“This bird will not die on my watch,” I declared.
Thus, I entered the chase. The three of us — bird, human, dog — scrabbled around the house. The bird shook himself free of the dog’s mouth and in abject terror slammed against the window, then to a door, then the other side of the room and back again. I strategized ways to help him escape.
This time last year I was in labor. I had been in labor for two full weeks. Since a bird entered the house, and I saw the poor thing in the living room. The dog, Sixto, the one with six toes on each foot, grabbed the bird. Bird escaped. Sixto leaped again, caught the delicate brown and white mottled creature in his mouth.
This is Sixto! He looks so innocent, doesn’t he?
I ran to the kitchen in pursuit of the dog with Bird in his mouth. When Bird once again broke free and began battering himself against the windows of the sliding door, I opened the door for him. Too late, he’d already turned tail and flew to the window in the living room. I opened that door just as Sixto snatched Bird from the window sill again, and before I could reach the door to close it, slipped out. Bird was still in his jaws.
I ran out and two strides up the hill. No way my pregnant body could catch up. I was no good to Bird. He was gone.
By the time I got back to the house, contractions had started. Oh I was ready, but apparently Charlie was not. The contractions continued for two weeks, a couple of hours each day, always in the afternoon at the very same hour of my mortal battle with the dog. By night, they slowed to a gentle and constant hum, a pricking reminder of what was to be.
***
Space, time and mass are indeed relative to one other, and those days before the birth of a baby slow down to the deepest, most enduring heart beat of the universe. Barely moving, the hands of the clock cease, and I waited impatiently wondering, “When? When will you join us?” God, I’ll be pregnant forever.
I don’t particularly like giving birth, but if I could replace an entire pregnancy with giving birth twice, no question I would do it. Or perhaps it was a trade. Two weeks of constant labor in return for lightening labor. Once labor quickened it went so fast, my doctor couldn’t get to the hospital in time.
***
Before Lila’s birth, a friend advised me to picture the exact birth I wanted. I didn’t expect it. You can’t always get what you want and must be prepared for anything, yet, I had exactly the best birth I imagined. Lila’s arrived in the light of this world at a birthing center in Brooklyn with two attentive midwives, my best friend Jen and Noah. She was born in water.
Noah, for a first time dad, freaked out. I mean, what exactly prepares you for this moment? You can read every childbirth book on the planet, if you want — although, he didn’t — but reading doesn’t simulate experience.
I gave birth to Charlie at a hospital. It was medical, metallic, sterile. Faces of people I didn’t know appeared in the room, disappeared. I wouldn’t recognize the doctor out of a thousand white, male doctors with short brown hair who laughed as I told him I need to walk, not lie there on my back. There was a bucket of body fluids on the floor. Was that mine?
Noah rescued me, my superhero. He held my hand as I crushed his soul from his fingers, wrang it out with each squeezing contraction. “Here comes another one,” I warned him, and then I was gone, washed under with pain. He was the face I saw when surrounded by strangers. His was the voice I heard guiding me through.
Then a pressing urgency. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I yelled out. La partera ran in, called the nurse, phoned the doctor while other nurses lifted me onto a gurney, covered me with a sheet and rushed me without a word of explanation other than “El bebe es viniendo!” to the surgery. What do you mean, the baby’s coming? He’s been coming for months. Five minutes and two pushes later, Charlie slipped into this world. He was born en caul, lucky they say, and incredibly rare.
“His head is so round,” people told me, “Did you have him by caesarian?” People say the strangest things. I wanted to be left alone with my baby to sleep, so I just nodded blankly as one of the nurses practiced her English with me. The room, shiny white after a recent renovation, included a nifty Samsung pad to control everything: lights, curtains, television and heat.
Charlie, oh, Charlie, how I do love you. I cried that night when Noah left to make sure all our parents were ok. He picked Lila up from our friend’s, and they went home. I cried not because of sadness, far from it. Yes, I was hurting and swollen. I didn’t want to be here with these tiresome people asking me irrelevant questions in a language not my own, but Charlie was here. I couldn’t believe he was finally here.
***
The moment after birth, time resumed its fleeing course, and here we are now, one year later.
Now, you who borbles like the Swedish Chef and understands kisses and besos, doggies y perritos. You, who loves mate and empanadas as much as hamburgers and mac ‘n cheese. You, who has the best big sister a little Monkeysnoozlebutt could ever want. You made our family complete — two kids, to adults, two dogs, two cats and a Sixto — and before you, we had no idea that it wasn’t.
Charlie-che. Mi Charlicito. Happy First Birthday!
