If you missed part 1, find it here
All tears dried and a holy quiet settled over me. Dave whispered in my hair, “You did it Carrie. That was amazing. We have a son!”
Nurses draped warm towels over us and begin discussing logistics of getting us out, but I was again in my own world. This one of total bliss. The fact that 5 minutes ago and for the last 20 hours I’d been consumed by pain was already an impossibly distant memory.
It was as if a breeze had rustled heaven’s curtain. For a moment, I was not seeing hospital walls but a glimpse into paradise.
“Let’s get you out before either of you get cold,” Kim said. Gentle hands supported me while others carefully held the baby against me, his cord still attached. My biggest concern with a water birth was having to stand up so shortly after delivery. But I felt no faint or nauseous twinge. I walked the path of white towels they’d laid from the tub to the bed like it was a royal carpet.
Then I was in bed, a mountain of heated blankets around us. Dave was cutting the cord. Mom was kissing my forehead and slipping out to get some rest.
Kim said I had a second degree tear that she would fix up. The final big fear. I registered about as much concern as if I’d been told I needed a stitch on my elbow.
Dave switched the music to the Labor Love playlist.
Morning light filtered through tinted windows.
Stevie Wonder sang.
A baby that smelled of heaven nuzzled against my chest.
I was enraptured.
“At some point we need to name him.” I grinned up at Dave. I never dreamed I’d be the person birthing a baby that didn’t have a name. But here I was, and it added to the charm.
Dave called in an order for breakfast.
“What sounds good that we can we get you right now?” the nurses asked, listing off options of drinks and snacks.
“Apple juice!” I announced.
Never have I savored a drink more than the sweet, icy juice. Never have I felt so satisfied as when the crisp flavor filled my mouth and finally quenched my thirst.
John Denver sang You Fill Up My Senses.
Eventually a bit of humanity crept into my euphoria. I polished off the juice and waited for our tardy breakfast delivery. Around 10 am. an ultra-perky lactation consultant arrived, pretty stoked to get us up-to-date on all things breast-feeding. Except, baby had just made the journey of his life, and mommy had not fully slept for 32 hours. As Ms. Consultant, with her freshly curled hair, chatted at high volumes about latches and football holds, baby slept slack-jawed, not even slightly interested in sucking. I attempted to smile but instead nodded into the pile of warm blankets. My eyes crossed when I tried to study diagrams of milk ducts.
But it wasn’t nap time yet. Triage rooms were filling up and it was time for us to vacate the delivery room.
We gathered bags and I moved slow but with less misery than I ever imagined. Baby was weighed and measured and diapered and then nestled back against my skin in our new room and finally it was just us. Smelling and kissing and staring at his wrinkled fingers and wisps of long hair.
JohnnySwim sang, “You’re my Hallelujah.”
“Oakley?” Dave said. We said a few other names, but every time we said “Oakley” we smiled. I had debated hardest on a middle name, wanting a connection to the girls and the special way our family had been built.
“Alexander?” I offered. “He can honor the uncle who cared for his nieces and meant so much to us all in Ethiopia.”
“Oakley Alexander.” Dave said.
We called our girls and tried not to cry as we described their baby brother and listened to their delight.
Finally. Baby named. Phone calls made. Oatmeal eaten. It was time to sleep. But I kept needing one more look. One more kiss.
“You’ve got me touching heaven
Got me touching heaven”
I could feel it, a roaring river of tears beneath the surface that would break through over the coming days. The magnitude of this experience was going to be a mess of emotions to work through. All of my fears hadn’t come true. All kinds of good things I could have never even imagined happened instead. It was going to be a process to accept the favor offered me while some of my dearest carried stories of tremendous disappointment, suffering, and loss. I was the most undeserving, and it would take months for me to accept that goodness, like grief, wasn’t something to make sense of, but rather something to simply receive and experience.
I could have never willed myself to create all my body and emotions had accomplished in the last 24 hours. It was an expression written in my DNA and triggered by such a complex sequence of events, and I would have to make peace with the fact that these feelings were not mine to manipulate. That when the body, mind, and soul all find a synchrony within instinct, there are incredible feelings that serve a purpose of nourishment and nurture and survival. Instincts can be triggered and love summoned, but without the perfect participation of hormones, the emotions may not cooperate.
I was born into motherhood without birth, and I would have to grieve what my girls and I never shared. I’d missed it before, but now it throbbed through my body. I would mourn as I fed Oakley, his body instinctually finding mine. I would promise myself to tell them about what a woman’s body can do, what their first mommy had done to give them life and start them on a journey of love. To weep with them again at each stage of awareness over what they lost with her and never shared with me. And someday, to tell them how, while I was a muddle of hormonal infatuation and fear and frustration, when they cried over a scraped knee or disappointing day, the sound of their sorrow would trigger a surge of milk. Death, adoption, and depression had robbed them of too much. Still, my body sought to comfort and nourish them just the same.
The tears would fall another day, the sleep would fall another year. For now, I might as well live fully while I was awake. I lifted my baby back onto my chest.
NeedtoBreathe sang,
“Oh, it’s so clear
Come a little closer
All of my love is right here”
Oakley’s eyes found mine, a little clearer now, and gazed steadily, us memorizing every detail of the one we’d known for months and finally seen face to face.
