Adventures at the Orange Door Inn: March 2017

Addie will be 20 months in just a few days, and it's high time I wrote her birth story. From the beginning, she proved to be exceedingly sweet and easy-going, melding so perfectly and unobtrusively into our existing mile-a-minute lives. Except for the occasional extra cuddle time or middle-of-the-night wakings, she barely slowed us down with her arrival as we sold our house; purchased, moved (when she was just a month), and set up a new home; potty-trained Caedmon; and started him in preschool. Even her birth was a whir, barely causing a blip in the physical time lapse of our lives. But that seems to be her modus operandi: unobtrusive yet monumental, and altogether wonderful. Though I haven't been writing much lately, I really do mean to celebrate and remember all the moments we have with her, so without further ado, here is how Addie came into this world.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

As a second child, of course Addie is subject to comparisons, and her birth is no exception. If Caedmon's birth was a long, grueling, yet rewarding marathon in which I sweated and endeavored (cue musical montage of heroic and herculean efforts at mile 20), Addie's was a quick 100-meter sprint. No, that makes it sound too light-footed and focused. Her birth was more like a mad dash from an oncoming runaway semi-truck—frantic, harried, quick, and filled with relief when the episode was over.

But it didn't begin like that. It started with my water breaking at 10:15pm on July 14 of 2015. We know this exact time, because we happened to have a phone appointment with our very accommodating realtor regarding some final details on the sale of our old home and the purchase of our new one. But contractions hadn't yet begun, so there was no immediate urgency. As second-timers in this whole birth thing, we were pros—calm, cool, carefree, even. We finished our phone meeting with our realtor (me, chiming in over the speakerphone while I mopped up my mess in the bathroom). I called my friend Stefanie and gaily related that it would be go-time soon, joking, laughing... What a contrast it was to the first time, when I was gasping into the phone, begging her—my nurse-friend and often go-to source for medical advice—to tell me whether I was, indeed, in labor or not (uh, yes, I was). I did some last-minute packing and then curled my hair and put on just the tiniest bit of makeup. (Because I learned from ALL those photos of myself after giving birth to Caedmon that a little help in the beauty department couldn't hurt.) With our affairs in order and my vanity sufficiently indulged, we left at 11pm for Kaiser Labor & Delivery for an initial check-in with the baby.

That's when we met Ionie. Ionie was the admitting nurse that night, a small but formidable woman in her 40s with close-cropped hair and a quick, deliberate gait. I learned soon enough by her firm demeanor and stern Nigerian accent that she was not to be messed with. As I lifted my hospital gown for her to hook up the fetal heartrate monitor, she pointed at the rashes on my belly. "What is that," she ordered more than asked. "Uh, eczema. From my pregnancy," I faltered meekly. Her reply was a mere grunt as she continued to hook up the device, but she did take the extra care to avoid the more irritated parts of my skin. Ionie's directive was simple: lie on the bed (in this contorted position) until she could record a solid 20-minute block of the baby's heartrate. It should have been easy enough, except that Addie decided to fall asleep at that very moment, and in order to wake her up, Ionie gave me a large tumbler of sugary juice to drink, and then left to tend to other patients, leaving me tethered to the hospital bed while my bladder quickly filled beyond comfortable capacity. After 45 minutes and still no sign of Ionie, I couldn't take it any longer and sent Wayne out to find her. Ionie bustled in, rebuking me impatiently for disrupting her workflow, "I was coming; I hadn't forgotten you." But she did unhook me from the monitor, and with a relieved bladder and a satisfactory recording of the baby's heartrate, we were discharged at 1am and sent home until my contractions commenced and became a consistent four minutes apart.

Upon returning home, we went straight to bed, since we knew the fun that lay ahead of us. Wayne quickly fell into a steady rhythm of snores, but sleep eluded me, because of course, that's when my contractions finally decided to begin. At 2:15am, I crawled wearily out of bed. Leaving Wayne to sleep, I retreated to the family room to wait out the early stage of labor, snatching the book lying on my bedside table to pass the time and distract my mind. Book club was in a week, and I was almost finished with our book selection, and so for the next two hours, I went back and forth between the sobering words of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and then tossing it aside as I bent over our couch, head buried in the cushions, rocking back and forth, riding out my early contractions and jotting down my stats on a piece of scratch paper. At 4am, I finished my novel, and so I woke Wayne to tell him it was time to go.

I pride myself in being task-oriented, reveling in a to-do list riddled with check marks and crossed out items, but I wonder if, in crossing out "finish book for book club", I had taken a tad too long to leave for the hospital, because by then, my contractions were VERY strong. When we arrived at Kaiser, there was no questioning whether I was in labor this time; I was screaming in agony.

We met Ionie again, this time in the midst of an embarrassing kerfuffle in which I had misunderstood the nurse over the phone who had advised me to go THROUGH the ER to Labor & Delivery and had mistakenly checked myself INTO the ER, and was thus stuck in some sort of administrative gridlock when I did make my way upstairs. As we waited for my name to clear from the ER computer system so that Labor & Delivery could add me, I was pelted by wave upon wave of soul-crushing, abdominal convulsions. "What's going on? Why is she still sitting here?" demanded Ionie of the receptionists at the front desk, who looked at each other helplessly. Ionie grabbed the phone, dialed the ER and shouted into the receiver, "This is Ionie from Labor & Delivery. You need to discharge my patient—NOW!" and hung up. She promptly led me down the hall towards a room, no question her order would be heeded. That's when I knew it was good to have Ionie on my side.

Though I was a pitiful, tearful mess at this point, Ionie’s no-nonsense demeanor did not let up. This time, though, it was a godsend. Admonishing me for my effusive cries of pain, she made me stop walking, ordered me to look at her, and sternly demanded that I breathe, modeling for me the deep breaths that reached her diaphragm—in through her nose, out through the mouth. No screaming, no crying. Focus. Control. I needed energy, and this was sapping all my resources, not to mention my oxygen. Indeed, I was already feeling light-headed and had started hyperventilating. I needed to take hold of myself emotionally and physically. And so I mustered all my self-control, willing myself to stay calm as I made my way slowly to the birthing room and crawled onto the hospital bed, quietly convulsing. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. No screaming, no crying. Focus. Control.

At this point, Wayne returned from parking the car, and as he took his position by my side, he jokingly quipped, "I almost passed this room; I didn't hear you screaming." Pathetically, like a jailbird, I looked at him and nodded over to Ionie, "She won't let me." It was that moment that I was seized by another gut-wrenching contraction. I suppose sometime during the short trip between the waiting room and the hospital bed, I had slipped into transitional labor, though all I could register was that I was in the grip of a most violent pain that was mercilessly unrelenting. As with last time, Wayne dutifully took up the role as Supportive Husband, holding my hand, and proceeded to give me the most loving and kind gaze, as if to say, so sweetly, "You are doing wonderfully, Sweetheart. I love you."

But this was not like last time! And his loving and kind gaze was like fighting the blaze of a roaring fire with puffs of sweet, summery perfume! In the throes of pain that had overtaken me so suddenly and swiftly, I had turned feral and animalistic. I was in survival mode. At that moment, I needed a coach to push me forward, not a cheer squad to brightly encourage beside me. I turned away from my loving husband and frantically sought out Ionie. "Help me!" I cried out, pathetically.

At my feet, she looked over at me, intense as ever. "Breathe!" she ordered, and so I inhaled. "Focus on my face." I looked at her with wild eyes. "Loosen your shoulders. Ease your muscles." And so, to the best of my abilities, I relaxed my tingling arms. Though I made little noise, lest I anger Ionie, I still felt an overwhelming desperation. Never did I want an epidural in all 15 hours of labor with Caedmon, because though the pain and discomfort were immediate and excruciating, the process was long and slow, allowing us to rest and even snooze in between each monster contraction. It felt right, controlled, and even beautiful, in my body’s steady progression toward its natural function of giving birth. But this time, nothing felt “right”, and I was no way in any kind of control, as I was seized so suddenly and sharply by what felt like the ultimate assault to my body. In the face of what I thought would be another few hours of torture, I wanted the epidural—NOW, but before I could gasp my wishes, I felt the overwhelming urge to push or burst or implode or something. I could hear myself, and I sounded like a scared, wounded, crazed animal. With all propriety and decorum out the window, I yelled what I considered to be a fair forewarning to the nurses, "I NEED TO POO!" Ionie looked at me, and with the most intent of expressions, shouted back, "Then poo!"

What I had felt was not a bowel movement, but was actually the baby pressing urgently into the birth canal. Who knew that in a matter of half an hour, I would be fully dilated from the 7 centimeters I was upon arrival (just one centimeter more than I had been when admitted for Caedmon’s birth) and my body would be doing all it could to expel the contents of my uterus. Unlike last time, when we were left on our own for what seemed like an eternity, the sheer absence of medical staff a demoralizing indication of my lack of progress, this time, there was no opportunity for anyone to leave. There was a great commotion as nurses pulled out the bright overhead light and rolled over the tray of tools. Ionie gowned up, preparing to catch the baby, before the midwife arrived in the nick of time. I pushed for less than 10 minutes, compared to the 90 minutes with Caedmon. I barely remember the ring of fire this time, because it was so brief, but I do recall the immense relief that rushed over me as the baby's head emerged, followed by the rest of the body. It was 5:38am on July 15, just less than an hour from the time we arrived at the hospital. In the mad chaos, there hadn’t been time to even fully admit me, but now, as the baby emerged, the room stopped.

It was that cry again that stilled the atmosphere. Second time, but still so distinct, buoyed by the torrents of relief and emotion so that its tiny vibrations filled the room. It’s the cry that signifies all is well, that it’s finished and that it’s begun. It’s the cry to herald that nothing is to be the same ever again. And so that cry pierced the air, but to be honest, it didn't penetrate my heart as it did with Caedmon’s. Everything was too quick for me to feel anything except sheer relief. The baby was here, we were surely overjoyed, but I was far from the tearful, blubbering first-time mother whose entire world—inside and out—had just been turned upside down. Instead, we all focused our excited attentions to the next order of business: was it a boy or a girl?

Wayne was the one who was given the honor of revealing the gender, and he hesitated as he performed a double-take. "It's a... girl?" he announced haltingly; he had so convinced himself that we were having another boy. And with that, they placed our new daughter on my chest... our baby Elydia.

Yes, Addison was first Elydia in the early hours of her existence. Liddy, we would have called her. We had written it on her little bassinet tag, even, but scratched it out when, in just the first hour after her birth, we heard ourselves repeating what I'm sure would have been for the rest of her life: “Her name is Elydia. No, EL-lydia, not Olivia. No, not Lydia..." And so Elydia became Addison, and our sweet Addie fits her name so well now that I can't imagine her as otherwise.

So just as with the whirlwind that was her birth, Addie has not missed a beat and has so competently and considerately kept up with the push and pulse of our lives. In fact, that same day, Wayne was on the phone with our mortgage company, closing the loan for our new house. And the next week, I did, indeed, make it to book club, not just clutching my copy of Brideshead, but also the tiny being that compelled me to the finish the night before her arrival. Though parts of the book's ending are a bit fuzzy, details from Addie's birth, though quick and harried and without much of the mounting emotion of Caedmon's, are etched in my heart, equally cherished and ready to be retold as less of a pull-at-the-heartstrings kind of tale than perhaps the source of a good chuckle.

Addie, dear, you are such a bright light in our lives, and you have made it so effortless and enjoyable to care for and love you. I don’t know what the teenage years will hold, but whatever difficulties, may they, like your birth, come quickly, even if intense, and be resolved with the same alacrity.