Memories

(Reminiscing about the delivery of best girlfriend’s first baby. )

    It’s been a month and a few days since Isa gave birth to Christopher-Greg Rubenstein-Roberts. And still I can’t get my head around that name. What on earth were they thinking? I mean two lots of hyphens, God, how pretentious! Worse still, Greg has reduced “my boy’s” name to CG – sounds more like crop fertilizer than a baby boy!

    Cripes, what a performance the birth was though. It sure upstaged the day when barely eight weeks preggo, with no visible protrusion, best girlfriend turned up at the Denver Gay Men’s Chorus spring fundraiser wearing an attention grabbing, billowy maternity ensemble. Hello! She might as well have stuck a Post-it to her forehead saying something along lines of Look at me everyone I’m pregnant!

    Oh, oh and then a few months later in June, she organized a surprise fortieth birthday party for me, but on the summer solstice. A whole week before my actual birthday! She did that just so she could use my party as an excuse to do her woo-woo solstice dance howling-at-the-moon thing, on the pretense that she was calling in the goddess of birthdays (who also happens to be the deity of pregnancy) especially for me.

    Yeah right!

    Those showy incidents aside, the real drama happened in the birthing room.

    Due to Isa’s forty-three year-old bod, a cesarean delivery was scheduled, but best girlfriend went into labor shortly after I – at Isa’s side as the anxiety-ridden stand-in doula – talked myself into a total state and then passed out from hyperventilating. Seeing me out cold caused Isa to panic, which triggered abnormal fetal heart rate activity, which prompted an emergency C-section then and there, with me slumped in an armchair in the corner.

    Poor girlfriend. There she was about to deliver junior while the handyman, father-to-be had had to dash off to work in response to a frozen pipe and flooded basement maintenance emergency. But not before calling me, the loyal and maternal (though at Isa’s birthing bed, I seriously questioned that Cancer-Sun trait) friend who naively volunteered to by “help out” if, when the time came, they should need support.

    Did I say naively? I should have said “stupidly” because I had no idea what I’d be getting into “helping out. ”Pre-hospital, post-hospital help, I was prepared to manage things along the lines of cooking and dropping off a meal or two, running an errand or few. Stuff like that is doable for a squeamish type like me. The bit in between the pre-and the-post is not exactly what I’d bargained for. It’s um … it’s very, well … intimate.

    Isa’s sudden-onset contractions caused her to flip-flop between making wild-animal noises and then flashing enormously rotund bare-body bits at me. Not on purpose though – it’s just when she rolled around in discomfort, her maternity robe got all caught up under her Willendorf-like bosoms. I had to totally disregard our Decorum at All Times pact. No point insisting that she refrain from sniffing, spitting, farting, peeing or in any way behaving uncouth à la jock-like since it was apparent that that was all she was capable of doing.

    Even though I felt sorry for Isa that Greg responded to a work call when his eagerly awaited baby was on the verge of emerging, I actually felt more sorry that she was relying on me as her stand-in doula. It was all too obvious my presence at her birthing bed was all about the verification of me as an incompetent weenie.

    Up until that day, Isa’s pregnancy had been a part of my life in as much as it was actively growing over there in Isa’s body and thus very separate from me. I liked that. It meant I could be objective, versus the gooey romantic that I tend to be. I could observe it up close – as in experience Isa’s pregnancy vicariously, but from a distance – as in be thankful that it wasn’t me dealing with the stretch marks, gastric reflux, then later the feeling of being about to burst and the subsequent sleeplessness.

    Too much detail can be a deterrent and over the months before the birth, Isa had freely volunteered waaay too much to the degree that I’d concluded, loudly and directly, “A baby is definitely not in the stars for me! ”

    But then in contrast to her ballooning bod, and the icky ramifications and my fear and loathing of such, was the fun bit. Boy oh beaut, the couple October Saturdays in her eighth month we spent shopping for baby clothes and nursery items, I attempted to commandeer those events. As the former Nordstrom personal shopper with a flair for both style and price, it was only sensible that Isa, as the former computer programmer and daggy geek, acquiesce and let me take charge and pick where to purchase the baby’s gear.

    Naturally, our first port-of-call was my online second-hand kids clothing store LostNowFound. com. However, Isa said she’d prefer new over used for her boy. I can understand that. I might have sold it, but I wouldn’t have bought it. But lots of parents did.

    And then I really got on her goat suggesting we go to K-Mart. She didn’t laugh. I think she’s sick of me teasing her about the reluctance of good Jewish girls to shop at America’s biggest discount corporate stronghold. So then I suggested Wal-Mart, but that fell flat too.

    In the end I acquiesced and let her pick where she wanted to shop. My rational: an adult tantie involving short and stocky Isa Rubenstein throwing around an extra fifty pounds, is not a pretty sight.

    I also let her pick where to eat when we punctuated our shopping with a best-girlfriend lunch, copious cuppas, and lots of chatting about the joys of becoming a mum. The discussion that sticks in my mind is the one when Isa got all misty-eyed while suggesting how much fun it would be if I had a baby too.

    “We could be moms together,” she’d said.

    “Oooh yes that would be fun. ” I’d said. “Hmm, Nikov and me and baby makes three. ”

    That comment had been fed by the fact that my uber-euro honey and I had by then been dating for about six months. Nikov, who never failed to call me Tildy my beauty my love, was undeniably head-over-heels for me, which meant by my next birthday, if I so chose, I too could be about to pop.

    But Isa grimacing while massaging the varicosities in her legs and maneuvering her donut cushion under her hemorrhoid-inflamed bum had caused me to plummet out of Cloud Romantic back to Ground Reality.

    “On second thoughts, that’d mean I’d have to be pregnant,” I’d said.

    Not missing a beat, Isa slammed me with, “Human see-saw Til, that’s what you are. Obviously you’re still conflicted about being a mom. Listen, you gotta make up your mind soon. Think haywire hormones now you’re forty! ”

    Girlfriends! Grrrrr, they can be so in your face with the obvious.

    But after what happened in the birthing room, it was easy to cut Isa some slack.

    Gawd, I was so grateful that one of the attending labor and delivery nurses revived me from my hyperventilated fainting spell. I really did feel awful for best girlfriend, falling face down on her bed like I did, and then slumping to the floor with a thud, apparently.

    The nurse who revived me insisted I take a heavy sedative, wrap myself in a blanket and sit in an armchair in the corner and “not move or say diddly-squat. ”I know she was concerned that if I had a repeat panic episode it might cause Isa, and thus CG, further unnecessary upset.

    Apparently Greg appeared precisely as Isa’s pubic line was being incised and immediately passed out as well. Net result, he and I shared adjoining corners, recliners and matching baby-blue birthing-room throws.

    By the time we were fully conscious and functioning, Isa’s parts and pieces were stapled back together and she was nursing successfully and not inclined to indulge Greg, or me, in talk about our wellbeing. Rather, she scowled disapprovingly at the both of us and then re-engaged with her gorgeous new boy, whose blotchy pink face nuzzled into his mummy’s boob.

    Yes, it was a scene of total bliss. So blissful, I wasn’t sure why I had sobbed with greater heaving action than Greg, whose quietly shed tears streaked his grubby worker’s face as he stood gazing in awe at his two babes.

    I put it down to the fact that birth is an emotional experience, like death.

    Birth and death, it’s big stuff and warrants a full on howl.

    But for me there was more to it than a normal, emotionally charged response to new life.

    I’d lost the undivided attention of my best girlfriend to motherhood …