The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
Journals of Yesteryear
Jessica's Story
(On the 30th birthday ammiversary of Jessica M. Dill, the New Hope Journal proudly presents the original "Jessica's Story" published in the Nacogdoches, Texas Sunday Sentinel in January, 1980, to commemerate Jessica's first birthday.)
It was a cold wet New Year’s Eve, 1978. It would be one of the coldest nights all winter. Sleet began to fall about 10 o’clock. Elaine’s mother had been with us since Christmas, waiting on the impending arrival of our new baby. She had given up for the time being and was going home to Austin after dinner on New Year’s day.
The four of us, counting Camen, sat by the fire, wrapped in various degrees of dress. Some had on no more than flimsy nightgowns. I, more cold natured than the rest, had on nearly everything I owned as usual.
I was comfortable that way though and I entertained the group for an hour or so by reading aloud first from the Bible and then from Robinson Crusoe. About 10:30 Elaine and her mother were ready to go to bed. Camen was falling asleep on the couch but she wanted desperately wanted to make it to midnight to see in the new year and she wanted to make some kind of noisy celebration out of it as is natural for 7 year olds. So we all agreed that since I was going to stay up reading a while, I would wake everyone a few minutes before midnight and as a substitute for firecrackers of which we had none, we would all beat on some pots and pans and then go back to bed. Camen thought that would be perfect.
Elaine never drinks more than a glass or two of wine (or any other alcohol) in a years time; so it was easy for her to adhere to the rule of no alcohol for pregnant women. But it was New Years Eve, and our wedding anniversary, and I had bought a bottle of Cold Duck to celebrate the birth or the anniversary, which ever came first, and she thought as she rummaged throught the refrigerator for a snack before she went to bed, that she would just have a half a glass of the bubbly and then the women went to bed.
The house grew silent and I began to read on about the sea swept adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Outside the wind howled and the rain began to fall hard. “The wave that came upon me,” the book went on, “buried me at once twenty or thirty feet deep in its own body…”
At 11:30 I heard Elaine’s soft voice from the loft say, “Well, happy New Year.” I knew she could only mean one thing. Her water had broken and we’d soon be on our way to the hospital. I stoked up the fire and gathered up our gear. By now it was almost midnight so I woke Camen to tell her the baby was coming tonight and that it was time to beat on the pots and pans. We all got a pan and a spoon and started beating out a noisy dissonant chime. Invaders from Mars and jungle primitives would have thought we were warding off the cold and evil spirits for the coming event, standing around the stove as we were in the middle of the night beating on a bunch of pots and pans. If anyone from our own neighborhood had heard or seen us they would have no doubt thought we were the jungle primitives or members of some strange cult.
I went out to warm up the car while Elaine called the doctor. He was out of town and there would have to be a substitute. A bad omen we were sure. Because of our distance from Nacogdoches and the bad weather conditions, we had made arrangements to go to a friend’s apartment in town who was gone for the holidays, to wait out the remaining hours until it was time to go to the hospital.
At about 12:15 Camen and her grandmother went back to bed and we pulled away from the house, the sleet falling steadily like broken glass, the muddy, rutty road to the highway awash with the fallen rain. Elaine was as calm as a summer breeze. I was cold and nervous as a cat. We were both as happy and excited as children.
At 2 in the morning, even on New Years day, Nacogdoches is a ghost town. Through the glistening sleet the lighted emergency room entrance sign at Memorial Hospital shines like a beacon to shipwrecked sailors, guiding us safely to the place where our baby will be born.
Elaine and I seriously considered having our second child at home. We are among those who believe at least theoretically that having a baby is neither a medical nor a public event, but a natural and private part of family life in which the mother and father and their closest friends and relatives join together to bring a new life into the world. It is a happy occasion and a time of celebration. The necessarily antiseptic standards of hospitals inadvertently gives rise to an unpleasant emotional sterility and lack of privacy that makes people feel uncomfortable at best and totally alienated at worst.
For those and other reasons we met with some of the local midwives and read books and weighed all the consequences we could imagine of our acts.
The result was that Elaine felt confident about her part (after all she had already had one easy birth without any drugs and she had been exercising rigorously for months). I, on the other hand, felt totally inadequate to handle what I considered to be my role in a home birth. Nothing is more exciting to me than having a child. If I had my way we would have one every year as regular as clockwork. But it is really too exciting for me to handle without professional help. There is something about the birth itself that terrifies me. Perhaps it is some unconscious memory of my own rather difficult birth. Perhaps it is the simple knowledge of all that could go wrong.
For me the celebration is not in the birthing but in the having been born. The emotional coldness of a hospital setting is easier to ignore than the threat of a real and not an imagined catastrophe. I can only defer to the most knowledgeable person I can find. Whether his bedside manner is gentle or supercilious matters no more to me than the political affiliation or criminal record of the degenerate who would be willing to save my life as I lay dying in a ditch by the side of the road. What matters is the competence to carry the event to a safe conclusion.
Birth is for me an unnerving moment of truth, a matter of life and death, whee existence and non-existence meet in a dark passageway and no one knows who will come out alive or in what condition.
None of my fears, thank God, were realized. At a little before 3 am. As I wrestled with the unfamiliar scrub suit I was to wear in the delivery room, Elaine was throwing up as she moved into the final stages of her labor. The contractions were coming fast and hard. She panted and breathed in time as she had been taught in LaMaze classes. My part as I expected was already forgotten. I tried like a helpless child to comfort her as I would a man who had just been run over by a train.
They wheeled her into the delivery room. The young substitute doctor (looking younger than me in fact) supervised the nurses, told me where to stand, prepared himself with the calm of a professional quarterback in the final seconds of a critical game: defiant, precise, in complete control. Elaine moaned under the pain. The baby girl was born. Elaine relaxed. I was in heaven.
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December 2008 New Hope Journal
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copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill
