She's here at last! We are happy happy to announce the long awaited arrival of the third Lovespy, Isabella Mariposa Higginbotham (Bella for short) who was born yesterday, September 29 at 2:16 p.m. She weighed 6 lbs, 10 oz. and was
19 3/4 inches long. She's a blondie and is perfect and beautiful. Mom is recovering nicely after her ALL NATURAL childbirth! (She is a superhero.) Her water broke at 6:20 a.m. and labor began immediately thereafter, so almost 8 hours exactly.
Julie: "That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life."
Rob: "What was the second hardest thing?"
Julie: "There is no second hardest thing."
Well, so everything else is obviously on hold for a bit. Oh, check the links for more pictures of Bella.
What can I share about new fatherhood? Sharing the natural childbirth experience with Julie gave me a new picture of our place here on earth, what with the bloody mixture of pain, strength, prayer, sweat, screams and panting and, from our midwife Margaret and me, encouragement, teamwork and faith, and at last, birth: Bella, half desperate gasp of the end of such effort, half startled miracle of strange new life. Everything strange at first, her color, her alien cord, her skull folded to a tepee point to allow her head to pass through the birth canal, and everything of course strange to her, the overwhelming revelation of sight, like a thunderclap after a lifetime of silence, and with that raw new smells and sounds newly unmuffled.
Bella one minute old:
She came out quickly at the end, too quickly for me to don gloves to catch her as planned, so Margaret did that expertly, then handed her to me to cut the cord. We then laid her on her mother's chest to catch her first breath. Julie and I had read parts of "Birth Without violence" by Frederick Leboyer, a French obstretrician who delivered over a thousand babies without episiotomies or slapping the infants to make them cry or encouraging them to cry at all. The book recommended that the baby should be immediately placed on its mother's belly until it begins breathing on its own. Well, Bella had some circulation problems from a rather rough delivery, and her lungs were still full of fluid, so after a few moments, we took her from Julie's belly and moved her to a heated table to suction fluid from her nostrils and throat. She began to cry, but while the attending nurse seemed to think that the goal, I had decided after reading that book that crying was never to be a goal in Bella's life. As soon as Bella made it clear that she was breathing, I said to her what I had said a hundred times to her in the womb: "Bella, it's your daddy. Da-da. Can you say da-da?" and she stopped crying immediately and looked over at me! I picked her up and brought her back to her momma and we began to try to get her to nurse.
Her hands and feet were blue and cold from birth, and we cuddled her and warmed them with our hands, then wrapped her in a blanket. We had requested a "no separation" birth plan, so when it was time to weigh her and check her vital signs (and get a heel stick to test her blood sugar) I went with her. Anytime she began to cry, I would talk to her and hold her tiny soft hand which would grip me fiercely. And she would calm down. Even the heel stick didn't bother her much (like a mosquito bite after the car-wreck of birth, I guess!) The worst part was when the nurse put a little t-shirt on her. Her arms had to be caught and the rough fabric scraped over them. I hadn't thought enough to refuse it, so helped get it on quickly and then quickly soothed Bella back to calm.
And there it was, holding this little scared creature, so dependent and helpless, I caught the essence of fatherhood: that I was uniquely needed and gifted to help a very real human being, my daughter, Bella, and that I was called to do so for the rest of my life, and at that challenge my heart leapt up, making it clear that nothing would keep me from that task. I looked at her tiny, open-eyed face, held her close enough to see me, and looked at her. She looked back. I looked and looked at her. And loved her.
We're tied to this earth by our senses, but beyond the muddling around of sightsoundsmell, like shaded, sometimes hard-to-find windows hidden above us, lies an ordered world of faith, ready to make sense of even the most fractal-twisted events of our life. We war mostly not between good and evil, but between faith and the absurd. The promise of this idea called "Bella" and the many absurdities of childbirth, like looking for a hairbrush and a parking spot while battling a race to start a strep B antibiotic i.v. within 4 hours of delivery to ensure Bella's safety. Then the shocking hurdle of hot red pain, and more of it than expected, coupled with Julie's exhaution because she didn't want to take a sleeping pill the night before because she was afraid of running out of them and wanted to save them to make sure she had enough rest when she went into labor.
But when she ran out of strength, Margaret and I looked at her at said "You can do this!" When she saw the pains to be more than she had thought, we prayed to Jesus for strength, asked for the Holy Spirit to come and strengthen her. And she made it through one more contraction, one more push. And I look back through the absurdities of my life, my teenaged thrash-metal band days, my twenties of recovery and searching and finding the truth in Jesus Christ, and now the battling between calling and economics, between rent and health insurance and food and trying to do what I believe God is telling me to do, and at this moment I just see myself holding Bella in my arms, her face calm, her eyes open, her whole body and spirit saying to me one thing:
I trust you.
