Bringing in Finn (41 page)

The room looked like a Holiday Inn. The walls were brown and green. There was a pullout coach, a flat-screen TV, and a wooden cart topped with a clear plastic bassinet for the baby. She handed us some diapers, the assisted nursing kit, two-ounce bottles of formula, and an extra swaddle blanket.

“Push the button if you need anything,” she said, gesturing to a remote control mounted on the wall.

“That's it?” Bill and I asked.

“Good night,” she said, and closed the door. We placed Finn, who was sleeping now, into the bassinet. I looked around for some kind of equipment. Where was the heart rate monitor to ensure he would continue breathing? Who was overseeing things from the central desk? The hallway was silent. The entire maternity wing seemed hollow, like a cave. The lone light, a dim floor lamp, eked out a stingy yellow glow in the corner. We were on our own.

Bill and I pulled the bed out and perched on the end, eye level with the bassinet. In all our years of waiting, I couldn't have imagined the magnitude of this moment. We could not sleep. All we wanted to do was look at the baby. I was afraid that if I closed my eyes for a moment, he could disappear, like a mirage.

We decided to take turns standing guard, just to make sure. But neither of us was able to sleep while the other kept watch. I'd lie
down and start laughing as I thought of Finn's tiny Connell feet, or the look on his face when the nurse had pulled him away from my breast after feeding.

“He looked like he was pissed,” Bill said, gazing at Finn's sleeping face. “He wanted more food.”

We stayed on our knees like that, watching Finn sleep, from 2:00 until 5:00 AM. When he awoke, hungry again, I nursed, fumblingly changed his diaper, and reswaddled his tiny body, which trembled every hour or so, the way the doctors had said it would, as his nervous system assimilated to his new world.

At 5:00 AM, I went to find my mother's room. If she was awake, I knew she'd want to see Finn. I peeked out into the hallway. The floor looked deserted, the only sound a soft hum from some kind of generator or central heater. It took me a few minutes to find a nurse. She informed me that my mother had never come up from the recovery room. Fear sounded in my head like an alarm. Shoeless, not even sure if my chest was covered, I ran to the elevator and jammed the DOWN button. On the eighth floor, I flashed my ID bracelet and raced through the whitewashed corridors to the room where I'd last seen my mother.

One of the nurses I recognized from our cesarean stopped me near the entrance. I inquired frantically after my mother.

“She's stable,” the nurse said.

I searched her expressionless face, my fear rising to a scream.

“
Stable?”
I said. That was a word people used in the ICU. “What happened?”

The nurse gave me some cryptic words about Dr. Gerber's not being happy with my mother's urine content, about needing to monitor her kidney function.

“Can I see her?” I asked, my voice raspy and hoarse.

“Wait until she's been cleared,” she said.

I walked back to my room as if I were wading underwater. How could no one have told us something was wrong? Kidney malfunction was serious. My mind swirled.

Back in our room, Finn was awake again and ready to eat. Bill and I set up the assisted nursing system, and I tried to keep calm. “They're probably just being extra careful,” Bill said, stroking the top of Finn's head and the side of my arm.

He didn't sound convinced. His brow was furrowed into an arrow, and he moved his jaw back and forth several times, the hinge making a clicking sound. I tried not to imagine catastrophic scenarios. I wondered if the risk we'd taken was too great. I was looking into the chasm of my worst fear: that we could not have this healthy, alive child without some kind of trauma.

I turned to our baby, his wisps of blond hair, a nose that turned up like Bill's. His little hands rolled into balls. He went back to sleep in the bassinet, a feeling of grace emanating from his body. I tried to emulate him.

I asked the nurses to notify me immediately when my mother was cleared. With each hour when we heard nothing, I plummeted several times into terror and despair.

At 9:30 AM, I heard voices in the hallway. I put Finn in the bassinet (a requirement for taking him outside the room) and rolled the cart into the hallway, waving to Bill to follow. A nurse with wide hips and long gray hair, with a badge on her scrubs marking her as HEAD NURSE, greeted us.

“I'm Jane,” she said, introducing herself. She balanced a tray of food and a bottle of water in her hands. I asked if she knew anything about Kristine Casey, who was due up from Recovery.

“You're the daughter!” she said, as if she'd met a celebrity. “Brought your mom up thirty minutes ago.” Bill caught up to us in the hallway. “This food is for her. She said that she is really, really hungry.”

Bill took Finn in the bassinet, and I ran past Jane down the hallway. My mother was sitting in bed, eating breakfast on a large tray. Dr. Gerber came by later and explained that there had actually not been anything wrong with her kidneys; my mother's urine output had simply been very low from dehydration during labor. In the ecstasy of relief, I forgave the staff for not telling us what had been happening all those hours. I wrapped my arms around my mother's shoulders, an awkward motion over the rails of the hospital bed. I put my face in her hair, drawing my cheek down next to hers, reveling in her physical aliveness and the fact that I was right there to touch it.

“I thought—” I said, my heart still stomping in my chest from the terror of the last few hours.

“I'm okay,” she said. “Better than okay. The Great Mother brought us through. Jane is treating me like a queen. Do you know I can order room service twenty-four hours a day here? And the food is good.”

I laughed as she showed me the menu. My father walked over and put a hand on my head.

“Congratulations, Momma,” he said. His eyes looked both joyful and strained. I'd seen the same look on his face the day Bill and I were married.

My mother looked radiant, as if she'd just won a race.

“Now, let me see this grandbaby again,” my mother said to Bill, who was pressing Finn against his chest.

By 4:00 PM, my mother had eaten two more meals from room service and slept for several hours. My father slept, too, rolled up in his coat, his eyes covered with a towel, on the pullout couch against the window.

Our visits continued like this all day. As soon as my parents woke up, my mother would have Jane race down the hall to get us. We'd pack the breast pump and clean onesies and swaddle blankets in
Finn's bassinet and roll down the hall to spend the next several hours in their room, until it was time for my mother to rest again. She and I squished ourselves into the hospital bed together so we could hold Finn and marvel at the blue of his eyes, his perfect unlined forehead, his gangly legs.

Jane and her nursing team brought vases of flowers in from the nursing desk, apologizing for the frequent interruptions. I closed my eyes, leaning into the sunlight that trickled into the room through the open blinds. A feeling was working its way to the surface, something important and desirable. I reached for it inside me, my inner fingers feeling as though they were touching air. The sensation caught in my chest, in the center of my heart: the realization that there was no more crisis, that I no longer needed to keep holding my breath. All parties were accounted for. We'd set out on a voyage, and we'd all come back safe. I shuddered as my body released what I had been holding. Finn moved in his blanket. He opened one eye and I smiled at him.

 

My cell phone
screen lit up, and I was startled to see I had seven new messages, several from the same phone number. Dr. Colaum and Tracey had heard about Finn's birth and wanted to visit. They'd already driven into the city from Evanston and were now standing in the lobby at Prentice. I smiled to hear Tracey's voice: “Would it be too intrusive for us to come see you and meet Finn?”

Dr. Colaum hugged and congratulated my mother, held Finn in a practiced embrace, and then encircled me in her arms at the side of the room. Since we'd seen her, Dr. Colaum had had her nineteenth grandchild. She spoke so quietly, I could not hear what she said over the noise in the room. I like to think it was, “I'm proud of you.” I leaned into her soft body and let her hold me for a minute. It was like hugging a part of the Great Mother.

Someone in the media had heard about our story, and by noon, reporters from news stations and papers all over the country were bombarding our voicemails with messages. A local station picked up the story for the evening news. International media began to call, asking if we would do radio and television interviews via satellite in Australia, India, and the UK. My mother was identified as the oldest woman in Illinois to give birth. We declined any interviews, saying we wanted to spend this time focusing on being together as a family.

A news station in Ireland called and said the nation was celebrating the birth of Finnean—due to his Celtic name, we guessed. This call impressed my father, who had felt repelled by the media interest up to that point. I'd finished nursing, and he was now rocking Finn in the green glider chair. He whispered, and I could not hear his words, only see his lips moving as he rocked. Finn stared, his eyes riveted on my father's face. The generator in the hallway kicked off then, allowing me to hear my father speak.

“Your birth was heard ‘round the world,” he said, as he pushed the glider with his foot, holding Finn close as they rocked back and forth.

T
hree weeks after Finn was born, my mother, Finn, and I were together in the downstairs guest room. My father and Bill were upstairs, watching a basketball game on TV. I could hear the announcers commenting on the game, and an occasional shout from my father when his team scored. We'd been in to see Dr. Gerber that morning, and my mother had been cleared for the drive home to Virginia that my parents would make the next day.

Finn lay next to us, looking like a baby cub on the fur throw that my mother and I had snuggled up under all those days during the pregnancy. He was dressed in a white long-sleeved onesie with hand mitts, and a small blue knitted cap to keep his head warm. It was still February, and cold in the basement. I'd moved our large space heater beside the bed and turned the heat on high, shooting warm air toward our faces. I'd carried Finn downstairs in the red Moby wrap Bill had brought to the hospital. I'd worn it constantly since we'd come home, carrying Finn around as I walked around the house, made phone calls, and folded laundry. Bill worked from home as much as he could, peeking in at Finn on the way to and from phone calls and meetings. He was fascinated by the way Finn curled
into a crescent, as if he were still in the womb. When he fell into a deep sleep, he would lift up his head a few times, then drop down, making a sound that Bill swore was a purr.

Finn was now awake on the bed and making smacking sounds with his mouth. He'd freed his arms from the swaddle blanket, and every few minutes he would lift them in unison, holding them over his head in a move we had nicknamed “the maestro.”

In the three weeks since Finn's birth, I had not slept more than three hours at a stretch, taken regular showers, or eaten a regular meal. And yet I felt amazing. I remembered talking with Kaitlin once, in the scary days of our miscarriages and my stillbirths: “Won't it be awesome when we call each other to complain about being exhausted because we were up with a baby?” she'd said.

The ecstasy I had felt the night of Finn's birth continued, even intensified, once we were home. In those first days, even months, every maternal task was a joy.

When Bill or my mother took a shift watching him, I would nap. When I woke, I would half-run into the nursery or down to the guest room, still hardly able to believe he was there, that we had a child to burp and feed and dress.

Later, when we weaned Finn to a crib, Bill and I still sometimes raced each other from the bedroom to be the first to arrive in the nursery.

Friends asked if motherhood was everything I had envisioned, perhaps wondering if it would be one of those things that reality tempers a bit. I answered truthfully that it was better than I had imagined—and I had imagined a great deal. “Likely a gift from a seven-year journey,” I said to friends who said they'd thought about giving their children back after three months or more of not sleeping.

My mother's milk had stopped enough that she no longer needed to bind her breasts with a sports bra or Ace bandage. At night, she
sweated so profusely from postdelivery hormone withdrawal that once or twice she had to wring out her clothes. The night sweats had the advantage of expelling the excess fluid she'd been carrying from the surgery, so that by the third week postbirth, she was no longer wearing maternity clothes. A friend who'd had a cesarean the week before Finn was born said she couldn't believe how quickly my mother had recovered. “You're in better shape than me,” she told my mother when she stopped by with her baby to meet Finn.

“It's different when you don't have to take care of a baby all day and night,” my mother said. “I feel as if I've been on vacation.”

She and my father were leaving the next morning. When I thought of her going, I felt a wrench of sadness in my chest. She would be back in Chicago for her eight-week checkup, and Bill and I planned to take Finn on his first plane trip to D.C. Mother's Day week. I knew that the bond we had forged during the surrogacy could never be undone. Still, the separation felt profound—the cutting of a cord.

My mother confessed to feeling a sense of groundlessness as she approached the return to her life in Alexandria. “Every birth is also a rebirth,” I remembered the counselor I spoke with saying after the twins died. The coach my mother had worked with during the pregnancy had given her a homework assignment to journal about what she'd like out of the next chapter of her life.