HW 36 - Pregnancy & Birth Stories

Interview with my mother:

My mother said that she was extremely happy and excited about being pregnant with my older brother. She and my dad were in a new parents group that met with a “birthing instructor” once a week after work. She said the class started after dinner and ended so late that when the lights came back on after the weekly film the
future dads were all out cold – sound asleep. Meanwhile, the future moms were pretty nervous about the actual births shown in the films. She said it was an international group all giving birth at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Greenwich Village. One woman was Vietnamese. She brought in some special sticks to put between the toes of another woman whose baby was in the breach position, meaning
its feet were down instead of its head so that she would have to have surgery for a Cesarean birth instead of a natural one. The Vietnamese woman lit the sticks so that they burned without hurting the other woman’s toes. My mother said the baby turned around and did not turn back again into the wrong position. The baby was born naturally, and the parents gave all the credit to the Vietnamese woman. The future parents all got along well and met at one of the parents’ apartment after everyone had given birth. There is a really funny picture of all the babies.
One of the dads was a guitarist in a rock band called The Talking Heads and madea video with all the babies sitting up at a bar. The mothers were all told to
leave the room for the actual filming, and they refused because the babies
kept slipping off the bar seats.

My mother said my brother was born seven weeks early. She said there are some contractions that are not the real thing called Braxton Hicks contractions and she thought they were them. The contractions kept coming so my dad took her to the hospital at 6:00 in the morning. It was Easter and even though the doctor, Fernando Moreno, was not all that religious, his family was. He missed his kids’ Easter egg hunt. The nurse said that she could tell my mother was not ready to be admitted yet because she was smiling. “When the time comes, no one smiles.” They were told to walk around outside for an hour or two. My mom remembers the contractions hurting so much that she would have to sit down on the steps of houses near the hospital. When they went back inside, my dad said she wasn’t smiling. My brother was born at 11:30 at night so it was a long day. She did not want pain killers because they make the baby drowsy but she had to be given a drug to make the contractions work better. This drug makes the contractions go to a whole new level of pain, and my mom said the music from the movie Jaws kept going through her head. I guess the contractions felt like a shark coming with its mouth wide open. All the special breathing techniques were useless she said. What helped was digging her not very long fingernails into the palms of her hands. The moment the baby was born, the pain magically disappeared and she remembers the doctor saying, “What was the boy’s name you chose?” Even though my brother came early and weighed barely five pounds, he was healthy. My mother stayed in the hospital for a week with him and the day after they came home the telephone rang, and they were told to bring him back to the hospital. He had to be tested for sickle cell anemia, a disease that has no cure. Luckily, he only has the trait for it and not the disease. My mother said she was terrified and then relieved except for being told that children with the trait often have respiratory problems. Reed has not had them. That fear was just replaced by others. My mother says she watched Reed almost all night long for the first month she was so scared he might die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, which she had read a lot about.

When I was born six years later, my mother said she was probably more nervous than
the first time. This was because she had had five miscarriages in between. My parents were thinking about adopting a baby when my mom got pregnant again. She had to have a lot of genetic testing to find out what was going wrong. She says the problem with genetic testing is that after you’ve learned all that can go wrong with chromosomes you can’t even imagine everything going right. She still remembers the phone call at her office from the doctor telling her that I was going to be a healthy baby. She said she ate as healthily as she did for the first pregnancy but did crazy things the second time like crossing the street if someone was smoking a cigarette near her and not even having one cup of decaffeinated coffee. She went into labor on Christmas Eve and Dad and my brother had to go to the hospital early on Christmas morning. She had the same great doctor as the first time and felt really badly that he had to leave his kids on Christmas day after prying them away on Easter six years earlier. She remembers that my dad and the doctor watched football games all day long, and Reed played baseball and soccer in the hall with nurses. When it was nearly midnight, the doctor said it might have to be a Cesarian birth. She went into an operating room for surgery, but the doctor said he would like to avoid surgery by using forceps. My dad says forceps are huge and look like some kind of medieval torture instrument and that my mom was scared that they would hurt the baby’s head. A nurse said that her doctor was an artist with forceps and that the baby’s head would be perfect. I was born almost at midnight, and my brother was so happy I was a boy. He wanted to call me Bullwinkle, Wink for short.

Hearing about what it was like for my mom to have my brother and me reinforces my thinking about what a very big deal having a baby is. Nothing is ever the same for parents again so they better be prepared for it. Maybe I believe this because my parents do (although I do not follow what they think blindly), but I think that the Republicans who are trying to reverse the Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision so that abortion can be illegal again are crazy. Some even think women who get pregnant from being raped should have to have their babies. My dad thinks that in general men shouldn’t be allowed to have an opinion on the subject, and I agree with him. A baby needs to come into the world being wanted.


Interview with Meghan, a family friend who had her first baby in October

Meghan said that unlike my mother she was sick everyday for the first three or four months of her pregnancy. Then she was told she had something called Maple Syrup Urine Disease (you can’t make this stuff up), which if not treated could cause coma and death for the baby. A week later she was told that she did not have this condition. Later she was told she had gestational diabetes. She did have it, but fortunately it goes away after birth. After going through all the childbirth classes she found out the baby was in the breach position. She was told to swim everyday and do exercises that were hard to do in the last month. The baby did not turn around. Her feet stayed down, and Meghan had to have a Cesarean section. She said she made an appointment to have the baby the way you make an appointment to go to the dentist and never had one labor pain. She was very disappointed.

After the baby was born, she felt extremely depressed even though she loved her baby
tremendously. She was angry with herself for feeling that way and had to have some
medication. She did not tell anyone except her husband about the way she felt, and she pretended to everyone else that everything was fine. Finally, after about three months she felt normal again, and now finally she is really having a good time with her baby. Meghan’s experience just is more evidence that having a baby is not something that you do lightly. Not only does it change your life forever, but a lot can go wrong that you can’t anticipate. It’s a huge responsibility and right now I can’t imagine being ready for it.


Interview with our neighbor

Our neighbor had a girl at the same time my mother had me. She is Brazilian and has
always had asthma. For some reason her asthma is worse in New York than it was in
Brazil. When she was pregnant, she had several bad attacks and ended up in the hospital. She also had to stay home to lie down at the end of her pregnancy because the doctor wasafraid that she would have a miscarriage. After taking birthing classes, she ended up having a Cesarean birth because of the umbilical cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck. Like Meghan, she was extremely disappointed. She also ended up with an infection in the incision and had to go back to the hospital

The baby had something for the next three months called colic, which meant that she cried for hours without stopping every night. She and her husband almost went crazy and had no sleep. On top of that it was the terrible winter of 1994. There was so much snow and ice that it was hard for her to go out during the day. She and my mother would take turns lunch with one another, and even though they live next door it was hard to get past all the piles of snow and ice. She felt like a prisoner especially knowing that it was summer in Brazil.

This is another experience to confirm my thinking that if you are going to have a baby you had better be ready for anything, and you probably shouldn’t be under 30. I think you should have a lot of experiences to get you ready for the anything that can and probably will happen and also so that you don’t resent your loss of sleep and freedom.

I would be interested in finding out more about Caesarean section births vs natural births.