Tags
2012, birth, daughter, dear, family, father, labor, labour, letter, life, love, mother, musings, newborn, pregnancy, reflection, skylar, story, writing
Dear Skylar,
It could be argued that each life is a story, and each story is woven together into an ever-evolving epic; but every story needs a beginning, middle and end. Seven billion disjointed plot points at any given time, each conflicting with another, leaves a lot of plot holes. And within each plot point is a billion smaller plot points, which makes one question what the point of the original story ever was.
My whole life, all I ever wanted to do was tell stories, create characters and their motivations; weave them between each other and figure out what makes them tick. Make them simple to empathize with but hard to figure out, and wrap everything in a neat package by the end of four hundred pages. Often, this requires months of work, hours lost daydreaming and the sanity of everyone around.
Yet, in mere moments, life created a new story of its own.
That story has a beginning, a middle and an end, but so do the opening pages. It begins with a series of climaxes, denouments and settings in itself. I may have lost several readers by now, some scratching their heads at the over-complication for a simple trainwreck of thought, but I’m getting there.
On the morning of your birth, a silver car pulled up to a red house. It was warm for the beginning of January, but there was enough snow for the coffee that spilt over my hand to melt snow. Past a red gate the cold made impossible to open, I made in the front door and down the stairs.
“Shy?” I called.
“I’m here,” she said, “In the bathroom.”
(….at which point I’ll skip over some icky details and to the main event…..)
Turns out, you had passed your first bowel movement inside the womb, which made getting you to the hospital more pressing. The lady from the hospital desk dispatched an ambulance and told us to gather what we needed (again, I’m skipping certain details) and waiting for the paramedics to arrive.
Now, your Mom was nothing but prepared. Over the preceding months, she’d packed that hospital bag three or four different ways, a thousand different times. Everything was ready to go when the other shoe finally dropped. Still, that did little to mentally prepare her for the hours ahead. Grandma paced back and forth, picking apart the hospital’s instructions.
“Why would they ask you for a shoelace?” she asked.
I shrugged.
“Said it had something to do with giving birth at home.”
By the time the paramedics arrived, your Mom didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. There were two veteran medics and a student, who seemed to be on a training day of sorts. He asked questions, helped by the lead medic who quizzed us on anything his pupil had left out.
Papa appeared in the doorway holding one of his shoe’s laces.
“Found one.”
The medics asked about the pregnancy, the broken water, the contractions. With little to add, I kept quiet, also weary from a long night. Excitement and anxiety had given way to exhaustion, but it mattered little. Adrenaline kept my body hooked up to an extended battery. I wasn’t about to sleep anytime soon.
When the student had collected all the information he needed, Mom was asked to get dressed and gather what she needed. We told the medics that Shyla’s doctor operated out of the Civic on Ottawa’s other side, rather than the nearby General, and she’d told us we were required to go there.
Grandma and Papa loaded the hospital bag into their car- a huge duffel bag I’d much questioned the necessity for. They would drive the monster across town, which included everything from make-up to baby clothes and diapers to Cosmo magazines. I accompanied Mom as she was loaded on a stretcher into the ambulance.
This was the best part of her morning so far.
(Before we left, I called Aunt Leah to alert the family of Mom’s situation and made several Facebook posts, so half the world knew you were on your way. In that process, I forgot some crucial components of our trip. To name a few; pants of any kind for Mom, the camera we got specifically for your birth and my phone charger.)
In the ambulance, the student was pressed by his mentor to second answers to question previously asked. As they monitored Mom’s heartbeat, they asked again about timing, the colour of her amniotic fluid, and her general health. She laughed between questions as I watched bends of the highway disappear in the distance.
My heart was jumping out of my chest. Incessant questions about the quality of my parenthood and the state of our finances took a backseat to concern for your Mom and waiting for time to stop.
I just held her hand until it did.
to be continued…..
