Waiting: An [Unnatural] Birth Story

My wife goes in first. Her gown hangs over her belly, her hospital socks cover her feet. She doesn't blink or waver or need a hug. I kiss her for formalities sake. See you soon, I mutter, and she is off, through the light blue metal door, leaving me alone in the hallway I sat in last year while I waited on word about M.

This is the girl I met twelve years ago and married eighteen months later. Courageous. Determined. Poised. I had no idea I was looking for her, or wanted someone like her, but she came to me in a rush, like a stampede, and left me on the floor in a state of blissful bewilderment.

Truer grit would be hard to find.

Here I sit, in the infamous hallway, tapping on my phone, waiting for the spinal to finish, moments away from meeting my son, and my mind is fixed on how fortunate I am to have found such a woman.

They give me hospital attire to wear over my clothes, each piece represented by a different color, as if someone might confuse a slipper with a face mask. Ocean blue slippers to fit over my shoes. A light blue piece of mesh to cover my hair. Green mask to cover my face. And a bleached white, full body suit that zips up from the crotch and is so undersized the bottom of my pants clear my ankles by a good four or five inches.

I'm dressed and ready in under sixty seconds, which is why I'm here tapping away in between bites of a Payday that I purchased from a vending machine.

The floor is different now than a year ago. It's faux wood in dark and light accents. The hallway is double the size I imagined from last year, like they added lanes to the freeway and brought in new pavement. And its brighter, much brighter. I remember carpet. I remember a narrow hallway. A lone spotlight shining down on my curled up figure, fear and uncertainty emanating from my body like fog. I remember a bleakness to it, a darkness, tattered ceilings and stained walls, like a mental ward circa 1952. Now it's just florescent lights and veneer floors.

If there was a spotlight on me today, thirteen months later, it would reveal a different man, anxious but strong, a man who understands sadness and has walked the road of grief, a man fractured but inexplicably more whole.

Twenty-three minutes I've been waiting.

We decided early on in this pregnancy to follow every doctor order without researching the hell out of it afterward or contemplating rebellion. So if our Doctors suggested we endure fifty non-stress tests and twenty-five biophysical profiles and six thousand doctor appointments over the course of nine months, we happily obliged. And it's why I am here in the hallway instead of next to my wife. The damn anesthesiologist, apparently, isn't fond of partners watching the spinal. He doesn't work under pressure. 

When we asked Dr. Wu if he thought it would be okay for us to deliver early, he replied, "let's take our money and run," and then circled May 7.

Thirty minutes waiting, too nervous to type.

Here we go...