Talking About My Baby

“She’s in pain,” Dan exclaimed.

Tara tried to evoke some feeling of compassion for Dan McCrea. A flicker was as good as it got. The man sent her straight into radical midwife mode; Ivy called it “RMM,” as in “Tara, you’re in RMM.” So be it. Dan, I bet your brother was born at home and you weren’t. Your mother must have been drugged, because you can’t tolerate pain now. Circumcision wouldn’t have helped, either.

There. She felt better. The man suffered from hospital birth.

“You’re five centimeters dilated, Millie,” Francesca encouraged. “You’re doing great. How about walking some?”

Millie’s husband gave her an encouraging smile, and she began to climb out of bed, just as another contraction came. She moaned through it, and Francesca said, “That’s right. Keep your mouth loose.”

“I’m going to order a monitor, Millie. I’ll feel better about your baby if we know how it’s doing all the time,” said Dan.

“I can use the fetoscope, Dr. McCrea.”

“We don’t want a monitor.” Millie’s husband supported his wife’s body as she labored.

Tara watched his tenderness for only a moment. It was all she could stand before unwanted emotions bubbled up. Just a man to love her like that, to want her to have his children. Down on the border, she didn’t see this—just women alone, women like her.

She paused in the doorway. As the doctors in the birthing suite pressed their case, two people approached from the end of the hall.

Isaac. And Pilar, her musical laughter preceding her. Tara’s heart thudded, and Laura stirred against her, then began to cry.

Isaac’s gaze avoided Tara’s as he peered in the door of the playroom, and the nurse continued down the hall without him.

“Back to work.” Squeezing Tara’s arm affectionately, Pilar sailed past, into the birthing suite.

Laura fussed, rooting for the nearest breast. There were too many people in the room, anyway, another labor-wrecker. Tara left. Noting Isaac’s new coolness, she hurried by him, to sit in the waiting area and nurse. She wished she didn’t care what Isaac McCrea thought of her. She didn’t care.

Isaac checked on his daughter. Danielle was fast asleep, her braids against the green nylon of his North Face bag. He could hear a woman moaning in labor. Francesca Walcott’s voice came from a room several doors down, the birthing suite. “You’re doing wonderfully. Millie. You’re such a good mom.”

Sometime, Isaac hoped to ask Francesca how her daughter had gotten so screwed up, but he reminded himself it was 1:00 a.m. And what had Tara really done except come on to an attractive man and talk too much about homebirth?

There were things about her he liked. Her simple clothes—corduroys, T-shirts and sweaters. Her nursing that baby. And the quality he’d once found in all beings—nobility of spirit.

Leaving Danielle, Isaac went out to the waiting room, found Tara and joined her.

He sat forward in the next seat, long forearms on long thigh bones.

Laura had not been nursing well, crying most of the time. Tara wondered if maybe the baby wasn’t really hungry. Ignoring Isaac, she moved the tube away and put Laura to her nipple. As the baby latched on, she felt a strange tingling, new and unfamiliar. She was lactating! Her breasts were producing milk. Probably just drops, but... “This is incredible! I think I have milk.” And much sooner than she’d ever dreamed.

Isaac felt the miracle, shared her pleasure. Inducing lactaction wasn’t easy. But his breath was shallow, his stomach muscles tight, as she switched the baby to the other breast, reached under her shirt and sweater, and brought out a sticky drop of milk on her finger, then licked it off. He said finally, “When is the mother going to take over?”

“What?” Tara recalled what she’d told him, that she was raising Laura for Julia. She’s not going to take over. “I’m not sure.” Why the sudden urge to level with him, to blurt the truth?

The appearance of her own mother, obviously steaming, forestalled any confession.

But Laura was still nursing, and Isaac lingered. “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “About babysitting. We could talk about it more.”

Could we talk about marriage? Oh, Tara, get real. “Yes. Yes to everything.”

His eyes never left her face.

Knowing Francesca wouldn’t say what was on her mind in front of Isaac, Tara used her finger to break Laura’s contact with her nipple. “Okay, pumpkin. Let’s go see your grandma.”

“Grandma?”

Tara flushed. “Sometimes I forget she’s not mine.” She had brought Laura’s car seat inside, and she settled and strapped the newborn in it.

When she stood and lifted the car seat, he stood, too, but Tara didn’t raise her eyes again until she reached her mother.

FRANCESCA SPOKE IN a low voice to Tara. “If I have to see another woman deliberately frightened by those men...” Francesca knew she was overstating the point. It was hard for physicians like Dan McCrea to see women in labor and not want to relieve their pain. Dan wasn’t a drug-pusher, he was just trying to help, in the way he believed was best.

But it’s just unnecessary interference. If Millie had asked for pain relief, had asked for a monitor... Francesca had seen a few women stuck at seven centimeters dilate to ten in an hour on an epidural. But most of the time she felt it slowed labor.

If only obstetricians and midwives could truly coordinate their efforts. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said homebirth was unsafe. All over the country, midwives were attending homebirths with no physician backup—because there was none to be found. Ivy’s situation in West Virginia was unusual; her backup physician, Mata Iyer, saw the need for a midwife who would visit homes in her impoverished rural area—and undoubtedly, Mata had never said the word “homebirth” to her insurance provider. Francesca’s own backup physician had retired a year before, after battling endless hospital politics.

Francesca appreciated the risks. For years, she’d kept all homebirths within five minutes of the hospital, attending women at the Victorian if they lived too far from town. The more she saw, the less sorry she was to work in the hospital.

Until she actually worked in the hospital.

I am so tired of all this. Maybe it was time to quit, or take up nursing full-time.

“Did they leave?” Tara asked, knowing the answer.

“He’s ordered the epidural and monitor. I’m going back to see how she’s doing.”

“We’ll come with you.” She and Laura.

“Tara, it won’t help. Please go home and sleep. You need it. And Laura needs you.”

“If Millie doesn’t mind, I’d like to stay. I’ll wait till the boys have done their thing and left, so we won’t crowd the room.”

Tara’s dark eyes were eager, yet failed to hide her fatigue. Francesca knew this aspect of her daughter too well. Tara relied on births for some kind of spiritual recharge. But now she needed physical recharge.

“Tara, you’re trying to produce milk, and you need rest for that.”

Her mother was right. But Tara longed to see Millie’s labor through to its magical conclusion. There was nothing more intense, more complete, than birth. It fulfilled something in her that nothing else ever would. Except, perhaps, Laura.

“I’m really wide-awake, Mom.”

Francesca knew that was untrue. But Tara was an adult. “Millie asked where you went.” She sighed. “Let’s go see how she’s doing.”

THE BABY’S HEAD crowned four hours later. Francesca caught the head when it emerged, and Tara guided Millie’s hands toward her child. She remembered Laura’s birth, Julia’s apathetic eyes. But there was nothing like this joy. The experience of meeting a person never met before.

No cord. More pushing.

“Ahhh... ahhh... ”

“Hey, you handsome guy.” Admiring the newborn—and double-checking Francesca’s quick suctioning—Dan smiled at Millie and her husband. “This one’s going to play for the Broncos.”