MARGARET WEAVER—DOB: 29JULY1992

The story of the birth of our first child, Margaret, starts about a month before the day she was born, also known as “The Day We Learned That Pretty Much Everything “Feels” Like Labor When You’ve Never Been In Labor Before And It’s Your Original Due Date And You Actually Just Peed On Yourself But Wouldn’t It Be Fun To Go The Hospital At 5am Like For Practice?”

Kandyce had taken up residence on the sofa some weeks before mostly because our bed didn’t have a helpful right angle built into the mattress allowing her to wedge herself in such a way as to accommodate her various…parts. There is also a slight chance that I was a high-strung sleeper who was disturbed by every toss, turn, and whining complaint and she slept on the couch out of unconditional love.

Anyway. It was a long time ago.

Continuing, she came into the room, in high dudgeon.

“Lee!! My water broke!! We need to go the hospital!!”

I had trained my entire life for this moment. It was my time to shine.

“Are you sure?”

She was sure. Which doesn’t mean she was right. It just means she was sure. So, we went to the hospital, where the nurses greeted us with all the warmth and charm of that troll from The Holy Grail.

Who…is your insurance carrier?

What...is your method of payment?

Why…are you here when all you’ve done is pee yourself from coughing/sneezing/breathing?

So, we went home. A week or so later, she woke me up in the middle of the night again. This time, it wasn’t her water breaking – or even her “water breaking” – but rather actual, hardcore labor. She was in terrible pain.

Several hours later, her labor pains were diagnosed as “Symptoms of Excessive Fried Chicken Consumption.” So, we were sent home empty-handed again.

To be fair, we were now two-plus weeks past her original “due date,” a fictional and arbitrary “X” on a calendar we were now convinced had been randomly selected by our “obstetrician.” I thought it fair to forgive her any imagined or phantom labor symptoms. Personally, I would have pushed out a kidney just to put an end to the whole tiresome affair.

Which brings us to the morning of July 29, 1992, when she came into the room at 5 am and woke me up.

“Lee? My water broke?? We need to go the hospital??”

“Uh-huh.”

I honestly think she considered going back to the sofa, but her “mama grizzly” instincts kicked in and she insisted that this was the real deal. So, down the hospital we went and, a mere 17 hours later, Margaret was born.

Between our “check in” and Margaret’s “arrival” many things happened.

Kandyce and I walked around the hospital and the hospital parking lot and the neighborhood around the hospital and to the freaking moon and back, all in hopes of “speeding this thing along,” because “this thing” was, once again, not “actual labor” but rather “obvious symptoms” of “mental illness.” Or whatever.

Anyway, our doctor finally grew weary of the whole charade and broke Kandyce’s water manually, which was quite possibly the most primitive and grotesque and OH MY GOD YOU COULD AT LEAST WARN A GUY BEFORE YOU SHOVE A CROCHET NEEDLE UP IN MY WIFE’S BUSINESS thing I have ever witnessed.

And one last word on this “breaking water” thing. Fellas, if you’ve never seen it and are under the impression that because “doctors” call it “water” that it in any way resembles actual water, let me assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. Because it is so very much not water.

Ick.

Okay, so now Kandyce’s water was broken and the clock was ticking! Things were really going to start popping now! So much so, that the male nurse, the anesthesiologist, and I almost had to miss parts of the 1992 U.S. Olympic Basketball Team – better known as the Original Dream Team – as they steamrolled Germany by 50 points. Thank God there was a TV right there in the delivery room so we could all attend to Kandyce’s needs while still enjoying the history being made in Barcelona.

After the game, I was famished. It was late afternoon and I’d been stuck in that hospital all day. Kandyce had pretty much stalled out, so I made a quick run to get a burger, which I was kind enough to bring with me back into the delivery room so that she could at least enjoy the smell of it, at which time I finally saw just how hormones can affect an otherwise pleasant woman’s personality in the worst kind of way.

Then, only six more hours later, Margaret was born! She came out, literally, two minutes before the docs were going to have to perform an emergency C-section. She also came out, literally, at the stroke of midnight, and we were given the choice of choosing July 29 or July 30 for her birthday. We more or less flipped a coin and chose July 29.

We were officially new parents! And since this was our first pregnancy/childbirth experience we did not yet know that nurses are exactly like IT guys, car mechanics, Home Depot employees, and anyone else you are forced to deal with under stressful circumstances and know absolutely nothing about the ONE thing they know EVERYTHING about. Or at least claim to.

There is something about that kind of knowledge inequality that produces the worst kind of communication breakdowns. And by “communication breakdowns” I mean “cruel and intentional lies.”

What I’m talking about is this. I am a bright guy. My wife is a bright gal. We are a bright couple. We have read books and climbed mountains (not really) and can drive cars (well, I can) and have basically done lots of stuff. And yet, despite our competency in every other aspect of our lives – and despite the fact that we had personally witnessed no fewer than 3,000,000 far stupider people successfully have babies – our nurses had us convinced there was no way we weren’t going to bring terrible harm to our child.

The list of things they told us that we might do – or might not do – or allow, evil, demonic forces to commit – was so long and frightening and contradictory that we fully expected our baby to burst into flames within the 17 minutes of being released into our care.

We spent the first month in the hospital’s ER driveway, just to be safe.

Not really. In truth, we spent the first month in this weird no man’s land between “Mind-Numbing Exhaustion” and “Anxiety-Based Insomnia Because Of That Whole 17 Minutes Thing.”

Personally, I was more angry than exhausted. I remember feeling actual fury that I kept having to wake up. I mean, for God’s sake, I had just gone to sleep! Who lives like this??

Okay, that bring us to pretty much the end of the pregnancy/child birth/new baby story of Margaret and I can’t help but notice I come off looking so far. So, in the spirt of being ‘fair and balanced,’ I will end with a little vignette from when Margaret was about six months old.

My employer at the time had given me a pager. I have no idea why. But anyway, Kandyce and I had – at least theoretically – worked out a code so that I could differentiate between a regular “call me” beep and a more urgent “emergency” beep. That said, our code was a really stupid one, but we were young and in love and we thought we could take on the world. Anyway, rather than making “911” our emergency code – a code that had not, in 1992, reached common-knowledge-level awareness – we used “911” for regular “call me” and “911***” for “emergency.”

I see now the flaw in our system. And I am sufficiently embarrassed. Can we move on?

So, anyway, I was downtown one night, at play practice, when my beeper went off.

911***

I tore out of the studio like a madman, jumped in my truck, and ran every stop sign between the theatre and our house. I did a four-wheel drift around the last corner and drove the truck over the curb, across the lawn, and right up to the front porch.

There, I saw Kandyce. She was doing a kind of nervous-happy-dancing thing like little kids do when they have to pee really bad.

I jumped out of the truck and saw that her expression was not so much one of panic as nervous guilt.

Before I could say anything, she said, “Was 911 star star star for emergencies or not emergencies?? Because um…we need diapers?”

Maybe those nurses weren’t so wrong after all.

Happy Birthday, Margaret!!

© 2014 Lee B. Weaver