Seeing What Is In Front Of My Face

By Sutton R. Stokes, 9-16-09

I got up early on Saturday, Sept. 12. I had work to do. For the previous month, I’d aggressively pursued freelance assignments to fatten up the bank account before Amy’s due date, Sept. 22, and getting it all done on time was going to take some weekend work.

I was up for about an hour when Amy called me back into the bedroom to tell me she was in a lot of pain.

“It’s kind of like gas pain,” she told me, then cringed as another wave of it hit. The pain was bad enough that she was vocalizing through it with little gasps and moans. She said it had first started around one o’clock.

“Gas, huh?” I said, striding authoritatively to the medicine cabinet. “Maybe you should take a GasEx.”

While she chewed a couple of tablets, I fetched one of our pregnancy books and looked through the index. “Gas” got a few mentions, but mainly as a minor inconvenience throughout pregnancy. There was a section on the heartburn many pregnant women also experience, but we knew about that already—and it was obvious this was no heartburn.

I fired up my laptop and searched around a little but could find nothing that seemed relevant. Meanwhile, Amy’s periodic moans were getting more urgent, and it was clear from her posture and movements that she was extremely uncomfortable. The web page I was looking at offered the following general advice: “severe pain should never be ignored, so call your doctor.”

I know good advice when I read it, so I pulled out my phone. The answering service put me in touch with the on-call doctor. I explained what I understood of the symptoms.

“Could it be contractions?” the doctor asked, her voice a little hoarse from sleep.

“I… don’t think it’s contractions,” I said. I really hadn’t considered the possibility. I wasn’t expecting contractions for another ten days.

“Is the baby moving okay?” the doctor asked.

I relayed the question to Amy, who said she hadn’t really been thinking about it and wasn’t sure.

“I think you’d better come in and get checked out,” the doctor said.

I quickly gathered the last items on our check list, threw them into the duffel bag we’d packed the week before, and put everything in the car before coming back for Amy.

Part of me understood that the doctor thought Amy was simply in labor, but I was still in a sort of crisis-response mode and hadn’t consciously accepted this possibility myself. Looking back now, the picture I found in the living room on my return from the car couldn’t have been clearer—Amy, paused mid-way across the room, her hands on the back of a chair, her face rigid with concentration as she experienced some extreme physical sensation that lasted about a minute—but I still couldn’t quite grasp what was happening.

What day was it, again?

We hadn’t even unpacked the Fisher Price My Little Lamb Cradle ‘n’ Swing with “Soothing side-to-side cradle motion.”

“I think these might be contractions,” she said, after one had passed. We were making our slow way down the front walk. The truth about what was happening was slowly sinking in. Maybe it was all the scenes I’ve seen in movies and on television in which a hapless husband helps his laboring wife to the car; there was something familiar about our slow pace, and the pauses we were forced to make as Amy endured yet another wave—pauses which, it suddenly dawned on me, were happening fairly frequently.

As we drove, we tried timing them. They lasted about a minute and were coming every three-four minutes. By the time we got to the hospital, even I had begun to grasp what was going on.

This was labor.

We were about to have our baby.

The nurses were a little quicker on the uptake. They took one look at Amy and sprang into action, whisking our pre-registration folder from my grasp and shepherding us down the hall to an L&D room. We soon learned that she was already dilated to almost eight centimeters. Five hours later, our son Coen was born.

There’s much about the overall experience that is still sinking in, but one thing that I keep shaking my head about is how slow we were to recognize the beginning of this event. We had read books, taken classes, and thought and planned for this day ever since Amy showed me those two pink lines one Saturday morning last January. But, because we assumed it was still too early for labor, we missed the clues and were caught off guard.

A humbling moment.

Something tells me that fatherhood probably has at least one or two more of those in store for me. Maybe I should meditate on the lessons available to me in this experience about getting so caught up in details that I miss out on the big picture.

But first I need to get back to paying attention to Coen—every little detail.




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