The Pontificators

When Debbie and I discovered she was pregnant with our third child, we had already successfully brought two children into our family, so we were confident we knew what was coming. We’d done this already, and though it wasn’t all singing and flowers, we were confident it would be routine, and in a few months we’d have special child number three.

We were in our “child bearing years,”and many of our friends were also going through the same things. Though we started among the earliest of our group, and stopped (6 children later) nearly last, a random gathering of a dozen of our friends at the time would have included probably a minimum of two pregnant women, and perhaps as many as four. And the thing was, some of them were having their babies at home. Yup, that’s right, no doctor, no hospital, maybe (or maybe not) a midwife. And every time we got together we had to listen to all these “I didn’t cut the cord, I bit it in half” stories, from all these very hip (don’t you know) young men and women. I still remember stories like: “I didn’t really experience labor. I had been so faithful with my Lamaze exercises that I just felt a little pressure, and then little Ezekiel slid out, singing ‘God of our Fathers.’”

We found ourselves behind the times. Our first children had been born in the hallowed, antiseptic halls of the local hospital, much to our chagrin. We’d bought all the bourgeois propaganda; we’d been brainwashed by our square parents and our Republican doctor. “Hospitals are safer if there is a complication… the sterile environment lowers the risk of infection for both mother and child… the nurses are trained to deliver excellent care for a newborn…”

But now we were becoming enlightened. We began to understand that hospital births were not only unnecessary, but also detrimental to the physical and mental health of the child. We learned that obstetricians had conspired to force women into hospitals for birth, that they had consciously acted to deprive midwives of their income and profession. We learned that birth in hospital was statistically more dangerous than home birth, and we learned that the impersonal, assembly-line approach to delivering babies meant that the babies would be deprived of the loving, calm atmosphere that was typical of home births. We listened to horror stories of others who had a sister, or a cousin, or a friend of a friend who gave birth in a hospital and had lived to regret it. (I don’t remember, now, exactly how they had learned to regret it. Perhaps when it was time for toilet training little junior resisted, and it was assumed it was because of delivery trauma from having been forced to enter the world under those bright lights, with all those scary people in white, and having one’s little bottom smacked in public. But I digress.)

Since we had finally learned the truth about childbirth, with number three we determined to follow the lead of our truly hip and organic friends. We were going to have our child at home. Our parents were against it, but we understood they had bought into the establishment’s factory mentality, just as we previously had, so we didn’t hold it against them. We felt sorry for them, really. How awful it must be to be as old as they, but still without any wisdom about the ways of the world. But we were newly enlightened, and because when we bought into something we did it all the way, we didn’t even engage a physician for prenatal care. We trusted to our careful diet and our Shaklee vitamins. And I have to say it went very well for, oh, nearly nine months.

Back then, money was a little tight. I was a college student and though we were getting by on my college funding, a little extra money was always welcome. In the Autumn, we had taken to “picking cones.” This is an activity in which you go way up in the mountains, way off paved roads, and you search for fir cones that have been cut out of a tree by squirrels. You gather these cones in burlap bags, and sell them to the forest service. These cones contain new seeds, and these are planted and tended in flats, and the baby fir trees are later carried into the woods by loggers and planted. It’s some “renewable resource” thing. For us, it was extra money.

So on a cold, crisp Saturday morning, with Debbie nearly full term, we dropped the two kiddie-boos off at grandmas, and headed into the mountains in our old Chevy sedan. We were both dressed warmly, and looked forward to a few hours out in the woods. The labor (so to speak) was not strenuous. Most of the time was spent locating the stashes, then it was scooping cones into sacks, and of course I did the sack-carrying back to the car. And that’s how it would have gone that morning except something else happened instead.

Suddenly Debbie gave a startled “Oh!” She looked over at me sort of puzzled, then informed me that her water had broken. Of course I, being who I am, inquired how she could possibly know that. “Well,” she said, “I think it’s a pretty good bet, since my shoes are suddenly full of amniotic fluid.” It was way too cold for Deb to hunt for cones in wet shoes, so I reluctantly turned the car around and headed toward home.

Now, we had really prepared for a home birth. We’d read several books, and had even built a backboard for Deb to use during the final stages of labor. We knew how to clamp and cut the cord, how to make sure the baby’s air passages were clear, and how to clean off all that gunk that a newborn is covered in. We knew we needed to keep the room warm, and bundle the little one in clean blankets and to tuck it into the bassinette. We had it covered, so I turned to Deb and said “I’m taking you to the hospital.” Her response was a demure “You better believe you are!”

This entry was posted on Monday, April 13th, 2009 at 10:06 am and is filed under Alvin, Essay, Nonfiction, Personal History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.