In the weeks leading up to the birth people kept asking: Are you excited?
Apprehensive felt more accurate. As Shakespeare taught us, one must always heed ill omens in the wind. There had been many in the weeks leading up to our due date: owls hooting at the edge of the forest; irregular belly measurements; a meadow vole Fozzie pounced upon one morning and proceeded to disembowel, painting the snow in thin, scarlet steaks.
Ten days past the due date, our vision of a second hippy home birth dissolved in dramatic fashion. All our nesting preparations became instantly obsolete. We no longer needed the rented inflatable birth-tub with its plastic embossed warning: strictly no diving!
At the Royal Inland Hospital, nurses rushed in and out of the delivery room as the baby’s heart, still in utero, plunged to 52 beats per minute. A fireman friend tells me 60 beats per minute is the rate at which they’re trained to begin CPR on infants. The sudden urgency of the situation manifested itself in our nurse’s shouted instructions: “Roll over, move your hips — move your hips!”
Nurses, doctors, orderlies materialized from nowhere and began scurrying around the room. This was not the birth we expected, but this was the birth we were getting. After a few anxious moments a small and healthy baby emerged.
“It’s a boy!” the doctor announced. My mouth dropped open. We were expecting a girl. Nobody expected a boy. We knew our firstborn was a boy without ever bothering to confirm by ultrasound — we just knew. All through this pregnancy we felt equally sure a baby girl was incubating. We never even discussed boy names. Our midwife had often expressed her belief our baby was a girl, repeating her prediction even as my wife moaned through her labour pains.
A boy? I couldn’t believe it. I leaned over the bed for a better look. He was small and scrawny and looked more monkey than human, but definitely a boy by the exclamation mark. “I am the father of two boys,” I said. I was not expecting this.
Nor was I expecting to spend the next three nights sleeping on a hospital foldout chair that resembled less a bed than a section of class two whitewater. The chair folded out into three different levels with a drop of about three feet from top to bottom. Although the back pain and sleepless nights didn’t compare to my wife’s discomfort, I felt like a better husband for being able to suffer, if only slightly, alongside her.
Through all of this, people offered up their regrets, as if not having our dream birth was some kind of tragedy. But our reality couldn’t have been further from the truth: we knew we’d been blessed. Sometimes, holding on to a vision of how things should be has a way of diminishing how things are. If anything, being able to abandon our expectations and be present in the moment felt empowering. In the end, the birth of our second boy felt like a gift and a revelation, and maybe that’s how Bodhi came to us, as an awakening.
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