Posts Tagged: personal happiness
I’m too busy to blog, so…
End of Summer
I take care of one of my grandkids each summer, which is fun and also keeps me busy. I don’t have much time to write, but I always find time to read. So I offer you two pieces I loved reading. This is some summer nonfiction for you.
This short piece by Casey Jo Graham Welmers concerns rocks, grief, and reality. And it’s fantastic.
The next one is a long and thoughtful look at “the third thing” and its role in a successful relationship. You have to settle in for this one, and take your time. I would like make the generalization that male writers are more comfortable than female writers with asking us to do that, to listen to every last word they have to say on a subject. But of course that would be sexist of me, now, wouldn’t it? Still, this piece by poet Donald Hall is worth the time and concentration.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/60484/the-third-thing
School starts soon.
And so will our regularly scheduled programming.
Happy Summer.
Retirement and Blooming
Retirement Discussions
So we had our family gathering for Memorial Day on Sunday, and “family” includes a LOT of people in my world. In addition to an incredible menu of traditional cookout delights, the hijinks of seven delighted children, and my beautiful daughters, I was privy to a fervent discussion between in-law and ex about the possibility and necessity of retirement.
My son-in-law’s father (Marty) is pro-retirement (as am I). My ex-husband (K), father of my children, is still working hard at age 67. Marty was trying to encourage K to finally retire. After listening for a while, I joined Marty in reassuring K that he would be fine financially (much more than fine). I mean, if I can manage, he certainly can.
K listened and argued and listed his reasons for putting off retirement again. Marty turned to me in bafflement. I said something like, “You’re right, but K’s refusal to retire has nothing to do with finances. It has to do with emotions. It’s all fear. He’s afraid of losing his identity and security, and no amount of logic can cut through that fear.”
What Not Working Means
I am so incredibly glad to be retired, but I’ve had my moments of free-fall. I was reading this essay by Hugo Dos Santos in LitHub this morning, and realized what he said about being laid off was the same for retiring:
Someone who has just been laid off is someone in the process of disappearing, and they know it, even if they can’t say so. The routines that informed the self are gone. Gone are the title, the inbox, the calendar invites lining up the days. What remains is the stubborn question underneath all of it, the one the routines were so efficient at keeping quiet: Who am I when no one is paying me to be anything?
I probably had less trouble with this “Who am I?” question than many, because I might have spent ten hours a day getting to work, being at work, and coming home from work, but I never felt defined by work. I had a career, but it was also just a job. What I did for a living was never my identity. In fact I often chafed at working because I am a person who simply cannot stand to be told what to do. Ever. By anyone. This is the core of my identity, this stubborn opposition to the direction of others.
If you think I’m joking you’re wrong.
So the answer to “Who am I now?” after retirement is “Myself, finally.” But this means I’m my own manager. I’ve had a few good managers in my life, and the best of them (Kathy) understood that I could and would do ANYTHING if allowed to do it without excessive oversight and questioning and nitpicking and bothering. I would power through projects like a draft horse if left to my own devices. I don’t think I ever missed a deadline.
However, as my own manager, I find that I’m a recalcitrant and stubborn employee. I can be a total pain in the ass. I think this could be helped if I gave myself more deadlines. I love a deadline, I love meeting or beating them, I’m like a dog on a track to cross that line. I miss having deadlines. So maybe I’ll work on that. Or not.
Finding that Door
Here’s another passage of wonder and beauty from the essay.
What I told myself, during those years of not writing, was that the conditions weren’t right. That I needed more time. More quiet. More distance from the ordinary demands of a life. That the writing would happen once things settled. Things never settle. What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door. And somewhere within that structure, I had stopped thinking of myself as a writer and started thinking of myself as someone who had, at one point, desperately wanted to be one.
Oh that gorgeous line: What I was really doing was building a structure of permission so elaborate that I couldn’t find its door.
I didn’t do that. I was always writing something. Poems or essays or blogs, even when the urge to write novels dried up. I’d write for work and feel an almost desperate pressure to write my own things instead, but I had those deadlines, you see. So I’d send myself an email with an idea or passage or just a phrase. Then I’d go back to whatever I was doing for pay. When I got home, I’d tap away at my own work. My real work.
This writer discovered that too.
The art happens in the margins between obligations, between the work day and the start of dinner, in the twenty minutes before the house wakes up. Or it doesn’t happen. The desk in the basement is not a retreat from life. It is inside the life.
That’s why retirement works for me. Writing was always inside my life, my true identity. Retirement has taken away nothing. Instead, it has opened up space for the parts of my life I’d fit in around the edges of making a living. I understand that it’s different for other people, but it’s beautiful for me, a blooming place where words are allowed to take up the space they’ve always needed.
If you’d like to read this fine and lovely, click below.
I never do this. So I am doing this.
The Big Question…
…is always the same this time of year. What am I thankful for. And oh my gosh there is so much for which I am thankful, so I thought I’d say a few out loud.
I’m thankful to be retired. It is so busy, so fun. As a friend says, “Retirement is better than it’s cracked up to be.” I’ll write about this more some other time, but I love doing as I please. I’m thankful that when I retired, my company gave me a beautiful send-off that made me feel appreciated and recognized. I think this is rare, and old-fashioned, and I’m glad that I worked for a rare and old-fashioned company.
I’m thankful for my husband. He’s absolutely the right man for me; intelligent, funny, devoted, and also quirky enough to keep my interest. We never run out of things to talk about, experiences to share, adventures to plan. We bring out the best in each other.
I’m thankful for my family, extended and nuclear, especially my girls, their humor and talent and general beauty. I’m grateful for the families they have built, for the son and daughter in law they brought to the family, for the three shining grandchildren they have made.
I’m thankful for my network of friends who buoy me up and make me laugh and inspire me in so many ways. I really do have all the best people in my life.
In other words…
It’s always people, for me. I’m thankful to have found my people, birthed my people, worked with my people, discovered and maintained and enjoyed connections with so many wonderful people. You’re all mine, you know. Happy Thanksgiving to you all.
Dog Day
But first, Dogs.
Yesterday I went to pick up my friend Sarah for a lunch date. She was ready to go when I arrived, but there were dogs there. Dottie, named for black spots on her white paws as a puppy, and Frank, named for his eerie blue eyes. “Let’s go get some fish and chips,” Sarah called out happily, but I was perched on a footstool, reaching for the short glossy fur of dogs. Prancing dogs, one with a rope and a ball clenched tightly in her jaws to let me know how happy she was to have me there. She is sleek and black and elegant, with catlike grace, and if she were mine I would call her Isis, after the Egyptian queen of the underworld. The other dog I’d call Jack, because to me that seems to be his name, with his cattle dog brindle coloring and uncanny white snout, wide as a Bull Terrier’s, and those strange blue eyes, always watching me to make sure of what, I don’t know. A hundred pounds of young, muscular dogs, romping and wrestling in play and nipping each other in competitive jealousy to be the one that sat at my feet, to gaze into my eyes with that singular canine devotion, to be carefully petted and caressed and talked to as if this particular set of eyes was the only set in the world. How can they both be the very best dogs, I wonder, though that is what I told each one in turn. And after a long interval of attention, each took a minute to lean a rump against my legs, extending an invitation that I declined, as I don’t require the information available at the back end of a dog.
And then I washed my hands, and then we went to lunch.
Making Your Art: a great post by Lincoln Michel
Art is essential.
Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop: A little cri du coeur about working on your work and avoiding all the noise:
“The fact remains that great art is never going to appeal to everyone. Even if you want to point out unique times and places when specific art forms were more renumerated (sic) and respected, well, so what? There is no time machine. You cannot transport yourself to the 1960s Greenwich Village any more than the theatres of ancient Greece performing Aeschylus. You are only here, now, with the brain you have and the times you live in. All that other shit has nothing to do with what you are doing.”
Read it here: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/why-you-should-still-build-your-raft
I am retired, tired, and happy.
Just a quick note after I retired and before I retire.
Being retired feels like that first morning of summer vacation when you’re eleven, when you wake up and a vista of liberty stretches golden and glowing before you. Except when you’re retired, it’s forever and you’re old. I am giddy with happiness.
I am retired, and I am also tired after a Mother’s Day with my girls, my son and daughter in law, three grandkids, and my husband. It was an afternoon of laughter, noise, and delectable charcuterie provided by my oldest and her husband.
I requested a craft, so we all painted with watercolors. There are some absolute MASTERPIECES over there on the hutch. My middle daughter cleaned up the entire mess of a table. I have a fridge full of delectable leftovers so I should probably have some people over for drinks.
Now they have all gone home. I finished up the hand-wash dishes.
I am extremely content.
The Geese Arrive on Little Webbed Feet.
The Migration of Geese
They arrived on orange webbed feet, often with blue ribbons tied around their long necks. Waddling and honking, pecking and settling into every kitchen in America. I’m talking about the geese.
But It Didn’t Start With Geese.
In 1981, I was a nanny, and my employer began accumulating the cutest dishes I had ever seen. It started with mugs by a company called Vandor. There were four, each featuring a different farm animal; cow, pig, sheep, and a pair of chickens (no geese, please note).
I know it’s hard to imagine, but at the time, these mugs were unlike anything I’d ever seen before. I was awash in admiration.
This was a fairly prosperous household, so the mugs were followed by salad plates, dinner plates, bowls, canisters, and salt and pepper shakers. There were some white ceramic animal heads on the walls, upon which to hang coordinating towels. Eventually, my employer had an entire kitchen full the stuff. It was amazing, this Vandor Country Collection, but it featured no geese.
A Barnyard Of My Own
My admiration was well expressed. So, when I married in 1982, my employer gifted me a huge box of my own Vandor Country farm animal ceramics. I received the original set of four regular-sized mugs, four miniature mugs with baby animals on them (highlighted by the chick), a pitcher that I’d use as a utensil holder, and salt and pepper shakers. She even got me the metal canisters. All country, all mine (but no geese).
My new husband and I moved to a nice two-bedroom town home, where I used cup hooks to display my barnyard wedding gifts. I found some country blue placemats at the thrift store and set them on the eating bar. Then I won a little blue occasional shelf with heart-shaped cutouts at some direct sales party or another. I hung that up over the pantry door and put some thrift store blue and white china on it.
I am telling you, I had that country décor thing going on. But there were still no geese in my kitchen lineup.
Flocks of Geese. FLOCKS, I Tell You.
All around me, the geese were taking over America’s kitchens. Those geese had waddled into the world of 80s décor, usually in a line, followed by a little girl wearing a hat.
This is a charming print, isn’t it? But when I described it, you groaned in recognition before you even saw it. So did I. But look at it! It’s nice! And if I hadn’t seen it hanging on the wall of nearly every home I visited during those years, I might have wanted it on my wall, too.
I had no geese at all.
I considered adding the geese as an accent. There were geese salt and pepper shakers, but I liked my Vandor shakers. Avon sold a set of measuring spoons shaped like little individual geese. They were adorable, but I didn’t want to measure out my salt in geese.
There were entire sets of dishes devoted to geese.
The trouble was, I already had floral ditzy dishes that coordinated well with my gooseless Vandor Country ceramics. Those dishes were a wedding present from my former mother-in-law. In all the years she gave me presents, those dishes were the only time she got it right. I wasn’t about to replace them.
Other Options for the Gooseless
There were geese wallpaper borders, but we lived in an apartment. I wasn’t going to risk the damage deposit by doing anything to the walls. There were geese towels. My kitchen towels came to me from my grandmother, who had this whole system where she bought dishtowels, cut them in half, crocheted a button-through hanger and sent them to me for Christmas. Thanks to her crafty generosity, I never bought kitchen towels.
My then-husband tried to come through. For one occasion or another, he gifted me a ceramic tureen, a white fowl along these lines:
But here’s the deal. I think it was a duck, not a goose. I mean, I don’t have a photo of it, but I think it was a very pretty duck. I tied a blue ribbon around its neck, and it sat on the sewing machine cabinet in the dining room, overlooking over the garage sale table and sticky chairs in a somewhat imperious manner.
My maybe-goose-maybe-duck tureen had pride of place. It deserved it. I mean, a tureen is a somewhat grand item, yes? But it was almost too special. By the time my then-husband broke it, I’d only used it once.
And Then, the Unthinkable Happened.
…I moved on to dusty pink.
Decorating trends come and go. Grey today, gone tomorrow. The stuff of mania is always packed up and donated eventually, and so it was with America’s 1980s geese. For years, they waddled up and down Goodwill’s knickknack aisle, settling bossily among the shelves of plates and bowls, honking and pecking and reminding me of the eighties. You couldn’t give that stuff away.
But everything old is new again, and other such clichés. The geese have migrated back into American homes. Now, when I see a white goose with a blue ribbon around its neck on Etsy or eBay, I groan at the outrageous prices. I groan, but I smile, too. I always knew they’d be back.
But here’s the thing. If you still love your geese from the 80s, or if you have somehow recently fallen under the spell of the geese, just go to the thrift store. They’re still there. I took this yesterday.
A New Leaf
Temporary solutions
In 1984, my then-husband and I were ready to turn over a new leaf, and upgrade from an old Formica-topped table we’d been using for several years. This table was, of course, a parental castoff.
My parents had used it in their kitchen, then on their deck. When they bought some beautiful wrought iron furniture at a Meier & Frank warehouse sale, they passed it along with two wooden chairs, Nichols & Stone beauties marred by a strange, sticky finish. Mom let me know that they were “really good” chairs.
Yes, but they were sticky.
It was a temporary solution, but as my mother had explained to me, “Temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent.” Her example was a crate used as an end table, something you do in college. Ten years later, you look up and that crate is still there, being used as an end table.
Mom had a point. Our entire apartment was furnished in temporary solutions, castoffs and loaners and curbside finds. We’d been using that patio table for at least three years. I used my dad’s staple gun to staple on a new vinyl tablecloth every now and then, but still. I decided to take a look at the “World’s Largest Rummage Sale.”
A heck of a sale
This secondhand extravaganza was held each year in the Memorial Coliseum by Catlin Gabel, a private school in Northwest Portland. The donation drive went on for months, resulting in an astonishing assemblage of upper-crust castoffs. I knew I could find something at the Catlin Gabel sale.
Boy, did I. A square pine table with a dark finish set me back all of $25.00. Such a bargain, for a “really good” table. It was solid, with a pieced top, braced corners and sturdy turned legs. At one time it had a leaf, because it had a central join with pegs on one side, holes on the other, and levered closures (like the ones you find on windows) underneath to hold the two halves tight.
I think someone built this table in a home workshop. Mom was a furniture snob—she’d worked selling furniture at one point in her life—and she approved of the quality. So did I. My husband didn’t understand why we liked it so much, but it fit in our apartment’s dining space, nicely accommodating our family of four.
It made the move from apartment to our first home, where we grew to a family of five. I thought we were fine. Each side could hold two chairs, especially when two were occupied by little girls. But my husband decided that we no longer fit.
A new leaf
He unscrewed the legs, carted the tabletop somewhere for measuring, then carted it back home and put it back together. “We need a new leaf.” I asked him who was making this new leaf. “I know a guy,” was the most he would tell me.
That’s all he would tell me about, well, anything. He followed his father’s advice to “Never tell a woman where you’re going, or how much money you have.” Fine, then. I retaliated by refusing to be curious (can you see how well this marriage was going? but that is not the point of this blog post. well, not really.).
He brought the new leaf home and unveiled it with pride. I was appalled. It had cost $85.00 to have it made for our $25.00 table, and it wasn’t even finished. He said he’d finish it himself, but I knew him. I covered the raw wood with a large tablecloth and got on with life.
The five of us ate dinner together at the elongated table for a few more years. The girls perched on rickety wooden kitchen chairs my husband found secondhand. Us adults continued to sit in the chairs with the sticky finishes.
But he made it home for dinner less and less. Shift work, most of the time. Other times? Who knew. I was resolutely incurious. It was my only defense.
His sticky chair wasn’t usually empty, though. We had dinner almost nightly with my friend Lauren, whose own marriage had ended. Her two kids came to my house after school, and it was easy to feed them dinner on weeknights. She reciprocated on weekends. That filled up the table very nicely.
New Chairs
When my husband finally moved out, the nightly dinners with Lauren and her kids continued. She was right there, every single day, helping me find (and keep) my footing. We formed our own little Kate and Allie situation.
But times change. I went back to work myself, and worked strange hours. My kids were with their father and his new girlfriend part of the time. One of my girls needed extensive surgery, so my family came down to help a lot that next year.
Eventually, Lauren remarried, and I began my single life adventures. But I believe she kind of, you know, saved my life. And I mean that.
Turning over a new leaf
Destruction brings opportunity.
That’s a realization you have after undergoing fundamental devastation. I was grieving the end of my marriage, terrified by the disruption of my children’s security, and just plain furious. But I had to move on. I needed to recognize the opportunity for change.
On the level of personal identity, this meant reclaiming parts of myself I’d set aside. I’d been told by my husband that for the marriage to work, I simply could not be me. I’d given away half of myself (or more, if I’m honest) to be part of that marriage. I wanted it all back and then some.
On the mundane level, that included making decisions about the house and how it was furnished. I looked at every part of my home to make sure it was exactly how I wanted it. Those creaking, rickety kitchen chairs had to go. I laid away four solid oak chairs at an antique mall in Newberg. They were early American in style, and very sturdy. I can’t remember what I paid, maybe $35.00 each? They’d been consigned by a Catholic monk who had finished them himself.
Once I got those home, I felt exalted. No more crappy chairs around my table! I took the table outside, painted the skirt and legs, and refinished the wood top. This included (finally) finishing the leaf, which I had considered taking out. We were back down to a family of four. We didn’t technically need it.
But I’d grown used to the sweep of a larger table. Plus there were kids’ birthday parties to consider. And family dinners on holidays. And all those freaking piles of laundry to fold.
More destruction brings more opportunity
The 2006 house fire allowed me to make more changes, not just in my home’s layout as it was being rebuilt, but in furnishings, because so many were lost. I have a new table now, a sweeping eight-footer. It took some years and some shopping, but it is now flanked by six sturdy modern chairs my daughter found for me on Marketplace.
All on my own, I found two bow back Nichols & Stone chairs for the head and foot of the table (thank you Goodwill, for pricing these beauties at $9.99 each). I like the blend of modern and traditional. And I love a bargain.
The remaining sticky chair is in the bedroom. That’s where I set my purse, and where I heap garments when I can’t decide what to wear.
The oak chairs made it through the fire, and I used them as a temporary solution around the new table. That temporary solution lasted fifteen years before they went to Goodwill. I was glad to see them go. They were sturdy, and gave me good service, but they were also tall and pale and dated. One of them had a little green paint on it. That’s how I identified it when I saw it at my local Goodwill, priced at $14.99.
So long, old oak chairs. It was good to know you.
And yet…
I kept the old table, which also made it through the fire just fine. I’ve loaned it out twice, once to a friend who used it as a desk, then to a daughter until her boyfriend surprised her with a new dining set. Currently, it leans against a wall in the garage, legs detached, solid and square as ever, waiting to be called into service. The new leaf is there, too, minus a skirting board, but still usable.
I like that table. It would work nicely if I ever call it up as a desk, maybe for the office I plan to create in one of the spare rooms. I’m not sure.
Like I said, it’s a really good table. It was always a really good table.
That’s why I’ll never let it go.
I’m not dead.
I’m not dead, I’m languishing.
Languishing is that in-between place, where you’re not one thing or another. You just are. And we all are, right now. Is it over? is it not? Where do we stand with opening up, here in my rigorously liberal city where we have been dutifully masking and distancing and vaccinating and boostering? Are we going to throw away our masks or just wait for the next wave? Will we start eating in restaurants? Are there any restaurants left? Will my book groups start up again?
Can I have a goddamned dinner party already?
I’m not dead, I’m sleeping.
Sort of. I’m tossing and turning my way through some nights, unsure what time it is, if it can be over, if I can get up and get on with the day, if my husband is asleep or not, if I’m asleep or not. Last night I slept eight full hours, and would have slept more but woke up to the sound of a horn giving one loud honk. I started awake, wondering what in the world that was. Was it a foghorn? Unlikely, since I live almost 100 miles inland. Was it a car? Also unlikely because I knew the honk originated within my own head. Yes, it was me. I honked. I honk when I’m falling asleep.
I woke myself up, and who can I blame for that?
I’m not dead, I’m waiting.
I’m waiting for…something. Well, one thing for certain, another grandchild arriving this month. This is the third time I’ve awaited the birth of a grandchild, and the first time was an agony. Now, three times in, it’s more like this. Imagine a woman and her three daughters, who made it through so much together, waiting for one of them to give birth. Three of the four focus on the pregnant woman with keen intensity, watching and waiting and worrying and fussing over every scrap of information as if we are the pregnant ones, not her. She’s merely incubating the baby for us. We will take ownership immediately, as a grandmother and as aunts.
We will all have our new baby soon.
I’m not dead, I’m writing.
Yup. A project that was an idea, then a germ, and then a sprout, is now 60K+ of words. Good words. It’s not quite enough words to send out to my carefully selected first readers, but it’s there and it’s real and I am so delighted and baffled with this project because it’s nothing like Iris or the Gentry books. It’s more like the Trailer Park book. I’m not trying to unravel the knots in anyone’s soul through suffering and humor, well, maybe I am, but it’s a work of pure imagination in a version of America that has never existed. I believe that’s called alt-history in the lexicon of terms I don’t give a shit about when it comes to writing.
Look, this place isn’t real, but my hope is you’ll enjoy the visit.
I’m not dead, I’m bingeing.
I’ve been really miserable this week with the state of my aging, leaky gut, and my husband has been in rehearsals every evening, so I’m watching my streaming channels with an unlikely intensity. Here’s what I can tell you. If you don’t have HBO Max, you should get it in order to watch Somebody Somewhere. If you’re in Schitt’s Creek withdrawal, watch Somebody Somewhere. If you’re languishing, and waiting, and sleeping, watch Somebody Somewhere.
Are you getting the message? Good.
I guess what I’m trying to say is this:
I’m not dead. I’m just here. And I’m glad that you are, too.
And…he’s here. My grandson.
I’m going to start out by saying that my daughter has given me permission to write about the delivery and birth of my first grandson.
Overdue
So, my daughter was overdue. She sailed through her pregnancy with perfect blood pressure, minimal weight gain, healthy habits and (mostly) good humor, interspersed with what she called her “hormone flares,” when lightning bolts shot out of her eyes and she hated everything and everyone. Aside from those, she was doing great, even when she went past her due date by a week. She was due on Friday, and the next Friday, at her doctor’s behest, she arrived at the hospital at midnight to begin the process of having labor induced. When she checked in, her blood pressure was at stroke/seizure level. The dreaded gestational diabetes had arrived.
The only cure is birth.
I didn’t know this. The plan was that I’d sleep as usual on Thursday night, and hop up to the hospital with a paperback book and my phone charger in my purse. There, I would join my daughter and her boyfriend for the birth, which I assumed my tall, athletic daughter would handle with no trouble at all. The best-laid plans, yes?
So I arrived, and heard about the blood pressure, which I could see on a little screen that monitored her erratic, weak contractions, and the beating of my grandson’s heart. This blood pressure was scary. The nurse assured me that an epidural would bring it way down, but before that she needed to move into real labor. She just wasn’t there yet.
My experiences
As a veteran of one completely natural birth and two predominantly natural births, I am under the impression that I know what I’m doing. And maybe I do, but I only know what I’m doing in non-medicalized births. My first labor was a rough walk—and I mean a literal walk, because at some point I got up and began to walk around and they really had to convince me to get back into bed—and my second and third deliveries were induced in hospital to avoid precipitous delivery. That’s how we do things on my side of the family after the first one comes. We go fast and hard. I know this from family lore.
My mother, a second child, was born in the front seat of a truck. During a freak snowstorm in June, my grandparents’ car went into the ditch on the way to the hospital. They were picked up by a bachelor farmer, and at some point my grandmother reached down, pulled her coat up between her knees and caught my mom. Grandma was embarrassed but I suppose that farmer was, too. I’ll tell the story of my grandmother’s third child another time—it’s great. A generation later, my brother took a reasonable time to appear, but my sister and I were born quickly. And I took the usual amount of time to have my oldest, but my second was a three-hour affair. Labor with my youngest daughter took 44 minutes.
Versus reality!
So this was the legacy I thought I’d have passed on to my daughter. And apparently I couldn’t have been more blithely mistaken. When I arrived up at the hospital, she’d been taking Misoprostol for eight hours, without much progress. And they didn’t want to start Pitocin yet. So we spent some hours watching her progress, and talking, and laughing, but really being scared each time that BP cuff inflated and gave us scary numbers. Finally, they offered her some Fentanyl. She took it, knowing it would help with BP and anxiety and pain, but she haaaaated how it made her feel. Sorry, all you opiate lovers out there, but there are people who despise that rush and I am one of them. So is my daughter. But it relaxed her.
We did some walking around the ward. Walking is a good thing to get contractions going, and she had been training for this for months before she and her C started trying for a baby, so we walked a good half a mile or so. This got the contractions started, and we returned to the room and did the breathing that you do, that natural childbirth stuff I remembered from 27 years earlier, because you really can’t forget it. The contractions were really hurting her.
When she asked for her epidural, we all were relieved, knowing it would bring down her blood pressure. But here’s the thing. It also slowed her progress. I remember watching the monitor that showed baby’s heartbeat and my daughter’s contractions. It’s interesting that the monitor showed her lines, and then the lines of the woman laboring in the room directly next to her. It was pretty easy to tell when her neighbor was delivering–the contractions do something dramatic at that point, they go from modest, regular hills to Grand Tetons to the Swiss Alps, a big jagged mountain range that drops off suddenly–and I said, “Looks like your neighbor beat you.” My daughter said, “Remarks like that don’t help, Mom.” At that point, I guess I thought I could still be flip.
Freezing
It was so cold in there, but she didn’t mind, so I dealt with it. When I say cold, I mean freezing. When I say freezing, I mean Arctic. And they kept hooking her up to stuff, and running monitors and lines and so on, and she bravely, stoically consented to all of this because how else do you get that baby out? I stopped being flip and became concerned. I would go out into the lobby occasionally to warm up, and I called T at one point and just softly poured out my concerns. He listened, and he would definitely have patted my hand had he been there, but it was enough just to let out my worries. I was okay. The morning turned into an afternoon, and the afternoon into an evening. I spent that night with them, sleeping in a chair while C slept on a bench/bed that was positioned under the window and under the air duct that kept pushing up a relentless stream of icy air on our heads all day and night.
I dozed, then would wake up and watch her contractions, which evened out as she slept (I thought they had stopped, but the monitor was in the wrong place). I didn’t remark on the appearance of a new neighbor, whose contractions didn’t look very impressive, either. I was so cold that night. And so worried. At some point, C woke up and went to take a shower (I am assuming to WARM UP) and he steered me to the bench, where I slept for two hours under that damn icy air. I apparently kept myself from waking up with a form of lucid dreaming–I kept dreaming cold dreams, like I was asleep in a chest freezer, or I was tied to the wings of a bi-plane with icy air current flowing over me, and the like. This allowed me to sleep instead of waking up to shiver.
Another day
Morning was a relief. Except of course the neighbor’s contractions did the towering peaks thing they were supposed to do, and my daughter’s stayed as gentle and rolling as hills. She was starting to feel like she was doing something wrong, because she just wasn’t dilating. All the loving support from her C, all my motherly ministrations wouldn’t hurry along the process. At 5:30 AM, they broke her water, warning her that she might get an infection. And we waited for that to make a difference. But each thing they did to her seemed like it pushed away the possibility of a regular birth, until the idea of her pushing out a baby was a tiny ship on the horizon, so far away from whatever was happening in that room.
Later in the morning, T brought me a bag with my heart medicine, toiletries and a Pendleton blanket. I sat with him in the blissfully warm lobby, telling him everything while he listened with love and care, then returned to the deep freeze labor room where I cleaned up, BRUSHED MY TEETH THANK GOODNESS, and wrapped myself in the blanket. I wasn’t sure if it gave me the gunslinger air of the Man With No Name, or maybe it gave me and air of some hippie doula lady who was wearing the blanket to usher in the birth with the help of the Universe and its blessings. I kept that blanket wrapped around me tightly. It saved me from frostbite, I think. And my daughter and C stayed calm and brave as she began gently, finally, to make some progress.
Discouraged
Is there any worse feeling than being in hard labor for over 24 hours, and being told you haven’t made any progress? I don’t know. I could have given birth in a field while chewing on a leather strap, then gotten up and gone back to work. I had no idea what to say, what to do, how to help. I just stayed calm and held her hand and watched that monitor, watching for peaks. C had gone out into the hallway to ask the nurses what they thought, and heard one saying something to the effect of, “You know what I’m afraid of? I’m afraid that after all this, she’ll push for two hours and we’ll have to section her anyway.”
After all that work? Worry? Waiting? No. Not fair. But that little ship seemed even farther away. I could almost see the sailors waving at us, wishing us well with the Caesarean. Maybe next time, they said. And my kids would have done it, their goal was a healthy, whole baby, not a natural delivery. But she’d worked so hard. They both had. Was major surgery the only option?
To their credit, not one of the nurses, the doctor, or the midwife ever mentioned a C-section. But it was out there. I knew that if she didn’t have the baby by 5:30 am the next morning, they would take him 24 hours after they broke her water. The staff encouraged her to keep trying, and she did. I wish I’d taken notes, I really do. Because it was such an ordeal, amplified by fear, multiplied by the sheer hours we’d been there. But then, finally, after another day had turned to another night, after she’d gotten a temperature and had to start on two IV antibiotics, after an hour when C had ducked out to try to find something to eat and the epidural failed her, my daughter and I sat quietly, doing the breathing while the terrible contractions of active labor overtook her.
Progress.
I knew she was making progress, because this is how my own first labor had progressed. Hours of labor. Nothing, nothing, nothing, and boom. A lot of progress in a short time. When C returned and the midwife checked her again, she was almost there. And after a very kind and sweet anesthesiologist came in and re-relieved her pain (I cannot be thankful enough for how carefully he listened to her, how gently she advised her, how sweetly he encouraged her), after the table full of draped birth supplies was rolled in, our matter-of-fact and encouraging midwife said she could push a little.
C hadn’t told me about what he’d overheard in the hall, but I believe it steeled him to be the best, strongest coach he could be for the pushing. He held one of her hands and pulled back one of her legs, and I took the other. It was just us and a nurse at that point. And after she did push a little, it was clear the baby was descending. I mean, he was arriving. C said, “We need some more people in here.” I thought it might take longer, but somehow, he just knew his son was imminent.
The midwife came back in, in they took the drape off the birth supplies and took the bed apart and made it into a delivery table and ushered in the NICU staff (there because my daughter gave birth in the high-risk area). And she pushed and we cheered and she pushed and the baby began his descent into the world, he was coming and it was happening, slowly but surely and irrevocably, all of us cheering and watching and hoping and that little head appeared and retreated and appeared a little more, and when I got too tired to pull on that leg another doctor took hold, and after fifty minutes of effort and encouragement, my daughter curled up like a potato bug one last time and pushed and then he was there, this long jumble of baby and cord and limbs and head and shoulders, his head a cone and his forehead scratched from battle, but she did it, all that work and he was finally there, 11:11 PM, just 49 minutes short of 48 hours after they got the hospital.
And…
My grandson is the most amazing little thing in the universe to me right now. Beloved, precious and perfect. 8 lb 7 oz and 22 inches, for those of you who would like to know the dimensions. Eye color is still a mystery, hair is soft, silky, blond/brown. He looks like my daughter and C both, and he has the longest legs and squarest shoulders. Everyone is settled in and doing fine, especially since her milk came in. This is a new venture for me, this grandparent thing.
I really can’t wait to watch my grandson grow.