My Son
My wife and I's recent experience bringing our son into the world.
After laboring for over thirty hours, my wife brought forth our son on a hospital bed. He came out of her body like a cartoon character: first came his head, then out popped his shoulders, and then in an instant the rest of him emerged, as if he had leapt out of the womb in a rush of water. He was covered in fluid and had a neutral expression on his face. The doctor laid him on my wife’s stomach and I saw, for the first time, the little child that I had been speaking to and singing to for months. I beheld the life that she and I had made together: the son of our love.
The first night in the hospital, he fussed and made noise, and so I tried to give my wife sleep by taking him outside into the corridors. I held him as I walked, and although he did not keep his eyes open for long, he did stare up at me for some time, and I lost myself in the wonder of his brilliant black eyes, so full of the darkness of life. I held him in my arms until a nurse starchily informed me that I was not permitted to hold him in the hallways—something about liability for them if I dropped him. I retrieved his bassinet from our room, moving gently as my wife slept, and placed him in it and walked the corridors into the morning hours.
On the far end of the wing there was a section with rocking chairs in it. I took him out of the bassinet and sat down with him in the chairs and rocked him. I had had little sleep in the past three days. As my wife had undergone her tremendous exertions to bring our boy into the world, I had stayed by her side, massaging her hips, applying counterpressure to her body to stave off her labor pains, which had maddeningly increased as the hours passed. At a certain point, her screams reached a heartbreaking pitch and she had sobbed as she pleaded for an epidural, so great was her pain that she could not possibly take more. I had rang up a nurse and a doctor had rushed into the room with a team, shooing us out so they could perform the procedure. Her mother and I and broke down in the hallway outside and wept as one last long scream from my wife punctuated the air. Never had I imagined that labor could be so terrible, so completely unbearable and raw and sacrificial.
We had found out earlier that our son had had a bowel movement in the womb, a probable consequence of being overdue by a week. The meconium infected my wife and the placenta. Could the infection have intensified the pain of her contractions? She was fevered as she brought our baby forth, and in the last hour she strained so long and hard that I began to fear she would not have the strength to push him out. And if she could not, if she had to have a C-section after all her suffering, I knew that we both ran the risk of having our spirits broken.
And so I prayed, and God answered: the hairy sphere of our son’s head crested into view and then broke forth from her like a shaft of sunlight piercing a long-dimmed sky. I could not even feel joy; only relief, that her labors were finally ended and that no surgery had been necessary. A bit of further drama resulted from having to remove the placenta: it remained inside of her for some time, and the doctor’s touch on her stomach to coax it out caused my wife to beg that she could not possibly take any more pain. After it finally came out, a sickly green sac ribbed by yellow webbing like a tree, we surmised that her abdomen was particularly sensitive because of the degree of infection that had taken hold. Strange, how a baby’s little poop could cause so much grief and anguish. It was a brutal end to a brutal labor, but our child was now in her arms.
I rocked our little son, the baby of our love, the child of my wife’s deepest agony, and clutched him to myself. Bleary-eyed with sleeplessness, I rocked him under the harsh fluorescent lights to try to whittle away the night hours without his cries so my wife could sleep.
Later after I had brought him back to our room, his oxygen levels began to grow concerning. A nurse conferred with a doctor, and suddenly our son was going to the Newborn Intensive Care Unit. What I googled on the spot about babies and oxygen levels was not comforting. We peppered a kindly nurse with questions as they ordered a heart exam and a chest x-ray for my son. I prayed to God that He would be gracious to my child as he lay on the warming tray with nodules hooked up to his chest and limbs. A screen to his right displayed his vitals in neon lights.
After some time our waiting was interrupted by good news. The chest exam brought up a number of minor spots in our son’s lungs that could have been bits of meconium that he ingested in utero. It was nothing to be concerned about, the nurse assured us; dangerous meconium aspiration requires much larger doses. And his heart exam revealed a number of small holes in his heart that were in the range of normal for babies; they would close on their own with time. I cherished the good news and held my son in the couch that was beside his warming table and rocked him amidst the silent chaos of the day and the insistent beeping of the machines and the occasional bustle of a nurse coming and going.
After two days, they determined that we could go home, and we packed our bags and emptied the labor and delivery room. My wife’s mother and father were there to help. The need to go home was overwhelming; sleeplessness was getting acute, and I yearned for the normalcy of my bed. After a careful drive we arrived home. And for the first time, I swung my son into our garage entry by his car seat and placed him in our living room, in the home that we will share together as a family for his formative years.
Our troubles were not over. In the next few days, a complication from the epidural gave my wife what is called a spinal headache, forcing her to lie flat to keep her head from splitting with pain. We went back to the hospital triage, and from there we were surprised when the nurses insisted that we go to the emergency room, for spinal headaches were not taken care of in triage. So we went to the ER with our newborn in tow. After a few hours, a well-meaning nurse advised us to get him out of there for fear of catching sickness. The anesthesiologist that later performed the procedure to remedy my wife’s headache said that he had never done the procedure in the ER before. We bitterly reflected that we had been sent there by the triage nurses for reasons other than our best interests. I took our baby home while my wife’s mother stayed with her and prayed that her spinal headache would be resolved.
Happily, it mostly was, and my wife came home to me and our baby. It had been a long and hard road. Pregnancy had brought my wife intense nausea and months of vomiting and weakness. Labor had been even more brutal. I wondered, does everything always need to be so hard? It seemed that all of God’s good gifts came to us adulterated with the filth of human brokenness, that His packages always arrived with some thorn or barb in them to mix sorrow into our joy.
But our baby was healthy, and safe. It occurred to us that things could have been a lot worse. He was ok. He was breathing, and sleeping, and eating, and frustrating at night when he cried and yelled and hammered our ears with noise—but he was safe. In our arms was a healthy, sweet little child.
And so as we recover from this experience, we are understanding in a deeper way the words of Christ, who said that for now, His disciples would grieve and mourn in this world. But when He promised to return for them, He said to them that nothing would take their joy away; just as there is sorrow when a woman labors, and joy once the child is born. Our joy in this life is likewise laden with sorrow. Years of chronic pain and deep disappointment have taught us that. But my wife and I can say that despite all the mess and confusion, our faith is still in Jesus Christ, who came to earth to make every human birth radiant with hope and the possibility of eternal life with Him.
What else remains to be said? Our son is still so small and dependent on us. He is a little bundle of joy that produces sleeplessness and frustration. Caring for him can be an ordeal, especially in the night hours. He brings out sin in me that I repent of and pushes our endurance. Yet there are times that his little face breaks out into a smile of wonder and everything is worth it. Perhaps that is the best of human experience in this world: a beam of joy from the sun of God’s blessings strikes us in our brokenness and corruption and reminds us that there is still something to live and laugh for. It points us toward the Savior who is the source of every holy joy, and who promises to seal joy to our hearts forever through His work on the cross.
And one day it is my dearest hope that my son will meet my wife and I on that eternal, incorruptible plain; in that city in which there is no more night, but only an endless and glorious summer; in which every day is better than the one before and one chapter moves to the next without pain.
And for that hope we will thank Jesus and His work on the cross, no matter our circumstances in the present.