On This Day My Child Was Born

It was February 13th. I was about 8 ½ months pregnant and I was returning to work after my weekly appointment at my gynecologist.

According to my doctor, everything looked fine. He also thought I may come a little earlier than my due date of February 28. That would be okay with me, I told him. I had had enough of the whole pregnancy thing- the tremendous weight gain, the sharp pain in my abdomen they called “heartburn;” the inability to sit, stand or sleep comfortably. I really did Ache All Over. I was more than ready to have my baby.

The snow was beginning to fall as I headed back to work, but I wasn’t worried. The roads weren’t bad yet, and my workplace was just four miles from my house. Nonetheless, I was pretty happy when I got to work without incident, just in time for lunch with my co-worker and friend Joan.

When I stood up after lunch to return to my work area, I felt an unfamiliar sensation. I realized with a shock that my water was beginning to break. I calmly called the doctor’s office, and they advised me to return to the hospital immediately. I wasn’t able to reach my husband, who was making deliveries for his family’s business in a time before cell phones. I left the message with his mother that I would go home and pack my bag and he could just meet me at the house.

I let my boss and Joan know what was going on and left. I got in the car, turned the key and…the car wouldn’t start. It seems that I had turned the headlights on when I was on my way back to work in the snowstorm and left them on. My car battery was dead.

Okay, so now I was beginning to panic.

I found Paul, my co-worker with jumper cables. Paul was flabbergasted, as he did not think that a woman in labor should be driving herself anywhere especially in the snow. He initially refused to jump my car. I explained that I just planned to drive the few miles to my house, and I probably wasn’t even technically in labor. Paul didn’t care. He offered to drive me anywhere I needed to go. I explained to him that this was my only car, and I could not leave it, dead, in the parking lot at work, especially if I actually had the baby. Paul was adamant. We argued for several minutes. I was getting desperate. I begged. I cajoled. I cannot swear that I didn’t at one point grab Paul by the lapels and yell “Jump the damn car, Paul!” Finally, Joan, who was pretty skilled at the power of persuasion, intervened and Paul grudgingly agreed to jump my car.

I drove home and packed my suitcase but my husband was not yet back from making his deliveries. I called the doctor’s office. “WHAT??!!!,” the nurse said, “You mean you haven’t even LEFT yet?” The last professional I saw get this excited was the whitewater rafting guide after I fell into the Youghigheny River. I decided against sharing the story of the dead car battery. She asked how long it would take me to get to the hospital. It was about 30 minutes when it wasn’t snowing, I told her. “Oh honey,” she said, “You need to get here RIGHT NOW!”

I called my mother-in-law back to tell her that I was leaving for the hospital and to tell my husband to meet me there. She offered to come pick me up, but after my conversation with the nurse, I didn’t think I should wait.

My mother also offered to come to pick me up, which was very sweet but not really feasible. My mother was terrified of driving in the snow, and lived in Swissvale, which was just about an hour away from my home in Washington, PA. I estimated that it would take my Mom 2 hours or more to pick me up and take me to the hospital in the snow, and I was certain that Mom would not want to drive in the snow and deliver her grandchild herself, at least not on the same day.

It was snowing a lot harder when I was driving to the hospital. When I finally arrived, I told the doctor that aside from the fact that my water had broken and I had just driven about 30 miles in the snow, I was feeling fine. He examined me and informed me that I was having contractions and I was “officially” in labor. Perhaps I was in shock as I drove to the hospital in the snow, and therefore numb to the contractions, or perhaps I had instinctively, unknowingly been employing those breathing exercises they taught us in Lamaze class.

Meanwhile my husband had arrived back at the shop, and was so upset at the news, that his parents did not trust him to drive himself to the hospital. His family accompanied him, and his father drove. He burst into the birthing room about an hour after I got there, in quite a state, I might add.

I will not share with you with all the minute details of the labor and delivery, because I hate when women do that. However, I will tell you that I had to have a Caesarian section because the baby was large, and my birth canal was small. I only mention this because I want everyone to know that there is actually a body part of mine that is too small, ironically located inside my body where nobody can see it.

At 10:15 p.m. on February 13, 1985, my beautiful, brown-haired, brown-eyed baby boy was born, 8 pounds and 9 ounces despite coming 15 days early. When they put him into my arms, I was smitten- crazy about the kid from the start. Every bit of the pregnancy and that day had been worth it.

That baby turns 25 today. One word always comes to mind when I think of him- proud. I am so very proud of the fine young man he has grown up to be. Here’s wishing my son a wonderful birthday, and hoping that the weather today is better than on the day he was born.

If the Glove Fits, Buy It

I love those little knit “magic gloves” that you can buy two for $1.50 at the local CVS. They are warm enough when I am driving and walking the two blocks to my office in almost any temperature, and fit nicely into the pocket of any coat. The gloves fit on either hand. My purse is large enough that I have actually misplaced a pair in there. If you misplace one pair or it begins to unravel (which often happens – hey, for 75 cents, what do you expect?) you always have a spare.

Unfortunately we’re having a Bad Winter. On one bitterly cold day during the 10 consecutive days of snowfall we had last month my husband and I were trying to shovel snow off the front steps and sidewalk. It turns out that my seemingly ideal little gloves are completely insufficient when shoveling snow when it is 2 degrees and windy outside.

I grudgingly decided that I would break down and buy myself a new pair of heavy, water-proof gloves. I headed up to Macy’s on my lunch hour the next day to buy a pair of “real” gloves. That should have been simple enough, right?

The first obstacle I faced was the Hat Department, which was positioned directly between the entrance and the Glove Department. Wow, there were so many really dashing, fashionable, cute winter hats there, all on displays with huge SALE signs on them. I’m not really a hat person, and I wasn’t in the market for a hat, but I am a serious fan of SALE signs. Well, I thought, it might be fun to try a few on… and so like a moth to the flame I headed for the shiny, red SALE signs.

Without going into all the painful details, none of the hats I tried on fit me. It seems that hat manufacturers had suddenly decided that one size hat fits all heads, but those of us who have heads know this just isn’t true. And if the hat manufacturers used their heads, they’d know it, too. Well, don’t get me started. Admittedly, I have a freakishly large head. I didn’t want any of their damn hats anyway, and they probably wouldn’t even have kept my ears warm.

I finally reached the gloves, my actual destination. Did you know that they have now started making fitted gloves that are “one size fits all”, too? Come on, people! Get a grip! One size of non-knit fitted gloves does NOT and never will fit every hand. They are called “fitted” for a reason. Don’t they know that that is what makes the magic gloves magic? That they start out real small, but then stretch to fit most hands? Unlike REGULAR gloves! I do NOT have abnormally large hands, and yet I tried on dozens of fitted gloves without success. Rack after rack of gloves. Some I could barely fit on, some I couldn’t get on at all. In the gloves that came in sizes, the old fashioned way, they didn’t have the larger sizes in stock.

Finally, I found one single pair of “extra large” red micro-suede, water-resistant gloves that fit, that would not only be good for shoveling snow in single digit weather, but were presentable enough to wear in regular weather and which matched most of my other winter accessories. They were too expensive even with a 25% discount, but I grabbed them and bought them before they could get away. Of course, once I bought these gloves, the snow immediately stopped and it warmed up. I thought perhaps by purchasing these gloves I had single handedly guaranteed an end to the snow, and temperate weather for the rest of the winter. That really would have been worth the investment. No such luck. Although we did enjoy two weeks of snowless, comparatively warmer days, we are at the beginning of a "snow event" right now. Seems the power of these gloves to prevent snow and cold is limited, but they never claimed to be magic.