Iohan's birth

Iohan is now two weeks old, and I’ve been meaning for the past thirteen days or so to sit down and write about his birth. It’s seemed a little perverse to do so, though: The same day that Iohan was born, a woman who attended our church before leaving Chicago also gave birth, but to her son who’d died in the womb, at 20 weeks’ gestation. A short time later, I learned of a friend of our friends who was and still is in a coma, struggling to live through an H1N1 infection and pneumonia. This young woman’s same family suffered the death of a husband and brother- and son-in-law a few years ago, as well as the death of an infant girl on, again, the same day of Iohan’s birth. Though my connections with these families are far from intimate, their sufferings have weighed heavy on my heart, especially, I think, when set in relief against my own child’s safe and healthy arrival into this world. I don’t believe that life is inherently “fair,” but I can’t explain why life should be so unfair to good people, and spare the rest of us.

So I sit down to write this with a paradoxically muted and heightened sense of joy at my own child’s birth. Muted because the sheer fact of Iohan’s healthy birth reminds me of the death of two children and their families’ suffering; heightened because the blessing of life shines so much more brightly when juxtaposed with death’s curse. I won’t go so far as to call this small account an act of defiance against Death, but I do offer it as a prayer of thanks to the One who gives Life, and, in some small way, as a prayer in memory of Adrian and Celia.

Iohan’s birth was, simply put, a dream come true. Considering the rapidity of my last two births, I’d spent at least a few weeks in mild terror of the worst case scenario, which consisted of any of the following: Gabe wouldn’t be home; no one would be available to care for Jonah and Manny; there would be heavy traffic; I’d give birth by myself; I’d give birth with only Gabe attending; I’d give birth on my front steps with the EMT; I’d give birth in a car; I wouldn’t realize that I was in labor until it was too late to go to the hospital; I’d give birth in an hour flat.

To my immense relief, my contractions started at 4:30 on Sunday morning, and they were regular enough, coming every 10-12 minutes, that I was able to establish that I was actually in labor by 5:30. Around 6:00, I experienced a couple signs that told me that I was in labor and that it was moving along, at which point I woke Gabe up; between 6:15 and 6:20 or so I was able to call the midwife, who told me to wait till the contractions were more frequent, lest they stall when we arrived at the hospital; my mom, who started her drive to Chicago; and our friends the Schmidts, who were on hand to take the boys until my mom could pick them up.

Finishing my phone calls, I attempted to act fairly nonchalant about being in labor, even though my contractions were now three to five minutes apart. Fortunately, my wise husband looked at me laboring and declared that we at least needed to get the boys to the Schmidts, regardless of what we did afterwards. The next several minutes were spent by Gabe packing the car and the boys and by me bent over at the waist whenever I had a contraction. In his hurry, Gabriel shut the keys in the trunk of my parents’ car, so he spent a part of this interval on the phone with my dad, searching for the magnetic extra-key box attached to the underside of their car, and being chided by our eldest son, who didn’t like the sight of his father laying in the street under a car.

Sometime around 7:00 we dropped the boys off at our friends’ home and then started for the hospital. This car ride had none of the panic that I experienced during labor with Manny; indeed, when Gabriel looked longingly at the McDonald’s a few blocks from the hospital, I told him that as long as he went through the drive-thru, I didn’t mind if he stopped. We signed in at the hospital around 7:40, at which point the staff put me in triage. This was my first time ever being in triage; previously, I’ve arrived at the hospital already pushing. It was about what I was expecting: A long wait for a nurse, who chatted on the phone about another birth; many seemingly inane questions (“How much did you weigh before you were pregnant?”) when she finally ended her call; and some griping by a different nurse that my preferred position was not conducive to hearing the fetal monitoring device. I couldn’t talk through my contractions at this point, and I felt sick. (A recurring thought in triage was, “Eating that CLIF bar on the way here was a mistake.”) The midwife came into the room sometime after 8:00 and proceeded to ask some more questions. I don’t know if it’s because I wasn’t vocal enough about my labor, or if it’s because the staff didn’t pay adequate attention, but it seemed that nobody realized that I was on the verge of having a baby, at any moment. The midwife checked me, as if to make sure that I was really in labor, only to discover that I was dilated to 7 or 8 centimeters. Almost on cue, transition hit with chills and nausea. The midwife decided that it was time to move me to the delivery room. I was fairly dismayed when I realized that this meant that I had to actually sit up and move into a wheelchair, but it may have been that act of sitting up that let gravity pull the baby further down: I was ready to push.

Though the attending midwife was my least favorite in the practice, she was great in the delivery room. She kept the nurses from putting an IV in me and reprimanded at least one who was evidently not paying attention to the fact that I was pushing. I gave birth lying on my side, and it took only eight contractions or so to push the baby out. Iohan is the first baby I’ve ever actually watched emerge, as I’ve always been too squeamish in the past to do so; I never realized how dark a baby’s skin is when they are born. When I saw his bluish-looking head, I told myself to push and get that baby out now! When I mentioned this to Gabriel later, he told me that that is how Jonah and Manny looked too. Later I saw that Iohan’s Apgar score was a 9. He was indeed perfectly healthy, but I was surprised that he wasn’t already pink. The midwife handed Iohan to me immediately, which almost created a no-nurse bubble of protection around us. Iohan’s bare and unwashed skin lay on my own bare chest. He wasn’t interested in nursing right then, just in being held and experiencing, I imagine, some mild shock at his new surroundings. In time, he nursed and was weighed and measured; his feet were inked and he was bathed; but the precious first moments were just for mama and baby, with dada right next to us.

I don’t love my third son more than my other two, but I was so much more present in his birth compared with either Jonah’s or Manny’s that there’s a sense of peace with his birth that I don’t experience in my memories of the other two. I knew what to expect, different from Jonah’s birth; and nothing ever felt out of control, as everything did with Manny’s birth. The pain was intense, but I was able to call on a couple mantras (“Pregnancy is not a disease” and “I’m going to get huge!”) from Ina May Gaskin’s book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth that helped me to deal with the sensation. I’ve read about women turning inward during birth, and I was able to do that, to mentally process what was going on with my body and to think about how close I was to my goal of birthing my baby peacefully. My husband, as always, was a rock. He remembered that I’d told him to tell jokes to help me relax, but he wasn’t offended when I showed zero interest in joking. His firm hands pressing on my back helped me through the worst of my contractions. He reminded me when I was at my most negative that I wanted this birth, I wanted to meet this child, sweet Iohan Hilary. “Iohan,” a variant of John, means “God is gracious”: Indeed, He is.