We have Arrived!!

Okay, so this is totally cool.

Connor Young Zook arrived at 1pm February 28th, 2007. He was 9 lbs and .06 oz, 20 and ½ inches. He was a week late, he was a moose and it took a surgical team of seven to wrassle him out of my athletically tightened abdomen. I didn’t want the C-section, and nearly cried as I struggled to put on the traditional backless gown of the feckless hospital patient. I nearly cried when my team of experts poked an oxygen tube up my nose and bent me double to do the epidural. I nearly lost my calm, patient, well-trained and zen-breathing composure when I realized that not only couldn’t I wiggle my toes, I couldn’t feel my toes and was at that moment unable to fathom in any abstract way a conception of toes that might belong to me. There was also the muscle-memory thing that had me feeling all along that I had my legs and feet cocked upwards like a pornographic frog the whole time. Then there was the tugging. With no feeling from the chest down, the only sensation of being gutted like a Final Fantasy bad guy was a weird tugging and some bouncing. I got a little too warm and a little nauseous and wondered how I’d throw up in my compromised position (barfing pornographic frog).

Dan came in swathed to the eyeballs in surgical stuff and asked “Come here often?” I think I muttered something lame like “not if I can help it.” He held my hand and we made googoo eyes at each other until he looked over the partition and asked “Hey, is that the placenta?” Oh, I do love my husband. My son was freed, born, so to speak, while the staff made comments about the Doc having to wrestle him out, that he was giving her a hard time, and asking whether Dan had brought a tricycle to the hospital. Funny people, these medical types. But then there was that moment when Connor, now washed and wrapped, was brought to me for inspection.
And this is the nearly inarticulable. I’m not sure what I expected – probably some cross between Mowgli, Damien and the kind of lank-haired, suntanned, knee-less denimed ragamuffins I ran with as a kid. The infant I was shown, however, was perfect, with a smattering of auburn hair and slate-blue baby eyes as endless as a wish. I touched him – I couldn’t hold him yet because I wasn’t done being stitched up, but I petted him a little. Connor, I thought, this is Connor, though it seemed an imposition, applying a name to the creature with those eyes. They finished the stitching while all I could do was look for the infant. I was wheeled into Recovery and he was brought to me. Only then did I focus on what was going on in the room.

I spent the night stoned on Fentanyl and petting him. He doesn’t look like an angel or a Botticelli cupid or an elfin prince or any of that crap: he looks like a baby. But he’s MY baby. Some overly sentimental types call this adoration like being in love. I’d say that’s more metonymy than metaphor. Being in love is the closest approximation because it, too, is the common, everyday experience that is magnificent enough to be held responsible for 97% of the song lyrics and 98% of the world’s literature because everyone who has been in love, eventually gets to have their OWN being-in-love that drives their understanding of that emotion. Having a baby is a common thing, but when it happens to you, it slams your reality through your heart at the blink of a slate-blue eye. It’s stunning and disarming. It almost makes you understand all the freaky things parents do in the name of their kids and the kind of neurotic terror you’ve been chasing out of your head the whole pregnancy that seems to get only worse as kids grow up, put on roller skates or bike helmets. Most kids don’t thrive without it. It is what makes moms so uncool and what I think is so very cool.

So yeah, Connor’s here. Hungry, loud and adored, he’s here.