How time does fly!  Twenty-four years ago on August 7th, I was giving birth to my first baby.  I was 23 years old and dumber than a bag of bricks.  I knew as much about giving birth and taking care of a baby as I did about designing the next space shuttle.  And I was alone.

The husband was in the Navy and he was stationed in Japan at the time.  I stayed home to have the baby thinking that I’d have more of a “support system”.  Well – not so much.  Not with MY family anyway.  But that’s a whole different post for a whole different day.  Lets just say that my sister (my roommate at the time) bolted to her boyfriend’s house the first time she heard the baby cry.  And my mom just dropped me off at the door and said, “See ya!”

I remember it all like it was just a few weeks ago, not 24 years ago.  That’s the crazy part!  I distinctly remember waking up at 3:00 in the morning with a feeling like I needed to go potty (number 2), but when I went, there was nothing.  The feeling went away.  Ten minutes later. . . same thing.  Repeat.  Now remember when I said I was dumb?  Yeah, that’s where it kicks in.  I went through this routine for about an hour before I realized that this was a recurring theme.  Duh! 

Well, I finally realized that that “feeling” was labor and I thought, “Wow, labor pains don’t hurt as much as I thought they would.”  Again – that dumb factor.  As the day went on and the labor pains progressed, I ATE those words and then some.  I had ever-so-naively said that I was going to have a “natural birth” – no drugs for me.  Have I mentioned how dumb I was?  Yeah – you believe me now, don’t you?   Cuz along about hour eight, I was wantin’ me some drugs in a big way.  Forget this “natural birth” crap!  But NOOOOOOOO, my doctor wouldn’t give me drugs.  I was fully dialated, but I couldn’t get the baby’s head down and he said if I had drugs that I’d surely not be able to push properly.  Well, I pushed and pushed and pushed for three more hours.  Just three hours of pushing and breathing and crying (I cry alot when I’m in pain.  I don’t cuss people out.  I don’t hit anybody.  I don’t yell.  No.  I cry.  A lot.).  And all I got for all that pushing was a big fat nothing.  This baby’s head wasn’t budging.

So – bring in the salad spoons!  As soon as I saw the forceps, I thought of Bill Cosby’s skit about his wife giving birth and the salad spoons.  Funny the things that go through your head at a time like that.  Anyway, the doctor FINALLY let me have the epidural that I’d been begging for since he was going in with the biggest salad spoons I’d ever seen.  And it was bliss.  Aaahhh.  The relief.  Finally I could stop crying.

But I’m here to tell you right now. . . when a baby’s head doesn’t want to come out the “natural” way, there’s a REASON!  He had a head the size of a watermelon. . . and he TORE his way out – ALL THE WAY OUT.  That child should have SO been a C-section baby.  But no – I get the oldest, most old-fashioned, back-woods, hick doctor on the planet who thought I should “suck it up”.  Plus, you’ve got to take into account that I was in Mississippi twenty-four years ago.  It was a different planet altogether.

My baby boy was born weighing in at 8lbs 2oz. and 18 inches long.  Yeah, he was a short baby and 8lbs 2oz. is a good size, so you’d think that he was a chunky baby.  No.  His body was actually very tiny.  I’d swear that at least 6lbs was just his head.  I joke him to this day telling him that his head was the size it is now when he was born. . . that he just finally grew into it.

His head was so gynormous that the doctor thought he had Down Syndrome.  That coupled with the fact that he had and still has a very distinct palm print that apparently only people with Down Syndrome have.  Plus his beady little eyes that he got from his dad.  Add all that together and the doctor was testing for Down Syndrome.  I just sat there absorbing all this news nodding.  I didn’t freak out or react all crazy-like.  I just thought, “Well, we’ll just wait for the test results.”  I was very calm.

A couple of weeks later when the test results came back – negative – the doctor said how relieved he was.  He said, “It didn’t look like you were going to accept it.”  I looked at him puzzled and asked why he would say that, and he said, “You didn’t react at all.”  I told him flatly, “I wasn’t going to love him any less.”

Back to the day he was born – after they sewed me up and cleaned him up, they brought him to my room and asked if I wanted to hold him.  I flatly said, “No.”  The totally stunned nurse all but shouted at me, “Why not?”  I (remember dumb as bricks)  said, ”I don’t know HOW.”  I was scared to death to hold him.  I’d never held a baby before.  I’d never babysat or even been around a baby EVER.  And he was so tiny that I thought I’d break him or something.  So, relieved, the nurse showed me how to hold my arms and she placed him there.  I sat very still and very stiff, afraid to move.  After awhile, I said, “You can have him back now.”  Still stiff as a board.  (Don’t worry.  I eventually got the hang of it.)

I think back to that day and how absolutely terrified I was and wonder how I turned out to be a mom who wanted ten babies (But only if I didn’t have to be pregnant to do it – I hated being pregnant).  I LOVE babies!  They’re just so precious.  So needless to say, by the time my second came along, I was an old pro.

But my poor oldest had to suffer through my learning curve.  Or was that me that suffered.  I mean, I’M the one that got pee’d on three times while trying to change his first diaper.  I was READING the directions on the back of the Huggies diaper bag trying to figure out the front from the back and the inside from the out.  (When I tell that story, people always ask, “There are directions on the bag?”  Yes, there are.  For dumbells like me.)  So when he made it to one month old, I wanted to write in the sky that I’d kept him alive for a whole month.  I was so proud.  At that point, I figured that he was going to be alright.

And he was. . . and is.  My baby just graduated from college.  He finished his last semester just this past week.  He’s all grown up.  But he’s still my baby. . . and he knows it.

See!  Same size head.  At least he stopped sucking his thumb.

Happy Birthday Baby!