Making Porridge

When you do things like eat half a pizza right before bedtime you are bound to wake up with some stomach issues the next morning. Toss in the better part of a large bag of peanut M&M's (especially when you're not even a peanut fan) and the churning can make sleep nothing more than an elusive dream.

Twenty-three years ago today, I woke with abdominal issues of a different sort. If memory serves, I had not eaten all that much the night before, although I looked like I had swallowed a basketball. The spasms that disturbed my slumber that morning would come and go at regular intervals, about ten minutes apart. I was already five days past my due date, so it's not as if I should have been surprised, but when you are pregnant and you have passed your due date you start thinking the human gestation period is limitless. "When are you due?" people would ask, clearly mortified at the size of my belly. How do you answer that when the answer has become moot? Never, I would think, imagining that I would one day be sitting in a tiny kindergarten chair with my daughter still floating around inside me while I learned to count on her behalf.

My husband and I were both a bit stymied on that unseasonably warm and sunny April morning twenty-three years ago. I sat on the edge of the bed watching the clock, bracing myself for each contraction. He watched me watch the clock for a bit, then showered and went to work. He called about an hour after he got to the office, frustrated because he couldn't seem to concentrate. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed, watching the clock. The intervals had gone from ten minutes to nine minutes and forty seconds. He may have been having trouble concentrating, but my attention had never been so utterly undivided in my life. "So come home," I told him. Why was he bothering me when I was so busy?

He came home. I was still sitting on the edge of the bed. Nine minutes, thirty-two seconds and holding. Even I was getting bored. We decided to go for a walk, shake things up a bit, though I was reluctant to abandon my perch by the clock. We walked slowly, stopping every nine minutes and thirty-two seconds so I could double over in an oddly delicious kind of pain. We wandered through the neighborhood book store. Even my husband, the most avid reader I know, didn't seem to notice the books on the shelves. I checked my watch. Things were speeding up. Eight minutes, fifty-three seconds. We thought we should probably hurry home, get to the hospital ASAP. Neither of us liked the idea of me lying on the floor in the fiction aisle, my legs braced against the bookshelves as our first child entered the world. Clean up in aisle seven. Ick.

That may have been a day like any other for most people, but for us it was quite memorable (and inordinately long). We rushed to the hospital, despite my doctor's recommendation that we wait. They weighed me and announced the number; my husband doubled over and seemed to be having his own kind of spasm. Maybe it was sympathy pains, but I think the realization that his wife had officially become the size of a small whale had put him into a state of shock. They revived him, wheeled me off to a room, hooked me up to all sorts of machines, and we waited. I didn't have to watch the clock anymore; there were highly paid medical personnel who would do that for me.

I turned my attention to more important things, like the baby's heartbeat. Hours went by, although it seemed like days. Eventually, my husband went to get coffee. My entire family was celebrating a Passover seder in New York, and they decided it would be a good idea to call. I tried to be pleasant, but  I was very busy watching the monitor with my baby's heartbeat, while the very highly educated and well paid anesthesiologist sat slumped and bored in the chair next to me. "It's not right," I said to him, although Aunt Sylvia seemed to think I was talking to her. "It's too slow." Aunt Sylvia assured me childbirth takes time. The anesthesiologist was ignoring me. "The heartbeat!" I was yelling now. "It's too slow!" Dr. Lazy-ass opened his eyes and looked at the monitor, pretty much told me I was nuts, and went back to his nap. Now my mother was on the phone, babbling about the gefilte fish or something, I really don't remember.

Well, the anesthesiologist woke up when the nurses came racing in with a crash cart, grabbed the phone from me (I think I heard someone tell my mother to go let Elijah in because I was busy), flipped me over onto all fours and started smacking my belly. Naturally, my husband appeared while all this was happening, getting a full view of my whale sized ass from the doorway as the nurses pounded away at my abdomen. I've never asked him if this unshakeable image was the beginning of the end, the real reason our marriage fell apart, but I have my suspicions. To this day, I give him credit for not grabbing a paddle and joining in on the beating.

The doctor on call had to show me the read out from the monitor to convince me that my baby's oxygen flow had only been dangerously impeded for about forty-five seconds, and not the seven hours I was claiming. Nobody said anything (they were afraid of me at this point) but I am pretty sure they had already put the psych ward on high alert. I have always been convinced my daughter missed being high school valedictorian because of severe and extended oxygen deprivation (both hers and that damn anesthesiologist's).

We spent the day together yesterday, my eldest and I. She called because her ankle hurt and she wanted to go to the doctor and she needed mommy to go with her. She also needed a reason to take a few hours off from work, and she knew mommy would be a willing enabler. The bad news is she has a stress fracture and has to wear a hideously ugly velcro boot to all her birthday festivities this weekend. The good news is I got to spend time with her, which I rarely get to do these days, and the mama bear I became twenty-three years ago got a chance to do her thing.

Mama bear may be rusty some days, but she was in full swing yesterday, even after my daughter and I had gone our separate ways. Mama bear was a force to be reckoned with later that evening when my youngest daughter's opponent was clearly cheating at a badminton tournament. And, when all the other mama bears saw my baby bear being wronged, they rallied around me like only mama bears can. My daughter had looked up and noticed I had disappeared (to tell the coaches to pay attention), and I feared that she would never forgive me for meddling. But even she couldn't help but smile when she looked up to see her own little cheering section, all the mama bears huddled together, protecting their young. And this other girl (we'll just call her Miss Cheater Pants) was toast. Nobody, nobody, messes with a band of mama bears.

Before she hobbled off to her life downtown, my oldest daughter let me know in no uncertain terms that no matter what she ends up doing with her life, the one thing she will not miss out on is having children. Music to mama bear's ears. Sometimes, everything really is just right!