My mom came up for ten days right after we brought Hannah home from the hospital. I don’t know why I thought this would be a good idea. She second-guessed our every move, tried to undermine Sally’s confidence as a mother by insisting that Hannah liked my mother more than she liked Sally, complained endlessly when we made her go out onto the fire escape to smoke her cigarettes, and generally drove us as crazy as she possibly could. She refused to cook, got inexplicably angry when we tried to eat healthy, natural foods instead of pre-processed crap out of cans, and complained constantly about having to walk up the three flights of stairs to get to our apartment. By the time she left, Sally made me promise that we wouldn’t have to see her again for a good, long while. I had little choice but to agree.
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| Our wedding at La Scalla in Hoboken. My dad must've taken this shot. |
I should have cut my mother out of our lives entirely. She was willfully disruptive at a time when such behavior threatened the very foundations of our family. However, this would have meant cutting all ties with my only remaining family. I simply did not have the heart to do it. My father had managed to hold it together for the two days he was up for our wedding, but it wasn’t like I could talk to him. He never called, and it had been more than a year since I’d succeeded in getting him on the phone sober. After a while, he stopped returning my calls completely.
My mother drove us crazy, but she and her parents were the only family I had left.
* * *
Young parenthood is challenging, and we were in it on our own in a third floor walkup in an urban area that made something as banal as grocery shopping almost more trouble than it was worth. Sally would wind up carrying Hannah and her car seat up and down the stairs multiple times just to unload food from the car. Add in maintenance problems with the apartment’s radiator system and mold from poorly fitted pipes, and we were more than ready to move. A place that had been a cozy starter apartment for a young couple became a ridiculous challenge for a young family. One of Sally’s childhood friends got his real estate license in 2003, and after discussions with both him and the owner of our apartment, we decided to become his first client.
We wound up buying a cute three-bedroom starter home in tony Fairfield, Connecticut. It was further from work than I’d have preferred, but we could afford it, and there were lots of people in my office commuting at least as far as I would be. As a matter of reality, commutes are a part of life in Greater New York. I started my MBA coursework around this same time at Fordham University, finally making use of the 650 I’d scored on the GMAT almost two years prior. My coursework progressed, and I was eventually promoted to a job downtown. This actually lengthened my commute, but it put me on the train—a far better experience overall and one that allowed me to start writing again.
We were ridiculously happy for several months. Hannah was healthy, Sally recovered from her surgery, and although I was busy, I was building what felt like a worthwhile personal life and professional career.
Sally soon started running again. She decided to run a half-marathon, her first, and set the Fairfield Half-Marathon as her goal. It occured in early June. The course wound down beautiful tree-lined streets along the water from Fairfield to Southport. It was mostly flat, but there were a few tough climbs at about the halfway mark. Sally spent long hours running along Fairfield’s winding beach roads, pushing Hannah in the jogging stroller and slowly but surely reclaiming her physical fitness.
Hannah and I camped out at the finish line for more than two hours while Sally ran. We had a long wait, but it was worth it when we saw her cross the line. She smiled and then pumped her fist. She finished in fine form at just over two hours. I was overwhelmed with pride.
Unfortunately, she recovered poorly. She complained for weeks that she felt exhausted, and sometimes it got so bad that I would catch her gazing mindlessly into space, lost in semi-consciousness. More often than not this happened while she was still standing on her feet, and after a while, I started wondering if she was having some kind of seizure.
This went on for weeks—long enough that I began to get legitimately concerned. Sally napped so much that I found myself doing almost all of our household chores, along with the work from my job and my MBA coursework, too. At the end of a few weeks of this, I was physically exhausted. Still, I came home ready to roll up my sleeves and get into it because that’s what our family needed to keep moving forward. I didn’t know when or if things would change, but I was committed to finding a way to make our lives work.
Sally pulled me aside a week or two later and sat me down gently on the bed in our room. “I’m pregnant again,” she said at last. “I’ve actually been pregnant since about two weeks before the half-marathon!”
“I’m so tired,” I said at last. I smiled and then sank slowly onto the bed. “But that’s wonderful news.”
“I know,” Sally replied. She lay down beside me on the bed. “I know exactly what you mean.”
How will we survive another baby? We’d barely begun sleeping through the night with our first baby. Our lives had only just begun to feel like some semblance of what we were used to them being. Having another child seemed both insane and completely overwhelming.
Still, the knowledge that Sally was pregnant was welcome news. Not only did it explain her fatigue, it also meant that our family was growing again. We both knew that having two kids in diapers would be a challenge, but, we reasoned, once we got them out of diapers, our lives will slowly start to get back to normal.
This seemed a goal set in some far flung, unimaginable future.
* * *
Sally trained even more obsessively for Emma’s birth than she had for Hannah’s. The memories of her “failure” in Hoboken still haunted her, and she vowed not to “fail” again. I tried to be supportive in this, but the possibility of “failure” seemed very real in my mind. Sally’s sister had lost a child to uterine rupture a few years previously, and this made me nervous. I was certain that Sally would avoid that particular calamity if only because I planned to be present in the moment of any potential crisis and make whatever tough decisions had to be made. I was mindful, though, of the psychic scarring that another rough-and-tumble intervention might engender within my wife’s mind. As far as I was concerned, we needed to approach this second birth with a clear head and all the medical knowledge that twenty-first century American medicine could bring to bear. But Sally didn’t see it that way. For her, Emma’s birth was a marathon athletic event, and she would succeed if she prepared correctly and went at the problem with all of her considerable talent and determination. This time, she would do whatever she had to in order finish the race.
We were fortunate that Sally hadn’t yet gone back to work. She had time to read up on pregnancy running and fitness in general, and she learned all there was to know about V-BACs, or vaginal births after Cesareans. Coming off a successful half-marathon, she had already laid a foundation of baseline physical fitness. Even Hannah was trained and ready for the jogging stroller. All that remained was doing the work of preparation and finding an OB-GYN who would be supportive of Sally’s overall mission.
This was not as easy as it could have been.
Most OB-GYNs were unwilling to take even the minimal risk associated with letting Sally attempt a V-BAC. “No,” they’d say. “That’s out of the question. You’re already too old.” Many were openly contemptuous of her desire to try for a vaginal birth given what she’d already been through, and few made an effort to hide that contempt. They just didn’t want to do it. It was an unnecessary hassle in their minds, and it did nothing to mitigate the risks to their professional careers and reputations inherent in childbirth, factors that were plainly evident in their minds. But Sally searched with the same dogged persistence that she brought to her physical training, until she finally found a woman who would try with her at Norwalk Hospital. She then hired a birthing coach to teach her how to prepare like a champion, and with that, she and her team set about the serious work of having a child the old fashioned way.
It seemed like Sally was pregnant with Hannah for ages, but her pregnancy with Emma flew by at light speed. She didn’t have any complications, and it helped enormously that we’d been through it all once already. Her water broke naturally one day while she was out for a walk along the beach with a friend, and it happened on a weekend, so that I was able to take her to the hospital without incident. We had go-bags packed this time, and Sally’s mother was, for once, perfectly willing to take Hannah for a few days while we dealt with the birth itself.
We got to the hospital and checked in without issue. I kept waiting for the doctors to hook Sally up to some crazy machines or something, but she paced the floor free range instead, walking determinedly in her nightgown with her birthing coach alongside her. She struggled through the pains of labor, but she also helped to speed the process with constant movement and exercise. She really did look like a bike racer on a climb. Her face was set and intently focused, and at a certain level, I kept expecting to see her to do headstands or pushups or something. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see her go through some pregnancy yoga. All the while, I watched and I waited, attentive for some sense of calamity, some moment of decision or whatever, when I’d be called upon to make a hard choice in the heat of the moment.
My moment never came.
Sally’s labor passed quickly and without medical intervention, and in the end, I watched uselessly from the corner while at last she gave birth—just after midnight in March of 2005.
“I did it!” she cried triumphantly. “I gave birth vaginally after a Caesarian section. I knew that I could.”
I was alone and forgotten, extraneous in one of the critical moments in my family’s lifecycle. I’d done nothing while my own wife had fought her way through the struggle of a lifetime. It just wasn’t my show. Like Beast Barracks, Sally’s triumph wasn’t about me. I was there solely for support. Even had I been absent, the whole thing would have gone off without a hitch.
This time Sally could hold her baby immediately, and that changed the experience in remarkable ways. I stood around like a tourist. Compared to that, Sally’s joy was pure, overwhelming, and infectious. She was radiant in triumph and newly confident after her success.
Emma slept five hours straight on her first night in this world. It was so weird that I woke in a panic in the middle of the night, wondering if something bad had happened. Both mother and baby were fine, however. I lay my head back on the little couch that some nurse had dragged into Sally’s recovery room, looked contentedly over to where my wife and my new daughter were nestled safely together nearby. Pure, unadulterated pleasure soaked through me.
All was right with my world. This was the dream, and I was living it.
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