One night very recently in Wellington
The night began, and ended too, with snow, ice floes and perfect, terrifying isolation; men and their ship reduced to a smudge on polar whiteness. I was reading Ernest Shackleton’s account of his Antarctic expedition, a boring book as it turns out, overstuffed with detail: counting and then recounting the coal they’ll need to last through winter, providing coordinates on every other page as if the reader might jump up to plot their course on a map. But all this detail made it immersive, also soporific. Our suburban house became a cabin in the blizzard, and reading was a ticket to cold, pale dreams. Lulling on our bed, I laid the book down. I might go to sleep, I told Alisa.
“I think you better not,” she said. “I think something is happening.”
A little later we were in the bathroom. She gripped the handbasin for help, and I tried to time her contractions using a cellphone app. “Now,” she’d say, and I’d look for the phone, find it, enter her password, swipe about to find the app and then press start on a timer. It is possible that these timings were not precise. Maybe they were a factor in our midwife’s advice, via phone, to wait a little longer then call her back. But Alisa was in pain, certain she needed to go to the hospital. And then, she felt something else.
“I think he’s coming out.”
No, I thought. No, no, no.
But he was, something was. I grabbed at the phone and called again. “Can you come here now,” I told the midwife and then began to shout our address. What was I thinking? That the baby would wait for her to drive over? Suddenly the door flung open. My father in-law, who was staying with us and had been in the lounge watching, as he did most evenings, a 50-episode series about the life of Bruce Lee, ran into the room, ready to help.
A month or so earlier, we had discussed a birth plan, a document that included none of these things, not her dad, not our bathroom. We had assumed this moment would take place at hospital with access to a birthing pool and, if necessary, painkillers. But then maybe our experience had a closer fit to the pattern parenthood takes. Well-meaning people, out of our depth, expecting the help of experts, the resources of the District Health Board, but ultimately, we’re the ones who needed to take that tiny pink body into our hands. The big R of responsibility began then, will never end. This is our pact, our tether. We are now four, all in the one lifeboat. Analogies are stupid but necessary – does any other word hold as many meanings as family?
These are all thoughts that have come to me since. At the time, our son emerged, slippery and purple, his head scrunched, his body twisting as he entered this world. I took hold of him. With one eye opened just slightly, he looked at me, and I thought one thing: Hello!
My father-in-law passed me a towel. We wrapped the baby carefully. I remember asking him to put the heater on, and am proud of this – it seems to me a demonstration of something like presence of mind. It was also the only example of anything like presence of mind that I would show. A phone rang. Someone from the ambulance was on the other end, had been called by the midwife, and so were sending people quick. They would give us instructions, explain the need to ensure the umbilical cord was not taut. They also talked about the need to place him low, which, in trying to keep the towel wrapped and the cord loose, we found incredibly difficult. Almost immediately, Alisa had asked after him, her voice desperate to know he was OK. I had the same desperation, but found myself mute, unable to speak it. The good news was that he did seem OK, although quiet and I hoped he might cry, only so I would know he could. But apart from the odd squawk he remained quiet, already at home, the most relaxed person in the room.
The midwife arrived and quickly took charge, cancelling the ambulance, and taking out a pair of shears to cut the umbilical cord. She noticed too that the baby was a little cold, and recommended we go to the hospital after all so he could spend some time beneath an open-air incubator. And so, maybe an hour after he was born, our son had his first car trip, this fragile little person was strapped into a capsule on the backseat of our Honda. I drove carefully, aware of every bump, along empty streets, rain beginning to pelt down out of a black sky. In the hospital, he was placed under something like a pie warmer for a time, while we sat and waited in one of the birthing rooms. Alisa dozed in a vinyl armchair, the head rest worn to cloth by a thousand heads. This room or one like it was where we would have been had everything gone as planned. There was beigey-grey medical equipment around the place, a large bath in the corner. It was fine, would have been fine. Our first son was born in hospital and I came to like its efficient, clean rooms, a happy place it seemed to me – those spaces transformed by his arrival. This time, the opposite occurred. I wanted to get back to the warmth and familiar comfort of our messy home. While Alisa dozed, I wandered down an empty corridor. I went into the whanau room to make a cup of tea, and opened all the cupboards without ever finding milk.
When we did leave, we would discover it was raining hard, dark still but with the hint of twilight in the sky, the faintest glow of a new day. A delivery truck stopped outside a motel on Riddiford St, an optimistic sight it seemed to me then, the first movements of this busy city day. And, I see now, another relatively mundane detail with which I have cluttered this story about one of the biggest events in my life, guilty of my own complaint about Shackleton. This giant moment, an accumulation of so many tiny things: gathering towels and turning the heater on, tightening the car seat and finding a park, moping blood from the bathroom floor. Amongst all this, appeared a person in his first seconds on earth, rumpled but perfect with his old man’s face and silky skin, blinking at us both. Here, I am tempted to go further, reach for the top shelf and sum up this experience as one of intense joy. But I hesitate, not because I’m a block of ice, I hope, but because I never really felt anything so easily labelled. It was in all those many small things again, each bringing a response, a clutter of feeling: panic, happiness, and worry, exhaustion and optimism to name only a few. Love and joy were there, but as the sum of these many parts.
And here’s another: birdsong. The morning chorus was beginning when we arrived home. We took our son inside, dozing now, swaddled him tightly and laid him down to sleep. I cleaned the bathroom, lumped all those towels to the washhouse downstairs, before I lay down and looked at my phone. 4:30am, and I was too tired for sleep. And so, for distraction, I picked up my book from where I had left it, went back into the world of ice, snow and inventory.
At 6am our 2-year-old woke, oblivious to the night’s events. He began to pound on his door, wanting someone to know he was up. This is the routine of all our mornings, and like any other, I got of bed, found my slippers and shuffled down the hall. I scooped him up, balanced him on my hip. “Hey,” I said. “I’ve got a surprise.”
His voice was hushed, goofy with expectation. "Yeah?"
I carried him to our room.
“Look in there.”
I felt him stretching to see, and immediately he grinned.
"What is it?” I said.
“A baby,” he said quietly, grinning still. “A baby!”
I looked to where he pointed, and he was right. There, sound asleep in a bassinet beside the bed, was our baby. John Summers is the author of the essay collection The Commercial Hotel (Victoria University Press, $30), available in bookstores nationwide
