Whenever I talk to someone who is about to get married, I often tell them that one of the coolest things about the whole experience is having everyone who you love and all the people who love you, in the same place at the same time. No other time in your life really do all those people come together. You stand there behind the double doors with your arm in your father’s and the doors swing open and there they are…all the people who you have loved and who have loved you, standing to their feet to meet you. People think about their wedding day and naturally think of it more in terms of the person you are marrying but there are other elements of that day that are priceless. For me, delivering my first child was much of the same way.
It was 4 am and I woke-up with a contraction. I knew it was a contraction and a really uncomfortable one at that but was this really it? I was, in fact ,constipated and going to the bathroom period gave me contractions so was I just really constipated or constipated with a baby who was coming out? So, I did what any one girl would do. I said a prayer that the Lord would let me know if it was real labor and I went into the bathroom and gave myself an enema. Standard night-time procedures. I highly recommend having enemas on hand. Whether you are squeezing out a baby or not being able to squeeze out what you wish, they are life savers. This one for me didn’t produce many results so I retreated back to bed and waited to see. Thirty minutes later: another contraction accompanied by another experience that let me know that THIS was it. 4:45 am on Sunday the 18th, just a matter of hours before Lance was to get up and preach a sermon he had worked on all night AND just before he was going to have to lead worship for the same service, I leaned over him in bed and said those words that we had been talking about for weeks and weeks.
“Lance, I’m in labor.”
“Are you joking?”
“While I think waking you up at 4 am and telling you I’m in labor is funny….no, no I’m not.”
For the next thirty minutes we were elated and in shock and Lance rambled on and on about how she is already a little rascal for coming before he was supposed to preach. I told him the cold, hard truth.
“Maybe the Lord didn’t think you’re sermon was gonna be good.”
That’s an example of a joke you tell at 4 am.
After cleaning my house between contractions for a few hours, we made our last trip out of the home with lugging a car seat behind us. I did what every girl would do. I took a picture.
With that, my journey to motherhood that began over 2 years and 9 months ago, started to become a reality. A reality in the form of hospital walks, contractions, excited phone calls, and the total loss of modesty in stages throughout the day.
As the time drew near, I found myself in a hospital bed with a machine tracking my contractions like an earthquake graph ticking up and up making mountains in the painful times of what were small little waves in between. Lance looked at the screen one time in disbelief and laughed and said, “Oh my gosh! This one is off the charts!” I let him know that comments like that would be said one time, forgiven, and never to happen again. This was not an example of a joke.
When it came right down to it, I was emotional as everything inched closer. I could barely look at the little warming table in the corner of the room without crying because I knew my little child was going to be there crying for me in a matter of hours. Every time I looked at it, I got choked up.
Time flew by and before I knew it, I was in a room with nurses in scrubs, a precious doctor I love on the way just to deliver my baby because she wasn’t working that day, and a husband perfecting the video camera for the perfect shot of the second that our lives got way better.
The doctor came and I pushed like I needed an enema. Lance talked me through it and watched as it unfolded in amazement. The doctor said, “A head full of dark hair…” while I was pushing and Lance went down to see and got teary-eyed. After yelling, “What?!!!” due to shock that I would have a child born with three strands of hair much less a head full, I had to stop pushing mid-contraction because I started to cry. There is nothing more surreal than aching, grieving, waiting, praying, and yearning for a child for years and to then be in the moment where they are seeing all my heartache emerge into a beautiful baby.
The nurse grabbed a swaddling blanket and laid it on my chest to receive our new baby. Again, I cried. I was moments away from seeing her and I couldn’t stand-up emotionally in the face of that.
I pushed. Pushed. Pushed.
The doctor says, “She’s almost here Go Go Go!!!”
I could hear it in her voice and see in Lance’s little boy awe-struck face that she was right.
With one push I hear the doctor say, “A head full of dark hair, eye lashes, and look at her blinking!”
The head was out.
I am such a woman.
One big final nervous, anxious push and a huge burst sensation and emptiness filled my stomach. I knew she out before I heard her cry because my body felt this intense sudden vacancy.
And then I heard her cry. I cried. I saw my husband cry and say “wow” over and over. They held her little bluish squirming body in the air and my heart and mind changed to a mother. I yearned for her all over again like I did almost three years ago praying and peeing on blank pregnancy sticks.
They lifted her to my chest and all I could do was weep and say, “Hi sweet girl.”
She looked at me with those coal, newborn eyes and then I knew. I knew how it must’ve hurt my parents the first time I told them I hated them in anger as a child. How they must’ve felt when I sang my first solo to a crowd in first grade and how proud they must’ve been. How it felt to hold their breath when I got my license and to watch me cry over boys. I knew a parent’s love. It’s an overwhelming moment where you both, experience a love like you’ve never had, while simultaneously realizing that all these years you had been loved like you had never known.
My sweet doctor came over to me teary-eyed, hugged me and told me how proud she was of me and how much she would miss seeing me around the office. I told her how much it meant for her to come in special to deliver my baby and how I couldn’t believe that she was finally here.
Eden cried on my chest and we had our first hour together as mother and daughter with a sweet new father looking in at us over my shoulder. My parents came back to visit me and as I soon as I saw their faces with this precious life breathing and beating on my chest, tears flooded our faces.
The hour flew by and they came to move me to my postpartum room. There I was again behind two big double doors waiting. With my daughter’s arms in mine, the hospital doors opened and standing to their feet to meet me was a line of people I loved and people who love Lance and I, lining the halls to greet us.
It was made up of the sister who orchestrated a “Go Rebecca” cheerleading squad every time the labor and delivery doors opened so that I could hear their cheers in the room while I pushed. The nurses talked about that the rest of my stay at the hospital. The sister who heartbreaking cried when she told me she was pregnant when I was still trying to conceive. The two parents who had been in that very same hospital 27 years ago bringing me proudly down a hall to their family. The brand new first time grandparents who had been perfecting their grandparent names for the past 9 months and the sister-in-law who proudly exclaimed, “We’re having a baby!” when she talked to us earlier that day. The cousins and aunts that drove hours just to be there for those few priceless minutes. They were all there.
I finished the rest of the night with a precious baby in my arms and a husband who continues to show me his greatness, by my side. There wasn’t much to do the rest of the night but be in awe. My little girl hiccupped beside me in my arms and I laughed quietly to myself because I had felt her in my belly doing that for many long months. My heart swelled with love and emotion like only that of a parent can do. Just like when I married my husband almost six years ago, everyone who loved us was there . And in a tiny hospital room, the last room left on the floor, rocked a new mother, a sweet father laying with her in bed, and an infinitely loved little girl and having everyone we loved in a room took on one 7 and a half pound new meaning. 3 years of hopes wrapped in a blue and pink lined hospital blanket. She looked more lovely than my heart ever ached she’d be. The sound of the air unit whirred on around us in the silence of the evening. Two changed people looked into the face of a new precious life and as with any birth to parent, for a moment, everything in the world was right.
