1987 in Roseau, at the Roseau Area Hospital, on a very early, very cold, northwest Minnesota morning with temperatures hovering around 40 below zero as I remember.

    My aunt, the late Irene Palm Davidson Reese (1917-2008), invited us to spend the night at her house in Roseau, so we wouldn’t have to make the potentially dangerous 20-mile trip at those temperatures into Roseau for my wife to have our baby. She knew all about living south of Wannaska 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 worked evenings at the toy factory in Roseau and was extremely happy that Irene invited us to her house. The factory was about a half mile away, 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 Circadian rhythm was in its winding-down phase too, my body was slowing toward sleep more than gearing up in anticipation of our imminent life-changing event. She said she didn’t want to panic me, but her water had broken a few minutes earlier. Awakening to the full extent of my eyeballs, 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.

    We arrived at the hospital in about five minutes; okay, maybe seven. 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 where there were a few nurses about, quietly walking from room to room where lights were dim so to facilitate, perhaps a calm peaceful atmosphere.

    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.”

   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 can’t speak for my wife, but I wasn’t nervous. For some reason, the hospital seemed familiar, comforting. Preparation for this for me had been merely an adjustment of time as I just 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 gown in place, I felt like I was walking onto a theater stage totally unprepared for the bright lights. This was the birthing room; The Big Show. It seemed so surreal. My earlier 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; I was becoming a father at 35 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.

   Happy Birthday Bonny!
   I love you,
 

Dad