Kelly Flowers

This is my son. He’s six weeks old. Yes, I know. He’s huge. His hugeness actually gives me a great sense of pride. Look at this fat, thriving human. I made that. *Huffs on fingernails*

This is not a mommy blog and my son’s birth doesn’t have much to do with working/writing. But these days, this is my full time job and I only moonlight (literally – Its 2am!) as a writer. So writing about babyhood seems like a hybrid of what I’m doing and what I could/should/don’t-have-brain-power-to do. And this is what’s happening in my world so writing about it seems like easy blog fodder.

I remember talking about my birth plan when I was pregnant, rubbing my belly and visualizing the details. People give you this knowing smile, which says “Ok, honey. You do that.”

Plan and pack and visualize but the world is going to deliver your baby however it sees fit; in a car, a month early or after a grueling labor. Birth is so unreliable, except that it will happen. There aren’t any last minute exits on that freeway!

It was 10:35pm on Easter Monday and I had just polished off another ice cream sandwich. Not the proudest moment of my pregnancy, I’ll contend, but the baby made me do it. I was just the hands and mouth that facilitated his overeating.

I scraped that last dreamy bite of black cookie from my finger and then felt a serious contraction, not the fun ones I’d been having the previous couple of days. When I got those, I got excited and hiked Torrey Pines, ate spicy food and did jumping jacks. This one made me want to curl into the fetal position.

My husband started tracking and the contractions were three minutes apart right off the bat. So far, so good. Easy peasy. This was going to be a quick birth, just like I’d planned. Harhar.

I’d always wanted a homebirth. From the time we moved into our home, I had the room chosen for it. But my husband was hesitant and, not wanting to be on the hook for such a big decision, I agreed to a non-medicated, hospital birth with a progressive doctor. But after our first birthing class, my husband said, “If you still want to give birth at home, I’m ok with it.”

This really excited me. Like, really. I found a midwife, starting buying the materials and began visualizing the room I would birth in. I read Birthing From Within, HypnoBirthing and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth. My nerdy brain saw this as very, very exciting.

So when the contractions started, we called the midwife, doula and mother-in-law. I sat in the visqueened room and lit candles. Ah… cue my joyful birth.

Fast-forward… I’ll spare you the next nine hours, as I don’t remember them all that well. I know I was in and out of the shower, the tub, the bed, up and down the stairs. I was force-fed applesauce and granola bars. But beyond that, it’s all a bit hazy. Pain does that. It transports you. Pressure, they tell you. It feels like pressure, not necessarily pain. This is hyperbole. I am with the majority who feel that birth is, in fact, painful.

When I’m ready to push, I do, with what I consider gusto, for an hour. But my baby is not satisfied with my efforts. He is not budging. We regroup and collectively decide that I am getting too exhausted and it is time to change strategy. Here begins the dissolution of my resolve.

My options: to ride out the contractions, which are full-tilt, back labor. Um, no. Or to go to the hospital, get an epidural, some rest and start again. It was like offering a starving man a Snickers bar. “Would you like to stop this hot knife in your back every three minutes?” Um, yes. How fast can you drive? The four contractions in the twelve-minute drive are when my labor really comes in to focus for me. Yeah, I remember that pretty well.

At the hospital, I asked the doctor, “How fast can you put in an epidural? Because I have two and a half minutes before my next contraction.” And bless that doctor. He watched the next contraction with needle in hand and then put it my back at hyper speed. “You’ll feel a pinch,” he said. I would have laughed, if I could have.

My birth plan was a thing of beauty. A purist’s work of art. No epidural, no Pitocin, no water breaking. Look at how strong I am, it said. Look at the faith I have in the natural course of birth and my own body’s instincts. I was proud of my decision to have a homebirth. I was excited to do it. Not just to have a baby but to go through labor. It sounds naïve but I was excited to experience it; the pain; the subsequent euphoria; my own threshold. And I did, and then I went to the hospital and did it all over again.

When I held my baby boy, (who happened to be 9lbs 8oz!) it was easy to let go of my expectations. I was much too happy to bemoan my errant labor. I recounted the story to friends and family with a smile and rolling eyes as if to say, “Crazy, right?”

At the end, we look at our baby, so healthy, so perfect. We feel we don’t have the right to regret anything in the process. Like the changing of a detail would have changed the outcome. And maybe that’s true.

And I am giddy with my baby but if I may be allowed a petty moment, let me say, I feel a little jipped on the birth. I put in the work, did the research and went through the pain (ten hours of it), without cracking mind you. I didn’t even beg for drugs like they do in the movies (maybe because I could not really formulate thoughts). I didn’t curse at my husband, whimper or bellow that I just “couldn’t do it.” And then I pushed, on my hands and knees, in my bedroom, for an hour. And it didn’t work.

I want to say that I did it. I want to give that smug little smile as I tell people I gave birth naturally, in our home. And I can’t. That frosts me a little. Now I am part of the statistic that took their homebirth to the hospital. I am not furthering a trend I whole-heartedly believe in but am rather an argument against it. She tried, it says. It just didn’t work. I don’t see how it could have happened any differently seeing as my huge child had to be vacuumed out of me. But I would sure love to have more bragging rights than just birthing that beast of a boy without a C-section. Ok, pity party over.

Now, look at this face! A healthy baby is the true measure of success and this kid is the picture of health.

P.S. Great birth perk… I’ve had 22 hours of training to fall asleep in the two to three minutes between contractions and I can snore on demand now. Now, that is a power nap!

I wrote this one many, many years ago but, in honor of Mother’s Day, thought I would regurgitate it.

Orange Creamsicles

It was a brittle, sunny day in Anchorage, Alaska. It might have been June. As I walked through a wide-laned neighborhood with giant drooping trees that consumed the sidewalks and carpeted the lawns with their leaves, I counted houses. If one looked from afar, the houses would have looked like cereal boxes in a row, small white-trimmed cereal boxes that came in buttercup yellow or cerulean blue or, Nantucket gray. But up close the houses boasted enviable features like farmer’s porches, birdbaths, swing sets or inflatable kiddie pools.

This quintessential street was the paper route my mom walked every morning. At 5am, even in the Alaskan winter, she delivered papers from a huge canvas bag that hung across her chest like a giant apron.

One might find it strange that a commodity trader would deliver newspapers for the joy of it. But she told me that sometimes, in the predawn light, the constant cadence of her own footsteps put her into a trance. True cold gets so pervasive it becomes euphoric. In an empty world, the heavy breath and monotonous action of slinging papers transported her. She resurfaced only when at our front door again and when she came in to find us eating yogurt and watching Smurfs, her red face glowed with transcendence.

On Sundays, the papers came later in the morning so my sister and I walked the route with her. This particular Sunday, the whole street oozed with the hot smell of baked bread and dandelions contended for sunlight from even the littlest crack in a sidewalk or leaf filled storm drain. Dandelions were my favorites of all flowers. Having eaten the bitter and buttery head of a dandelion flower at least a few hundred times, I felt that calling it a weed was unkind.

My dad said that something in the bitter yellow blooms was good for us but we ate them just because we could. For a kid, there is no pleasure like strolling along, nonchalantly picking a flower and then just eating it (even if it didn’t taste all that great). Especially when you look over and your dad is just smiling about it.

Dad used to walk this paper route with my mom. As I swooped to grab a dandelion poking out from under a cedar fence and then ran to catch up with her, I wondered if he ever ate any of the thousands of dandelions on this street. Of course, if mom walked her usual soldier-like stride, he probably never got the chance.

My little sister and I began walking the paper route because Mom and Dad were filing for divorce. Dad was even talking about moving back to Seattle. Whenever we asked if we were moving, Mom just shrugged and said, “It’s not out of the question.” We just assumed it was her quirky way of saying no.

As we passed the two story pea-green house with the picnic table in the front yard and the round submarine windows on the sides, we knew time was running out. Mom flashed us a quick smile and sped up; and we had to walk-run to keep up. We didn’t care because we loved this game.

Shuttling along, three of our hurried steps to every one of hers, she tossed newspapers wrapped in a tang-colored plastic bags into driveways, each one landing with a crinkle and thud. It sounded like a giant letter being stamped. If I counted the thuds of landing newspapers, I wouldn’t think about my aching legs. But I lost count and started over so many times, I could never remember how many houses there were.

Mom always made up little games – road trip games, spelling games, bathtub games. The paper route game was more of a race though. If the last paper hit the last driveway before the church bells started chiming and if we had refrained from complaining along the way, we’d go straight to Safeway and buy a whole box of Orange Creamsicles. Then we’d divide the box into three, eating two each. Two WHOLE Orange Creamsicles.

When we finally reached the baseball field corner that ended the route, we giddily sidled up on either side of mom and took a hand to cross the street. Just one more block to Safeway and only four houses left. Crossing the street when you’re a kid is a big endeavor and everyone knows the goal – to get to the other side as quick as possible. So when my mom paused in the middle of the quiet street and looked down, we panicked. What was she thinking? At any moment a car could just come out of nowhere and mow us down. Didn’t she know that? For a moment, she just stood there. My sister and I, with pulses rising, looked frantically from left to right. Left again. Right again. Mom squatted and the newspaper carrier on her chest threatened to spill the last four of the little oranges missiles in every direction. I saw it all in my head – newspapers scattered, cars flying through stop signs. I was only six and I could feel a disaster coming. Couldn’t she?

She picked up a plastic keychain, badly scratched from being run over. The ring was gone and what was left of its small metal chain was mangled and rusted. The thick plastic was rough and jagged in her hand and the image was barely visible through the scuffing. She looked at it and gave one of those smiles that never seemed like a smile. We looked at it too, confused. The image on the keychain was a row of cartoon hula dancers in little grass skirts and multicolored flower leis. In bold letters “HAWAII” was written in the sky above the dancers and palm trees were suspended over both ends of the word. Mom looked at our impatient faces and held up the keychain for us to see. She inhaled s small fast breath and held it. In a quiet, excited voice that sounded like a secret – or a promise – she said, “This is where we are going to live.”

In the distance, the church bells started. Baffled at how this could be more important than Orange Creamsicles I shrugged and said, “Ok.” At that, she flashed a contagious smile and we crossed the street, each with our own destination in mind.