The Birth of Leon

Just before Leon was born, Janice and Mike had a New Year’s Eve party. Mike loved his friends, he was social, had so many friends. They laughed, drank, embraced at midnight, danced to disco music. Janice danced too but she was not feeling well at eight months pregnant.

As the party ended, and the guests paraded out into the post-Christmas winter night, Mike said to each guest, “Come over tomorrow morning. We can have breakfast, brunch, keep celebrating.”

When the house was finally empty of revelers, Janice said, “Call every one of them and tell them not to come tomorrow morning. I can’t do it. I’m tired. I’m fucking pregnant!”

“Oh god, yes,” Mike said, “I’m sorry. I was having such a good time I didn’t want it to end.”

“I know and maybe they thought you were kidding but in case they thought you meant it, call them up and call if off.”

Mike understood. He wasn’t upset. He just did not know what Janice was going through with the pregnancy. Janice wasn’t upset either. She loved Mike’s sociability and his connections with friends and family. He was authentically interested in people. In fact, Janice found this fascinating because although she liked people, she was not as enamored with them as Mike was.

Janice had abdominal pains and a slight headache. The next day she took a bath and realized her thighs looked big. They were swollen. She consulted her book, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, looked up her symptoms, saw they related to pre-eclampsia. She told Mike and they called the obstetrician who told her to come to the office in the morning. She tried to sleep, put a pillow between her legs.

Mike took her to the doctor’s office in the morning. The nurse took a urine sample. Several minutes later the doctor stuck his head in the room, said, “We’re going to send you to the hospital,” and turned around to leave.

“Wait,” Mike said. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Protein in the urine, probably beginning of pre-eclampsia.”

Mike and Janice drove from the office in Westport to Norwalk Hospital where Janice called her insurance company from the lobby to make sure she was cleared to be admitted.

The baby was not due until Valentine’s Day, six weeks from the day Janice was admitted to the hospital. The ultrasounds indicated the baby was small and there was not enough amniotic fluid. The birth would be that week with labor induced by magnesium drip. But the medical people wanted to wait as it would be better if the baby could do at least one more week in utero.

Janice’s mother, Geraldine, came to the hospital the day they started the magnesium drip. Very mild contractions began; there was a monitor you could see the contractions occurring and the baby’s heart rhythm. At each mild contraction, Geraldine said, “There there.” Janice remembered how her mother videotaped the launching of the space shuttle. When you played back the video, the moment her mother caught the shuttle in the sky, she said, “There there, there it is.”

Geraldine, a snob, didn’t like Mike, thought a carpenter was not good enough for her daughter, didn’t want Janice to marry him, especially didn’t want Janice to have a baby with him. If there were no children, it would be simpler for them to divorce. She believed it was karma, the baby to be born premature, Janice sick, now in the hospital.

Janice thought she wanted her mother there for this momentous time. But once her mother sat down in the hospital room chair, Janice did not want her to stay which turned out to be fine for Geraldine who did not plan to stay anyway. Janice’s father, who did not come to the hospital, was home packing the Buick for their yearly trip to Florida. Geraldine left the hospital.

The next day, the doctor increased the dose of the magnesium drip. The nurses and Mike gave each other anxious looks as the baby’s heart rate dropped with each contraction. The doctor, sticking his head into the birthing room where Janice was hooked up to the magnesium drip, said, “We’re going to section you.”

Mike winced as blood spurted from Janice’s abdomen with the first cut by the surgeon. Lifted out of the uterus, the baby gave his first cry. Janice cried thinking I have a son.

On that day, the day on which Janice and Mike were to have their premature baby, the day on which her daughter would lie in recovery with the room spinning, her face swollen beyond recognition from the toxins released into her system, her mother and father were on the road in the Buick driving south on I-95.

Leon stayed in the NICU for twenty-six days. On the first day, as he was having trouble breathing to the point of turning blue, Mike witnessed the NICU nurse say, “I know what to do,” and she gave Leon a sponge bath which he did not like, he let out a baby scream, and cried which started his breathing to the point that he turned rage red in the face with oxygen filling his lungs. Janice and Mike visited him every day. Janice would hold him, stroke the little area at his temple and sing Both Sides Now. In a way, they got used to having a baby who did not yet live with them, and when Leon arrived home, Janice said to herself, he’s here to stay. It wasn’t that she did not want him, but that she was surprised she had a baby. In her twenties, using coke, singing in a punk rock band, getting wasted every night told her she would die before she was twenty-eight. Now she was married, in love with her husband, and mother to baby Leon who was thriving. The first day she was home with Leon, as she was lying on the sofa, she placed him on her chest, stroked his temple and sang Both Sides Now. It had become the song that she would sing to him many times.

I've looked at life from both sides now

From win and lose and still somehow

It's life's illusions I recall

I really don't know life at all

Although she loved the song, the last line did not fit for her. Janice knew life. She was an observer and as such, she saw life all around her, humanity at its best and worst. And she knew her life. Loving Mike, falling in love with Leon. Besides the basics of food clothing and shelter, she deeply felt that she did not need more.

A few months later, Geraldine told Janice that she saw Janice’s friend from elementary school who had married a dentist of Italian descent. Geraldine would have sold her soul for Janice to marry an Italian dentist, well preferably an M.D., but a dentist was close.

“I told her you were a partner in a law firm.” Geraldine said.

“You didn’t tell her I had a baby?”

Janice chuckled to herself that her mother was so shallow. In the past, before Mike and Leon, Janice would have been hurt at Geraldine’s blindness to Janice’s true essence. But now she saw Geraldine as cartoonish. She left Geraldine’s house to return to her home where Mike and Leon would be waiting. In giving birth to Leon, she gave birth to the good family she knew she deserved.