Kevin told me later he was sure something was terribly wrong
with the baby. I suppose I should have been scared, but it never crossed my
mind.
And never in my thirty-four-and-a-half weeks of pregnancy did it
cross my mind that I’d have a premature baby. When my water broke, I figured it
was just one more weird aspect of my baby-factory physique and that Tom/Emily
would still appear close to Christmas. First babies were usually late, right?
My mother’s and two older sisters’ babies had been.
That very morning I had heard a baby being born, in a room near the room where I was waiting for my obstetrician. While she, at last, was examining me with the stethoscope, she asked me several times if I was feeling contractions "yet." How odd that she should be so confused, I thought. My due date is nearly six weeks away. She let me loose, and I visited friends, did some errands, and by 6 p.m. I was walking from the A train into my apartment at Broadway and 190th Street. I had to pee, of course ...
It was a Friday night, the eve of my second Lamaze class. We were to
drive to Providence after it, to my baby shower at my sister Joyce’s. But
there was all this water! Too much water! What do I do? “Joyce!” My sister, a pediatrician
and pregnant herself, could advise me. “Hmm, looks like no baby shower for you
this weekend! Call your doctor. Call Kevin!”
Kevin, at NYU, the opposite end of Manhattan, was working in a
school recording studio on the Fairlight. “Oh, Ellen, I just got set up.” I tried reasoning
with myself—labor takes a long time. I’ll
tell him he can finish up, then come take me to the hospital. “Come. Home. Now.” I gasped. “Call the
doctor,” he said.
I felt a tightness in my back, as though my period was coming.
(My period?) I had lent my my book on childbearing to my friend Cal, who was also pregnant with her first. “Cal! Tell me how to breathe!”
Her husband put me on a conference call with Cal’s sister—she was
pregnant too and she’d know how to breathe. “Ellen! Call your doctor!” urged
Cal.
My own doctor was not on call, an unfamiliar member of his group
was. “Well, call me back when the contractions are six minutes apart,” he
yawned. I was on my hands and knees huffing when Kevin arrived at about 7:15 p.m.
Fordham Road, the Bronx. Not a pretty neighborhood, even without
construction barriers that closed lanes and clogged traffic. On this temperate
Friday evening the neighborhood was clogged with shoppers, teenagers, fast
food, slow cabs—and scared Kevin.
“Hold my hand!” He reached for me between the two bucket seats
of our Jetta. I was lying across the back seat while a giant rolling pin tried
to flatten my doughy body into pie crust. “I ... can’t!” In that 40-minute trip
to Albert Einstein Hospital there may have been 30 seconds when I wasn’t
feeling a contraction.
I couldn’t see too well, but there was a wheelchair ready to
lurch into. “When’s your due date?” asked the admitting nurse. “12/17,” I said,
then wondered why I didn’t just say December like a normal person.
In the delivery room Kevin was surprised at me for just dropping
my clothes on the bathroom floor when I changed. “I want to throw up,” I told him
and the nurse. “You must be six centimeters dilated,” the nurse responded.
Kevin went to change into scrubs. “Oh, Baby!” I shouted. “Give me something for
the pain!”
“Too late,” they said, as I was hefted, groaning, onto a gurney.
“Can I push now?” I was in the labor room; no one said No, don’t push, so—once,
twice—“It’s a boy!” The boy cried. The boy peed. “Well, at least two things are
working,” said Kevin, awestruck.
“Thomas Edward. That was so quick!” I repeated, dazed, relieved.
Someone was shouting, “You forgot to call me! You forgot to call
me!” It was the sleepy obstetrician. A resident had delivered the baby; we ignored
the intruder.
“He’s got the chin!” crowed Kevin. The Cosgrove family’s dimpled
chin. “Thomas Edward,” I sighed. “That was so quick! I want my mother.”
Five pounds, one and a half ounces. “I have a Son,” breathed Kevin.
A champion, a star. It was 9:41 p.m.
