WATER BIRTHS
Hurray! Michael Daniel was born last night. Leia’s birthing coach called me this morning with the news, just before Igor was supposed to arrive. (Hey! It’s Labor Day weekend, Leia—how appropriate!) Then, during my Alexander session, Leia herself called twice, but her voice was so soft and dreamy my answering machine kept cutting her off. I didn’t know they did that.
Today when I drop by her house, all the balloons from Arielle’s birthday party are gone, and the house looks uncharacteristically sedate. Seeing the TV on through the window, I knock softly instead of ringing the doorbell, not wanting to wake Leia if she’s sleeping. I’ll leave my congratulations card on the doormat, I think. But Mamachela, Manny’s mother, answers and waves me toward the back room, where I find Leia in a jumble of linens on the master bed with red-faced little “Who is like God?”—which is what “Michael” means. Her two midwives are there too. I have a toy shopping cart for Arielle but want Leia’s approval because I’m worried Arielle could get her fingers pinched in it.
I hold Michael Daniel while the midwives press his feet to a three-tone inkpad and make sets of footprints on two documents. His weight is down from nine pounds to eight-and-a-half, they say. “How come?” I ask.
“Because for the first few days he’s suckling colostrum instead of milk, so he gets all the nutrients he needs, and antibodies, but no fat,” one of the midwives explains.
Leia tells me she started having contractions just a few hours after we got back from the lake. She called the midwives around midnight, when she began to have the urge to push, and Michael was born three hours later at 3:15 a.m. His head came out with one contraction, his body with the next—she didn’t really even have to think about pushing; her body just took over, she says.
“Did he start to breathe as soon as he came out of the water?” I ask. (That’s the part of the water birth I was anxious about.)
“Yeah, when the cold air hit his face.”
“And Arielle—how does she feel about having a brother?”
“Oh, she wants to kiss him all the time. Unfortunately, she wants to jump on him too. They’re so different!” Leia marvels. “Arielle used to wake me up every hour to nurse; he slept for five hours last night. She was wide-eyed from the beginning, taking everything in. He mostly keeps his eyes shut or squints out at the world with one eyebrow cocked like he’s a little bit skeptical about it all.”
And three years later, a little before dawn, along came Emerald–also a water birth. Arielle–at age five–was going to cut the umbilical cord, but suddenly got cold feet…er…fingers. So I did the snipping, and a few minutes later I witnessed Emma’s first yawn.