My Personal Easter Story
On Easter Sunday, 50 years ago, I gave birth. But nothing about it happened as expected.
This might sound strange, but I never really expected to give birth to any children.
I don’t know why. I didn’t expect to get married either. Didn’t anticipate it. Didn’t plan for it or anything. But I did get married, and after three years of marriage, I did get pregnant. And the whole time, I felt as if it was happening to someone else. Because I knew nothing about being a mother or having a baby.
An only child who’d been adopted at 3 months, I had no one in my life to prepare me for motherhood. Sure, I’d done some babysitting. But not because I enjoyed it. I really never was (and I’m still not) the kind of person who runs over to greet the new baby. My policy was more along the lines of, “I’ll take care of you if I have to, but I really won’t get involved in any way.”
On the other hand, I loved working with teens. Les and I had even talked about adopting a family with three or four older kids.
Our unexpected journey started on a drive back to Regina from a visit to British Columbia, where my husband’s older brother and his family lived.
We’d eaten at a sea-food restaurant the night before, and I’d had bouillabaisse for the first (and last) time. As we were going through the mountains, I was trying not to throw up every few minutes. I figured I had food-poisoning. I still think about that drive every time I hear that someone is pregnant.
Anyway, a few weeks later, when I was still feeling a bit queasy, my doctor told me it hadn’t been food poisoning.
So I got a couple of books from the library and before too long, we started to get a room ready in the three-story older house we’d bought a couple of years before.
When I think about it now, it seems crazy, but Les got some of the wood from the old barn on his parents’ farm, and we put it on the walls of the baby’s room. We got a dresser that had been his dad’s when he was young. After I’d made some pregnancy tops, I made curtains, covered an old laundry hamper to match, and made a change table from an old table we found at a garage sale. We decorated the walls with some pictures I’d made plus one that had been my paternal grandmother’s. We did buy a new crib and sheets, a music-box mobile for the crib, and some clothes (neither pink or blue), and we were given baby clothes and toys by our family and friends.
With ten days left until my due date in later April, the only thing left to do was to put bright wallpaper in the closet and get ready to have the baby. But very early on April 17th, the Saturday morning after Good Friday, a contraction woke me up. But that wasn’t all. I yelled for Les to get up. “I don’t think we’re going to get the baby’s room finished today,” I said.
“Why not?”
“My water broke.”
So at 5:00 a.m. that Saturday morning, we went to the hospital. In those days, when your water broke, they were deathly afraid of infection. I was basically told to “Get onto that bed and stay there!” So I got on a narrow “bed” (a generous word because it was so hard!), where I endured contractions (and wasn’t even supposed to get off to go to the bathroom!) for the next 35 hours. I went to the bathroom once, and was told not to do that again. I so much wanted to tell them to try using a bedpan when you have an extra fifty pounds, an enormous stomach, back pain plus very painful contractions! They would barely let me sit up, never mind walk around.
No, that wasn’t a misprint. In total, I was in labour for thirty-five. Long. Hours.
The doctor I’d been seeing was away for the weekend, so I was told that her partner, who was Chief of Obstetrics, would look after me. I saw him for a few minutes and he seemed to think everything was fine. He said he’d see me later in the day.
But it actually wasn’t fine.
Normally, contractions do something besides hurt. They create an opening for the baby. We later learned that my contractions, while painful, weren’t quite doing the job. And because it was Easter weekend, the resident didn’t want to bother the doctor too early. So there I was—in pain and helpless.
Les, who stayed by my side the whole time, felt helpless. It was his first baby, too. All I had by way of information was what I’d picked up from stories I’d heard and what I could find at the library, which wasn’t much. (What To Expect When You’re Expecting wasn’t published until 1984!) We’d attended some Lamaze classes, which weren’t that helpful as it turned out.
We had no mid-wife, no doula, not even a parent or a friend to tell us what to do. And while the resident and nurses weren’t unkind, they also weren’t all that helpful. I expect they were short-staffed because it was Easter weekend. Plus, we later found out that the resident who was in charge was very likely on his first week in obstetrics.
Saturday dragged by.
Any enthusiasm we’d begun with had long ago evaporated. How much longer would this go on? Les talked to someone from our church and they said they were praying for us. That made me feel a bit better. I’d started a prayer chain in the small group I’d been leading for a few years and we’d had some wonderful answers to prayer.
I was eventually given something for the pain, but it just made me sleepy, which meant I was less able to control my breathing, and the contractions hurt as much, if not more. My back was killing me. I begged to get up and was told I was better not to. Les rubbed my back, but it didn’t do much.
As Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, I began to worry. I knew women had died in the past because of difficulty in childbirth. But this was 1976. Could it still happen? I prayed, but said nothing to Les. He was as exhausted as me, and I didn’t want to worry him.
We somehow got through the long night, me on the bed, Les on the chair beside me. In the morning when a nurse came in to wash my face, I urged Les to go and get some breakfast and rest for a bit. Around 10:00 a.m., he left the room. The nurse left, too.
After a few minutes, I felt so alone.
I was used to doing things. Seeing the big picture. Taking action. But I was totally lost in this world, with no idea what to do. And no one else seemed to be worried that this had gone on so long, or to even ask if I had any questions. Would my baby survive? Would I?
Suddenly, I felt another presence in the room. A warmth came into my body. The pain remained, but I felt as if God was holding me in his hands. And in my mind, I heard him say that he understood. That he knew what it was like to lose a child.
It hit me that this was Easter Sunday—the day Christ rose from the dead.
And I suddenly knew that if God loved me enough to send his son to die for me, I could trust him now. I’d known God loved me since I was three or four years old, and I knew I could trust him no matter what happened. I felt peace flow through me. The pain was still there, but my fears were gone. I wasn’t in the resident’s hands, or the doctor’s, but God’s.
Not long after that, Les came in to tell me my obstetrician was on his way. Apparently, Les had told the reluctant resident that unless he called my doctor immediately, even though it was interrupting him on a long weekend, Les was going to call him. That finally made him act.
Once my doctor arrived, things happened.
The first thing the obstetrician did was to actually yell at Les for not insisting they call him sooner. I can’t imagine what he said to the resident!
After checking me and discovering that the contractions weren’t getting me dilated fast enough, he gave me something to make the contractions more effective.
Some time after three pm, I was deemed ready to go to the delivery room.
By then, I was desperate to push that baby out!
But as we headed for the delivery room, the doctor warned me I might need a Cesarean section and, just in case, I shouldn’t push.
You’ve got to be kidding, right? It took every bit of willpower I had left to try to keep from pushing. I was terrified that I would hurt the baby, but it was so hard. All I could do was ask God to look after us both.
They took me to an X-ray room, and I had to stand up so they could take an X-ray. As I recall, they had to hold me, and that was probably the worst moment of the whole thing. I was trying not to breathe, not to push, and not to move while desperately wanting to do all three.
As it turned out, by the time they got me into the delivery room, before he even got the results of the X-ray, the doctor had decided a Cesarean section was needed.
The only problem was, there wasn’t an anesthesiologist in the immediate area and they’d had to call one from another part of the hospital. The doctor got testy again, and said, “If you people hadn’t voted for this government, we wouldn’t have a shortage of anesthesiologists!”
To which Les responded, “Well, I didn’t vote for them!”
A few minutes later, the doctor sent my weary husband out of the room. He told me he’d make one attempt with forceps and do a C-section if that didn’t work.
The last thing I remember was a gentle male voice near my head (the anesthesiologist, who had just arrived) saying, “I think you’ve had enough.”
I said, “Me, too,” and then I was out.
I woke up hours later, alone, in a private room.
After a while, a nurse came in with something for me to eat. She didn’t mention the baby and I was too afraid to ask.
Half an hour later, another nurse came in. “Would you like to see your baby?” she asked.
I nodded, afraid to speak.
She brought me an adorable little bright-eyed boy with a bump on his head where he’d apparently been trying to get through a tight opening that was never going to be big enough.
I think I asked if Les was there, but the nurse didn’t know.
I later found out that when the doctor sent him out of the delivery room, Les had no idea how long it would be. Exhausted, and with no one to tell him what he should do, he drove home and immediately fell asleep on the couch. He found out he had a son when one of our friends, who had first called the hospital, phoned to congratulate him and woke him up.
Later, when I told Les that I had felt God holding me in his arms, he told me that when he’d driven home, groggy from a day and a half without sleep, he nearly had an accident that definitely would have been his fault. Strangely, after the accident had been avoided, he felt peace. He realized that if he was in God’s hands in that traffic incident, he could trust God with me and our baby. After the short trip home, he immediately fell asleep until our friend’s call, and was able to come back to the hospital, feeling refreshed, not long after I had been given our baby.
My parents arrived later Sunday evening, but I didn’t see them until Monday morning. They’d been extremely worried because the birth was taking so long and had decided not to wait any longer to drive the four hours from Brandon to Regina.
Les’s parents came on Monday and his mom finished putting the wallpaper in the closet.
A few days later, my doctor told me that unless my next baby was the size of a peanut, if I got pregnant again I’d be having another C-section. (I did—three more times!)
I also learned that my original doctor had noted that I might need a C-section. It might have been nice if she’d mentioned it to someone. Me, for example. No, I didn’t go back to her. I stayed with the one I trusted and the next two births were a breeze compared to the first. (We moved after that and I had a different doctor for the fourth one. That’s a whole ‘nother story).
I also discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that having my own baby was a lot different from looking after someone else’s. And I think I became a pretty good mother and, later, grandmother.
Every April since that 1976, I’ve celebrated, not only the birth of my first son, but also the continuation of my trust that the God who gave his Son for us on a long-ago Easter weekend, and who held my son’s and my lives in his hands on another Easter, still holds me and my family in his hands each day.