it was like 7:00pm on a tuesday night. nothing special at all. we had actually made the (what i now see was not a terribly bright) decision to renovate our bathroom over the summer, so there was much daily stress to do with that. as it turns out, daily stress can be good for making you forget your wife is highly knocked up. so we were getting ready to head over to our house to spend the evening continuing the labor on our house (we were staying with jen's parents), when god decided there was another kind of labor that needed doing more.
it's odd, but even after nine full mnths of baby preparation, you some how have the nerve to be surprised when she says its time. our conversation went like this: i was in the car waiting for jen to come out. her mom came out instead and said i had better come back in. confused and a little annoyed at the delay, i went back inside to find jen was in the bathroom. i knocked on the door...
"honey? you ok in there?"
she cracked the door and i saw a sliver of her face. i remember thinking she looked amused about something.
"i think my water broke," she said flatly. now this is a moment we had been planning for! we had prepared bags and made arrangements. so, which part of my action plan did i execute first?
"uh... ok! um...", and here came my moment to shine: "what do i do now?!?!"
so, after much bag collecting and other general marx-brothers-like behavior, we got in the car, and i made a law shattering dash or the hospital. now THAT was a particularly bizzare experience. after all the speeding and panicing and dashing, i pulled up in front of the hospital, ushered her in as carefully as i knew how, and looked for the pregnant-lady bellhop. you know, the dude who rushes out to meet you with a wheelchair.
only, he wasn't there! no guy with a wheelchair, no doctors or nurses bustling about her prepping her for an emergency babyectomy... nothing! just soft (and bad) 80's style saxaphone jazz reverberating around the vacant lobby. it was surreal. so we bee-line it to the receiving desk and with wild eyes announce to the sleepy-eyed attendant that we're in labor, please call someone to begin CPR, or whatever needs to be done. with a sleepy look, the dude at the counter tells us to just get on the elevators to the third floor, and pointed us in the direction of the lift! what a schmoe...
anyway, we checked in and got into the delivery room, and camped out for the remainder of the night, waiting for the dialation. we were in there by 8:00pm tuesday, and didn't reach the fabled 10cm mark until like 8:00 the next morning. so all that, and then we sat for 12 hours. talk about hurry up & wait...
here's the real point to this entry. between 8:00am and 10:00am, as i saw my wife- (mind you... this is the same wife who is entirely incapable of waiting at a traffic light more than 30 seconds), i watched her wait through the most grueling three hours of her life. we all know the gory details of labor, no need to describe that here. but no one warned me of the immense emotional strain on the father during all this.
i will never be able to describe how awful it was to sit and be able to do nothing while she is in that much misery. on a few occasions i actually had to get up from the bedside and hide in the bathroom a second to compose myself. comically, my tears made jen's mom cry too, and between the two of us & jen's tears of pain, even the nurses started to get weepy! aw yeah, and if you think that's impressive, you should have seen what i did to those poor suckers in the room at my wedding...
anyway, i did what i could to help (which was very little), but jen was the one in the trenches. and i watched this woman, whom i have unwittingly refered to in the past as a suburban princess, grit down and work though this awful process with a grace and strength for which there are simply no words. on this side of labor, i see her completely differently. she is brave and strong and graceful and controlled (and more than a little hot!).
and if that weren't enough to produce love and respect from me, after three hours of this misery, she learned she was going to have to have a c-section anyway... and was still immediately able to adapt to the change. 23 minutes later when bennett was born, i was even more astonished when she became immediately capable of tenderness & love the likes of which even she didn't know she posessed. at that moment, i fell in love with my wife all over again; and in a way that made the first time look like puppy love. ...all that, and we haven't even gotten to the part where she spends the rest of her natural life bailing me out of all my own stupid mistakes!
so what i learned is that birthing a baby is a real pain in the heart. but like so many other things in my life, god has used it to show me a glimpse of real fulfillment. i'm so grateful...
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