A Baby's Cry

This morning I woke to the cries of a newborn. Through the open windows, his wail came mixed with the sounds of the birds chirping. The sound took me back to a morning fourteen years ago, and made me smile.

It was almost twenty four hours after my son was born before I got to hold him. I spent much of that day in a drug induced stupor. I have a few vague memories of my own, but much of what I remember has been pieced together for me by my friends and family.

I have an image of the delivery nurse running down the hall toward the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit with a bundle in her arms, a blue knit cap on his head. I can’t imagine why they didn’t place my son in an incubator and wheel him there, but in my mind he was carried. Someone, maybe my mother, told me that story.

I know, from tales my husband likes to tell, I begged for more morphine from the doctor after the emergency caesarean section. My husband laughs when he weaves his story of how he tricked the attending physician into believing I was a recovering street addict, which explained my need for more drugs. I don’t remember any of it.

I’d left a chicken thawing in the refrigerator the morning my son was born. I was evidently concerned it might spoil, and rightly so! Not one to waste food, I was explaining to someone, between screams of pain, how to get into my house, and what to do with the chicken. I also planned Easter dinner with my mother. I was in no condition to do anything about those plans four weeks later, but for once in our family’s existence, we had a plan in place for an upcoming holiday. I don’t remember this.

But, I do have a few vague memories of that day. I remember Olga, the nurse, coming in to make sure I kept moving. She was short and round and had a thick Dominican accent, not the German tyrant I’d pictured when I'd first heard her name. She’d role me to one side, then role me to the other, making sure my body began its healing process properly.

I remember trying to calculate how much weight I’d have to lose after giving birth to a seven pound baby. Seven pounds of baby, plus seven pounds of fluid, would still leave fifteen pounds of excess body fat I’d need to rid myself of. How many months would it take, I wondered. Would I be ready by summer?

I remember my husband sitting at the desk in the private room, working on his laptop, some big deadline looming ahead. I think he’d secretly hoped I could hold onto the baby until the deadline passed, five days later. I remember his boss, who’d just gotten divorced, calling the cell phone my husband had left with me while he ran home to shower and feed the dog. I remember his boss’s frustration when he realized my husband probably wouldn’t be coming in to work that morning, and understanding clearly why his wife had left him.

I remember the excitement I felt when the nurses wheeled in my baby for me to feed him, and then the extreme sadness I felt when they wheeled him back out, realizing they'd had the wrong mother. I thought I could have been a fine mother for that baby.

I remember the delivery doctor coming to check on me, telling me of his decision to retire; my delivery had been the final straw for him. He brought me pictures of the umbilical cord with its two knots. He showed me where the blood was, and where it wasn’t. He told me how much longer he thought my baby could have survived if they hadn’t done the surgery; ten minutes was his guess.

Olga wheeled me out to the elevators, pushed the button, and sent me down to the Pediatric ICU wing. My husband met me there and wheeled me to the sinks where I had to stand – groan – and wash my hands for an eternity: three minutes. The pediatrician came out to us to explain what we could expect from a baby born deprived of oxygen. I don’t remember what she said, I just remember her tone was glum.

Inside the ICU, they wheeled me in front of an incubator and lifted out the tiniest, reddest, noisiest creature I’d ever seen. He screamed so loudly, his entire body was taut and he was beet red.

This I remember clearly, when the nurse placed him in my arms, he stopped crying immediately and looked up at me. I know they say a baby’s eyesight doesn’t develop for a few weeks, but I’d like to think he saw me.

We named him Andrew, after generations of Andrews before him, but decided to call him Drew. They say I insisted on this, instead of the nickname Andy we'd planned, but I don’t remember that.

And, the doctor's predictions were wrong; as I write this, he's asleep in the next room. Like a typical teenager, he can sleep through just about anything, crying babies, included.