birthday tomorrow

Katie turns six tomorrow. It is hard to believe, just as it is hard to believe it will be 27 months since Becky died later in the week.

But this is a post about Katie, my amazing little girl. We were playing in the pool at the gym, and I told her the story of the day before she was born, and a little bit about the day she was born, and it was delightful to both of us.

She was due on the 16th of June as I recall. My mom was rooting for the 13th of June; I was cheering for something between June 15 and 21 so that sometimes her birthday would be on Fathers' Day. But she was comfortable and persistent in being unwilling to be born. Finally, on Friday, we scheduled to have her induced on the following Thursday the 29th if nothing happened before then. And I guess that rattled the cage enough.

In the summer of 2000, I had bit off as much as I could chew. I was working full time for a little CPA firm in Tallahassee, while finishing my master's of accounting as a grad student at the same time. And I had started studying for the CPA exam in the fall. But other than that, not much was going on. Becky and I went to the movies Friday night as we often did; across from the theatre was a Garfield's restaurant where we often went. So we had dinner and a movie. We met one of my coworkers on the way out of the movie, and she playfully scolded Becky about sitting through a movie. You have to walk if that baby is ever going to get born. We watched Dinosaurs, the Disney movie, and then we did stroll through the mall a little bit before heading home.

Since the baby could be born at any time, I decided to do all of my homework and reading on Friday night after we got home. Becky was justifiedly tired and went to bed, and I went into the back bedroom with my financial accounting and marketing homework and listened to the Royals game on the radio through the internet broadcast of the game. And I worked until about 2:30 in the morning and crawled up to bed exhausted.

I had been asleep about 45 minutes when Becky shook me awake. Her water had broken, and it was off to the hospital. We settled into triage and they checked this and that and the other thing. The water breaking was only partial; it wasn't as dramatic anyway as we had been led to expect. But it was go time, and they eventually got us into one of the birthing suites at the hospital. We walked around and around in an attempt to get the contractions going, and after a couple of hours, they started in earnest. For whatever reason, they didn't want to give Becky an epidural until she was dilated a certain number of centimeters. I don't remember the details except that she was one centimeter away from that for a long time, and the contractions were really hurting. I sat on her right side and gave her ice chips, and when the contractions hit, she grabbed my left arm. To this day, when I close my eyes, I can feel exactly on my arm where each of her fingers were as she squeezed, hard enough to make my fingers tingle a couple of times.

And then she finally made it to the right number of centimeters, and the anesthesiologist gave her the epidural, and another medication to speed the contractions along, and then it was really on. Becky was hooked up to a monitor that measured each contraction, though I don't remember the units, and in the first few minutes after the epidural, we watched the monitor spike much higher than the ones that hurt so much, and we could see the muscles tighten, but there was no longer any pain. And Becky went to sleep.

I was horribly exhausted, and they told me that the chair I was sitting in would fold out into a bed, and so I did so and the chair become a four foot bed. But I was so tired that I slept dreamlessly for two hours when the bed didn't go past my thighs. And after a couple of hours sleep, we were both refreshed and ready for Katie to be born.

The Royals game was on that afternoon. It seems like they were playing Oakland on the road, so that it was a late start. And I am sitting here thinking Brett Tomko pitched for the Royals that day while at the same time I don't remember him ever pitching for the Royals, which is a weird confluence. I don't know why I am reporting this, but I remember watching the game on Fox that day while the labor intensified, still basically painlessly.

Our dear friend and Katie's godmother Barbara came to the room for the delivery. Our parents were all hundreds of miles away, and Becky had decided that she would rather wait for the help for when Katie was actually born, rather than schedule someone to come out and then miss seeing her altogether if she was late. And so it was the three of us with the doctor and nurse for the delivery. Becky had a slight fever throughout the labor, and so they warned us that Katie would likely be born with a fever herself, and they would take her to the infant ICU as a precaution. I stayed up at Becky's head; the action lower down was just plain nasty. I know I was largely responsible, but during this time I was longing for the days when the men could just smoke cigarettes in the waiting rooms, and I don't even smoke. But Barbara was brave and she even cut the umbilical cord as I recall.

I have wondered from time to time whether I should have cut that cord myself. And everytime I have thought, ewwww, yuk, and am grateful that they toweled off the purple martian a little bit before handing her to me. Childbirth is a miracle, but it is an ugly, stinky, painful miracle. Someone told me you forget about all of the yucky stuff once the baby is born, but not me. I can remember all of those little details of the day.

Sure enough, the baby did have a fever, and they gave us a minute or five with her and then whisked her away to the ICU and told us to come down in a while. And that gave us a minute to name her - at the time, we hadn't decided between Katherine or Shannon - Becky needed to look at her first. How very different our lives would be if we had chosen Shannon, I think. But in looking at her then, there was never really another name for her than Katie.

And then I took a long walk through the hospital to call family and tell them everything was reasonably okay. Becky was fine and while Katie was wrinkly and slimey and off in ICU, they assured me that this was normal. But it took me a good while to get over the trauma of the day. I have heard countless people tell me that the happiest day of their life was when a child was born, and for me, that just isn't the case. As miraculous and meaningful as that day was for us, as much as it transformed our lives in obvious and subtle ways, it took me quite a while to get over the angst of watching Becky hurt for hour after hour. I was spent from that, and it was only after some time to collect my thoughts that I could call family and get the chain in motion that Katie was among us.

I want to talk about one of the subtle ways this transformed Becky, but it is already too late, and I am going to bed. Hopefully I will get a chance to continue tomorrow.