Bringing in Finn (36 page)

“Okay,” Bill said, “but if they so much as mention the term ‘herbal tincture,' we're out of there.”

The lactation consultant, Jamie Simms, came to our home the next day.

“We'll need total commitment and to work quickly if we're going to get milk,” she said. She wrote out the protocol for induced lactation, which involved taking a medication called domperidone, a drug created for gastrointestinal irregularity but that had the side effect of lactation in some people. I would also need to start
pumping with a breast pump six to eight times a day for the six weeks leading up to the baby's birth. At the end of the appointment, she recommended an herbal blend called Mother's Milk that was available from Whole Foods.

“Thin ice,” Bill whispered in my ear, as I wrote out a $75 check for the consultation.

“You'll need a prescription for the pump from your doctor,” Jamie said. “Prentice rents them out on a month-to-month basis.”

The second week in January, my mother accompanied me to my annual visioning workshop. Twice during the afternoon I stole into the bathroom and pumped while the workshop participants created their vision boards. At the end of the afternoon, I invited my mother up to the front of the room to share the story of her vision board from two years earlier. As she reached the point where she had offered to be our surrogate, she pulled her shirt close to her body and swiveled to each side, providing a lateral view of her belly.

“So, be really conscientious about what you put on your boards,” my mother said. “You could end up pregnant with your grandchild.” Even though she was attempting to be funny, several people in the room had begun crying. One woman, a photographer who worked out of a studio in Ravenswood, asked if she could do a portrait of us.

“I'm doing a mother-daughter project,” she said. “Yours is exactly the kind of story I want to shoot.”

 

The twice-weekly stress
tests at MFM became routine. The baby's heartbeat was regular, and he usually finished the three periods well before the half hour was up. I toted the breast pump to and from appointments, affixing the plastic cups to my breasts as the baby kicked in the chair next to me.

The doctors and nurses in the practice were all very interested in the process.

“Any milk yet?” Katie asked whenever I saw her. I shook my head.

“The lactation consultant told me it would take six weeks minimum—just in time for the baby,” I said.

“Does it hurt?” Katie asked.

I described the sucking motion the machine made and then acquiesced that it was in fact painful for the first ninety seconds or so, until my nipples became slightly numb.

“Just like nursing,” my mother said.

 

Every time the
doctors checked the baby's position, he was head down. Dr. Socol, whom we seemed to see most often, was delighted by this news and never failed to mention that it was optimal for delivery. The doctors were all excited about the likelihood of a vaginal delivery.

We met Dr. Peaceman at our thirty-seven-week appointment. He was a short, energetic man who was on the faculty of Northwestern's Feinburg School of Medicine.

“I'm going to check the position of the baby,” he said, pressing hard into my mother's belly.

“Ow,” she said, and shot up from the table. I jumped.

“This baby is head up,” Dr. Peaceman said.

“We had an ultrasound four days ago,” I said. “Dr. Socol said he was head down.”

“This isn't good,” he said. “They can't turn again after thirty-seven weeks. If he's breech, we'll have to do a C-section.”

“That's okay,” my mother said. “We just want to get the baby here safely.”

Dr. Peaceman didn't cite my mother's age as an increased risk, but he seemed averse to a C-section, so I had to wonder.

“Whatever is safest for my mother,” I said, still standing.

“If the baby hasn't turned by Friday, I'm going to try to turn him manually.”

We looked up instructions for a manual turning procedure on the Internet that night. My mother grew distressed as she read. People on the website reported it to be painful and said the procedure could bring on immediate labor. “Go with your bags packed,” one website said.

“It seems extreme,” my mother said. “Are we sure this is what he was talking about?”

At the bottom of the page, the website listed exercises women could try to turn a breech baby. My mother knelt on all fours and rocked back and forth, the way we saw in the pictures. I dug my reflexology book out of a box in my office to confirm the point on the foot that was said to make a baby turn. I worked the reflex on the side of the pinky toe by pressing my thumb into the skin and massaging the point with my knuckle and then thumb.

When I woke up the next morning, my mother was sitting in the kitchen, sipping a cup of tea.

“I felt something,” she said, her face hopeful. “I don't know for sure if he's turned, but at two in the morning he was moving so much that I wondered if I was going to start having contractions.”

Dr. Peaceman ordered an ultrasound.

“He's head down,” he confirmed, as he slid the ultrasound roller over my mother's belly.

“Whoo!” I called out.

“Wow!” my mother said. Dr. Peaceman handed the ultrasound roller back to Kenisha, the same technician who had performed our twenty-week ultrasound, and said he would meet us in the regular exam room to finish our appointment as soon as Kenisha finished measuring the baby. As soon as Dr. Peaceman left the room, my
mother said she was convinced the baby had turned on request.

“I told him last night to do whatever was perfect for him, but said if going head down was just as good, Grandma would so appreciate it.”

“The baby looks good,” Kenisha said, moving the roller around to try to give us a 3-D view from the front. My mother and I watched the screen together. The baby was scrunched up in a ball with his hands up, covering his face, like a boxer.

“But
whew,”
Kenisha said, letting out a low whistle.

“What?” I asked, startled. I relaxed my hands, which had been clenched. I was not going to feel calm until this baby was out, breathing, healthy, and in my arms.

“He's all good,” Kenisha said. “But that baby is
big.”

“Now I'm nervous,” my mother said, as we walked from the ultrasound room to meet Dr. Peaceman. “I read that the baby gains half a pound a week from this point forward. I don't know if I can push a ginormous baby out of this old body.”

“Weight tests can be a pound or two off in either direction,” Dr. Peaceman assured her. “Don't worry about his size.”

When he checked her cervix, it was high up in the back, closed tight in a thin, straight line, like a clam.

“With so little precedent for delivery at your age,” Dr. Peaceman said, “we just don't know if your body will go into labor on its own. We assume so, but if you haven't started by week forty-one, we'll do an induction.”

“Forty-one!” my mother said, aghast. “Dr. Gerber told us we wouldn't go beyond thirty-eight when we met with her.”

“That was in the first trimester, before we saw how well you've tolerated the pregnancy,” he said. “You have yet to express a single troubling symptom.”

 

As much as
I wanted our baby out with us, I was grateful, right there at the end, for a little more time. “We still have so much to do,” I told my mother on the way home.

“Well, you'd better get on it,” my mother said. “I want this baby out by February twelfth.”

The next week, we had the fire department professionally install a car-seat base in both of our cars, something my mother thought was ridiculous (how hard could it be?) but that the teachers of our Prentice classes had implied was the only nonnegligent action to take. We attended the remaining CPR and infant first aid class, and the next night moved my mother's things to the basement, where we'd outfitted the new guest room with a featherbed mattress and favorite items from our travels that we hoped would give it a feeling of luxury and warmth. And the last weekend in January, we finally did the nursery.

We invited my sister and brother-in-law over for a decorating party. Bill put together the changing table and the crib. I vacuumed the carpet, washed the floorboards, and stacked linen shelves in the closet. My mother informed us that we would need to prewash all the baby's things with a special detergent before he came home.

Taking the tags off all the clothes and folding them into the drawers and closet shelves called up my old fears again. As the crib went up, I fought the urge to grab everything and put it back in the closet. My mother started a marathon of laundry, washing multiple loads of onesies, burp clothes, swaddle blankets, sweaters, and a quilted zip-up sack with a hood, a splurge from Nordstrom that we thought would be warm and ideal for the baby's trip home from the hospital.

I stacked our children's-book collection on the bookshelf, a cheap, white IKEA basic, my own from my old bedroom at my parents' house. It was the first piece of furniture I had bought with
my own money and the one piece I had moved to college and then to my first apartment, to England, and all the way back to this nursery. I wanted our baby to have it now, a place to house his favorite books.

By six o'clock, Bill had assembled all the large pieces, the green patterned sheets were on the crib, and I'd switched on the Japanese paper lamp Sandy had sent from New Mexico, which projected images of trucks and bicycle riders on the ceiling.

My mother went to the kitchen with my sister to decide on something to order for dinner. I walked around the room, straightening the books, running my bare feet over the furry rug and the pile of blankets stacked six high on the changing-table shelves.

“Do you still feel scared?” Bill asked.

“No,” I said. Sometime in the course of the ten hours we'd been at work, I'd experienced a shift.

“I love this room,” I said. “And you know something?”

Bill sat down on the gray, modern foldout chair that we'd purchased so one of us could sleep with the baby whenever we wanted. He waited for me to continue.

“This room now feels like it is what it always wanted to be.”

 

On February 1,
Bill and I surveyed our living room, which now contained a baby swing, a high chair, and a bouncy seat.

“I think we're close,” I said.

“Good thing,” Bill said, craning his head toward the dome window, looking at the sky. “The Weather Channel predicted a big snowstorm this weekend.”

The snow came on Saturday night and dropped hard—two feet in one night and another foot the next morning. Only the roofs of the tallest SUVs were visible along the streets. My mother's car, a Toyota hybrid, was buried completely.

“I guess that's one good thing about the baby not coming early,” she said, looking at the spot on the street where her car was parked. “No need to go anywhere today.”

 

For Christmas, Bill's
stepfather gifted us with an overnight at the Elysian, a sumptuous hotel in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood. When Dr. Peaceman told us that we might well go to forty-one weeks, we planned to do our overnight for February 11, the week in between our two birthdays.

“Don't wait that long,” Roger said. “I want you to have one more fabulous night out before the baby arrives. Once he's here, you won't be going out for a long, long while.” Mostly to appease him, we decided to move our stay to February 7, the Monday after the snowstorm. I worried about leaving my mother at home on her own, but she was convinced the baby was going to be late and that the doctors would make her stay pregnant through week forty-one.

“Not a single one of you was on time,” my mother said, giving Bill the statistics of her deliveries and our lateness: me (five days), Laura (one week), and Ellen (two and a half weeks). “None of them wanted to get out. And now this little guy is staying put, too. I thought for sure a boy would come sooner.”

“That's why you're the gestational host,” Bill said, as I propped a pillow behind my mother's back. “Your uterus is like the Four Seasons—no one wants to leave.”

I peered out our living-room window, stretching my neck up to see the sky. The streets had been plowed and no new snow was predicted, but I still felt protective.

“Go,” my mother said. “We don't all need to be here, twiddling our thumbs. I'm going to order mac ‘n' cheese lasagna and watch romantic comedies all night. If by some wildness I go into labor, I can
walk the half block to the fire station and they will get me to Prentice sooner than you could.”

As I carried our single overnight bag to the car, I ordered a taxi to take my mother to our OB appointment in the morning.

“I'll meet you at MFM at nine fifteen,” I said. “We'll have our cell phones on at all times.”

“Now,” my mother said, waving her hand at me and pushing Bill by the back toward the car.

 

Our room at
the Elysian was a decadent suite with two fireplaces, a king-size bed, and an enormous tub big enough for two.

“Thank you, Roger,” Bill said as he opened the closets and sniffed the neroli hand lotion in the bathroom. With the precipitous weather, the Elysian wasn't full and the staff seemed happy to have guests to dote upon. The concierge sent the chef from the hotel's restaurant to our room to ask if we'd like him to prepare a special tasting menu for dinner. The maître d' sat us at a cozy table in the corner and delighted us with Dover sole, lobster with chestnuts, and a charcuterie plate that almost made Bill weep.