It's 5:30, and I am at the hospital. It looks new, with soft lighting, quiet halls, and a waterfall streaming down marble in the main lobby. The rest of my close family was in a nook hidden in the side of the third floor, watching a detective drama. In the filmed world the main character's teenage daughter had been kidnapped, and he was doing everything money and energy could to get her safely back. I did not blame them; we had been waiting since very early that morning, and distractions were becoming necessary. The drama drew us in, the distraction well written and well acted, but I decided I had enough drama in my life right then and did not need to augment it by TV. I walked into an adjacent hallway, across from my sister's room, and leaned against the wall.
It was then that I started to hear the sounds the TV had masked. First were irregular sounds like large plastic tubes being dragged over something hard. My Mom explained "It's the baby moving; the microphone is for his heartbeat, and has to be very sensitive, so every time he moves it sounds like that." There were occasional gasps from my sister, sounds that made me uneasy, but no other sounds. Time went on, and on, and on, till I walked over for glimpses of the TV's story, but always returned to the hallway to listen to the story I was waiting for. It got closer to eight, and the noises got louder, my sister twice yelling in pain. I was shaken; I had not heard her cry in pain before. I heard her once yelling "I don't have anything left!" I knew childbirth was painful, but I had hoped it was exaggerated, that the stories I had heard were the exception. Listening to my sister, I knew that wasn't so. I prayed. I thought again of the curse in Genesis; I thought of one of the many prices of sin. I do not know if I went white, listening to her, but I prayed for her, for her child, for her husband, for a quick birth. It had been eighteen hours now since this story's climax began.
Nurses had been coming in and out, in and out, always pausing for a second to gather hand sanitizer from a dispenser beside the door. Each one, I watched but said nothing. Each one had a job to do; someone would tell us if there was anything important. None did. In and out, in and out, with their muffled voices coming through the door, urgency in their actions. But wait, now one came out. She told us she could see the crown of our baby's head, my sister's child. Smiling, she told us he had a lot of hair. My mother and sisters joined me in the hallway, waiting with me, my dad sitting back in the nook, reading but smiling. The baby was coming.
Time still went on. We waited and waited, staying in the hall. I thought of a chapter I read in a James Herriot book, where he oversaw two births, one birth in a cow barn, where it was only of interest to him and the cow mother, how no one else had time to watch the birth of a new life, and then after, on a small farm, where the calf's birth was the center of the whole family, even of the farm's dog. He felt the second showed the miracle of what a birth was supposed to be. I knew it would be that miracle for our family. All of us had waited for it for months, keeping in touch every week with my sister, watching her grow, listening as she learned what was happening the baby inside her. We still waited. Most of the nurses who came in and out started to give us uncertain looks; I imagined them wondering if they would have to hold us out of the room when the baby was fully out. We stayed quiet and did not move. Nurse came out, and went back in. They went to the computer at the reception desk three doors down; they came back. They went to the staff room across the hall from my sisters room; they came back out without anything. They were all in the room when we heard the baby cry for the first time; he was born at 8:46.
We waited still. It seemed an hour before they said we could come in. They'd had to clean up the blood (I'd seen a few drops beneath the span of the opening door), stitch up my sister, clean the baby, and try to breastfeed. Mama went in before any of us, helping my sister with the amazing, vast knowledge a mother of six. They gave us details--7 lbs, 5 oz, and 21 inches long. We still waited, waiting till my sister and nephew were clean, the room back to hospital standards, and everything in its place. Then we were allowed in.
He was so tiny. Most babies are born with fat; he was born with length. His feet were long, his hands reached to his knees, his head the size of his stomach, his dark hair completely covering his head. He was swaddled in two blankets, his chin a deeply defined dent in the midst of baby fat on the only place he had it, his head; his hawk nose had white bumps all over it, and his eyes were completely black and fully open.
We got to hold him then. My mother held him first, then another of my sisters, and I witnessed another miracle, another of my sisters crying in front of the family, even if she laughed it off. She had closed herself off from us for the most part, but here was something she openly loved. I sat by the tired, light-headed new mother, who laid back with her eyes closed, and I watched my family while we welcomed this new member.
When it was my turn to hold him, I regarded him with awe. I had not held a baby only a few hours old before, and I realized, holding him, that I was holding the beginning of eighty years. Eighty years can hold anything from wars to the beginning of a nation; here was an entire lifetime where nothing was defined, not even a personality. It is possible to hold an undefined being and love him wholeheartedly. What I held was a person, beyond all doubt, but I knew I could be holding a great warrior for God, a quiet, unnoticed man, a missionary, a plumber, an athlete, and I did not know it. God had already written this boy's story, and I was holding the beginning. Later, as I wrote a friend of his birth, and spoke of holding eighty years in my arms, I realized that his place of birth defined that number, for my friend lives in Cambodia, and that is not the average life span there. But he is here, in America, and he was amazing to hold, to love, and to wonder about and pray for. God willing, he will have a childhood, a life of God's glory, an ever-loving family, and God gave me to see, to even hold, the beginning of his story.
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