Postscript: More Miracles, April 22, 2015
I HAVE TWENTY-ONE PROGENY BUT I HAD NEVER WITNESSED A live birth. My own three were Caesarean sections and I’ve never had the courage to even watch a movie or television program of what happens when a woman delivers a baby into the world.
Since all three of my children are males none of my grandchildren or three great-grandchildren have ever been born to a woman who was my blood kin. I have loved these women for the children they gave my family but I have never been deeply involved in the pregnancy or the delivery. Selfishly I let their mothers and grandmothers carry that burden of worry and love.
I have eight wonderful granddaughters and I have told the oldest ones for several years that if they don’t get pregnant by the time they are thirty years old I want to bribe them to have some eggs removed and put into freezing storage. It wasn’t a joke, although they always laughed and acted like it was one. I was ready to make the bribe an offer they couldn’t refuse.
Last year, when she was twenty-nine years old, my oldest, tallest, redheaded granddaughter and her husband, Sean Perkins, decided to begin a family. Her name is Ellen Gilchrist Walker Perkins. She is my namesake as well as the oldest granddaughter.
None of this had anything to do with my threats to bribe her to freeze her eggs. Their decision was their deep love for one another and their combined love for other people and animals of all kinds.
I followed the pregnancy from Fayetteville for the first four months, vitally interested in every visit to the doctor, a monumentally wonderful and expert gynecologist, Dr. Hope Ruhe. By the time I met Dr. Ruhe I had heard her advice so many times (secondhand from Ellen) that I thought she was an old friend.
In December I applied for an unpaid leave of absence from my work at the Writing Program in the English Department of the University of Arkansas and drove down to my house on the Mississippi coast to be near New Orleans and my expectant granddaughter.
My house is on a small beach only eighty-nine miles from New Orleans and is in the town where Ellen grew up and lived until she went to New Orleans to college. Her home here was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina so my place has become the spot where the grandchildren who lived here come to see old friends, attend weddings and baby showers and funerals and just to stay near the beach where they played all their lives. Also, it is a good place to get away from the craziness of New Orleans at times like Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest.
The pregnancy went by like a dream. There was morning sickness and fear of ruining her beautiful tall thin body but she kept on with her work of teaching yoga and did exactly what the doctor and the Internet demanded, no alcohol, a careful diet, vitamins and calcium pills, and whatever else was suggested by a daily pregnancy site she watched on her computer. I thought some of the warnings on the site went a bit too far but if I had been having a baby in 2015 I would have been watching it too. In the 1950s I was surrounded by aunts who had given birth, and cousins and friends and a sister-in-law so I got lots of advice, most of it sound but some of it silly. Everyone said if you want the baby to come on out you should run up and down the stairs a lot so I did that and my first child was born a month early coming one foot first, which is why I had to have a Caesarian section at a time when they cut from side to side through the large muscle groups to get to the uterus. After that all the following pregnancies have to be Caesarians or the muscles might tear.
Ellen’s Internet advice had been peer-reviewed and she was dedicated to do this pregnancy and birth to perfection. Her husband was so into it he gained a few pounds and showed other signs of being deep into the process with her.
From the beginning Dr. Ruhe had predicted the birth to be on April 21, a prediction she told me later almost never was this specific.
On April 17 Ellen and Sean drove the ninety miles to my house to spend the weekend and get some sun and sand and attend the funeral of a much-too-young mother of one of Ellen’s close friends. My youngest son, Pierre, and his wife, Natalie, and five-year-old daughter, Josephine, came over also to help watch and wait. The soon-to-be-parents were getting ready, and so was Sunny Louise. Ellen was dilated one centimeter. She had seen Dr. Ruhe that morning who said the baby probably wouldn’t be there until the following week.
Ellen went for short walks, but for the first time in her life didn’t seem to really want to exercise. We tried watching Downton Abbey but the men got bored so we watched the Discovery Channel and saw a fabulous film about the building of the Roman aquaducts in the third century B.C. Pretty amazing creatures, human beings. All the while Sunny was kicking the hell out of Ellen’s liver with her very long and, it turned out, strong legs, and moving nearer and nearer to her destiny with the sun for which she would be named.
At ten that night I wanted to go to sleep but before I went upstairs I said we had to have a plan in case the water broke while we were sleeping. Ellen said she would go five miles away to the Ocean Springs hospital and would not try to make it back to New Orleans but she hated not to have Dr. Ruhe there.
I managed to sleep most of the night, as did most of the party and at ten the next morning Ellen and Sean started driving back to New Orleans.
The excitement was building. The plot was thickening. I went around “praying without ceasing,” advice from the Old Testament which I had been remembering from something I heard on television or read in a book. It is from II Thessalonians but is also somewhere in St. Paul. I first learned it from a book by J. D. Salinger called Franny and Zooey which I have read six or seven times and am going to read again this week. Between “praying without ceasing,” yoga breathing, wishing on stars and being eternally grateful for the strength and health of my beloved grandchild I made it until Sunday afternoon when I called and Ellen told me she was having contractions. The next morning she saw Dr. Ruhe and was told to go home until they became stronger and closer together. It was happening. Om Mani Padme Hmm, I kept repeating and started packing a suitcase and carrying things out to the car. “You don’t have to come yet,” Ellen told me at six o’clock Sunday afternoon, but the only reason I didn’t start driving that moment was that eighty-year-old women really shouldn’t drive at night.
Early the next morning I put gasoline in the automobile, threw clothes in the car, called and got reservations at my favorite New Orleans hotel which is only one block away from Touro Infirmary, the hospital where Ellen was born thirty-one years ago this August first. It was a miracle of another order that they found me a room at the beginning of the first weekend of Jazz Fest. Some dear soul somewhere cancelled their reservations at the exact moment I called, in case you want to call that a coincidence. I’m living too high right now to doubt luck and divine interference if you’ve been good enough and been “praying without ceasing.”
At ten o’clock I was halfway to New Orleans and called Ellen’s brother, my physician grandson, and he told me that Ellen was in a delivery room, had already had an epidural and to drive carefully because the baby wasn’t expected until the afternoon.
I drove eighty but I was extremely careful, hands on the wheel, Bach on the stereo, eyes on the road, being terribly polite to other drivers but moving on.
I got to the hospital at eleven-fifteen, found the room, washed my hands for about fifteen minutes, and went to sit on the couch beside my grandson-in-law.
Ellen was in no pain, a registered nurse as tall as Ellen was in attendance and she was turned on her side waiting and resting before the big show.
I don’t think I had ever been this excited in my life, I kept thinking about the three times my own mother had to drive or fly to where I was having a baby. Her love and devotion and attention were with me. The look on her face when I would see her was the look I was wearing. This was happening to me, now, to my own flesh and blood.
This wasn’t about me in any way. This was Ellen and Sean and Sunny’s date, their production, their magnificence.
In a short time Dr. Ruhe came in and I met and thanked her and she turned to Ellen and said, “Are you ready to get into position and push that baby out?”
“Oh, yes,” Ellen said, and I stood at the back of the room and watched the amazing expertise that the RN and doctor used to position Ellen’s long legs and arms so that she could use her deep muscles to push Sunny out into the light.
It was timeless and amazing. Sean and I sat for awhile on a bench with our backs and arms pressed so tightly against each other we might have been in a rugby scrum.
Finally, at Dr. Ruhe’s urging, first I, and then he moved a little nearer and stood behind the operating table and watched as Ellen pushed and the doctor and nurse coached and praised her and the head would appear about an inch, then go back in, then reappear.
Finally, in one long series of about twenty deeply held breaths and huge efforts on Ellen’s part, the head came all the way out, face up and so quickly you couldn’t count to one the shoulders and long body and longer arms and legs. It was the most amazing thing I have ever witnessed. They handed the long beautiful baby girl to Ellen and she began to croon to her and sing her a song as old as the human race.
Such joy, such love and pleasure all over the room, such never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. As Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, “A memory, never to be bartered against the hungry days.”
I am definitely the luckiest woman in the world and every now and then I have the luck to be in the exactly right place at the exactly right moment with the exactly right people.
So I would like to end this book with what Peter Brook called “[a] clear, accurate, precise reflection from which we cannot tear our eyes away.”
He was praising the work of William Shakespeare, but I believe you always need the bard in times of great joy or sadness.
Read on if you dare. No one will let me tell them about the dazzling biology I witnessed after Sunny Louise was safely snuggled in her mother’s arms.
The only people who can bear to hear this are women who have witnessed it or done it. Attached to the baby was a huge umbilical cord about two inches in diameter and unbelievably complicated and made of materials I’m certain no one could duplicate in a laboratory. Many blood vessels and arteries and layers of clear materials as soft as silk. Dr. Ruhe told me to touch it. It was amazing, so pliable and wildly beautiful. She pulled it out of Ellen’s body, foot after foot of it. Not at all like the small hard tubular thing I had imagined an umbilical cord to be. It should have a better name, something like miraculous life-giving creation. At the end of the long cord was the placenta, large and flat and many layered and softer than the softest thing I have ever touched, huge and heavy and not at all bloody or useless now that Sunny no longer needed it. Indwelling, you might call it, or Miraculous Creation Baby Carrier.
I didn’t want it to be thrown away or discarded. I liked it so much I wanted to keep it in the room for awhile or send to a place where scientists could recycle it into a new medicine that would cure cancer or tuberculosis or depression or meanness or refusal to understand the wonder of the world of living things.
I moved back while Dr. Ruhe carefully stitched up a place where Sunny’s head had torn a few small places in my precious granddaughter’s body. They were very careful, small stitches that were made with a material which the body will reabsorb as soon as the incredible human immune system sews itself back together with the real stuff it makes for that purpose.
What a day, what a long, wonderful, lucky day. I’m glad I waited until I was eighty years old to view this wonder. I might not have been smart enough to appreciate it when I was younger and not as open to miracles or willing to know one when I was allowed to witness it.
Hooray for Everything,
ELLEN LOUISE GILCHRIST
APRIL 25, 2015