The Birth Of My Daughter's Daughter

My first blog dealt with the death of my dad. This blog will go to the extreme opposite of death. This was also written in 2002 for a class and is a short narrative essay. It is the story of the birth of one of my grandchildren. In rewriting this for my blog I have made some minor modifications which I hope will improve the writing structure a bit. I have also changed the name of my family members so as to respect their privacy since I do not have permission to use them on the internet. I hope you will enjoy this short narrative.

The Birth of My Daughter’s Daughter

It is about 6:50 in the evening. I am in my daughter’s hospital room getting ready to say goodbye to her until tomorrow. The doctor came in about twenty minutes ago and speaking to my daughter he said, “The medicine to induce labor isn’t working. You’ll have to stay in the hospital for the night. In the morning I’ll attempt once again to get your labor going.”

Susan is sitting up on the end of her bed eating the stew that has been brought for her. Her husband Robert is sitting in the chair next to her bed. They are having a conversation. They are trying to decide if he should stay the night at the hospital or if he should go pick up their son and head on home.

Suddenly my daughter stiffens and drops her spoon into her bowl of stew. Then she grabs her stomach with both of her hands. At the same time this is happening I am seeing disbelief and panic in her eyes. I think, “She must be having a contraction but she looks so panicked. She has gone through this before. Why does she look so frightened at one contraction?” In a voice that carries the very force of the contraction she is having she shouts, “Oh my God! Robert, I want a pain killer and I want it now!” He is looking at her in disbelief and I’m thinking, “A pain killer? My goodness honey, this is your first contraction.” However, I know she means it because of the very tone of her voice. “What’s going on honey?” I ask. She looks at me with panic still clearly visible in her face and responds, “Mom, I’m scared. This contraction is too hard and it isn’t stopping” Robert asks her, “Do you think we should call the doctor?” to which she replies, “I don’t care. I just want a pain killer and I want it now!” I tell the kids, “I’ll go have the nurse call the doctor and let him know what is going on. I’ll also ask her to call the anesthesiologist.”

As I walk out of the room Susan is still clutching her stomach and looking horrified. I have so many thoughts just racing through my mind. One thought comes after another; then another. As fast as they come, they leave. “My poor baby. Why is this scaring you so bad? This must be one awful contraction. How I wish I could go through it for you. It is so hard to see you hurting so badly. How well I remember that pain from when you were born.” It only about 10 yards to the nurses’ station but I have hundreds of thoughts and feelings run though me in the short time it takes to get there. After explaining what is going on to the nurse and answering the questions she asks, I go back to the room. Unbelievably, Susan is still clinging to her stomach and looking very frightened. “I have to go to the bathroom” she cries.  “I need help.” Looking a little scared himself Robert helps her to walk the ten or twelve feet to the restroom.

When Susan is in the restroom, Robert and I suddenly hear her screaming, “The baby is coming! The baby is coming now!” As he rushes over to her I run out of the room. “I’ll get help!” I holler as I am hurrying out. Hearing Susan’s cries my body reacts by going hot and cold all at once. I want to cry because my baby is so scared and in such pain, yet I can do nothing to change it. When I get to the nurses station I see the nurse is already on the phone paging the doctor. After she finishes sending the page we run back into the room. Susan is still standing at the toilet with tears streaming down her face. She is no longer holding her stomach. Now she is holding her hands between her legs and she cries, “I can feel the baby’s head.” The nurse, taking complete charge of the situation begins shouting out orders, “Robert, you help me get Susan from the bathroom onto the bed! Susan’s mom, you get that bed stripped fast!” After I strip the bed faster than I’ve ever stripped a bed in my entire life, I sit down on the edge of the chair in the corner so I will be out of the way.

I watch as the nurse and Robert get my poor frightened baby to bed. I want to cry myself as I see her fear and pain. I want so desperately to say something, anything that will comfort her. However, I know I must not say a word. Nothing I can say will be of comfort to her right now. Also, if Susan realizes I am still in here she might make me leave. She has been so adamant about no one seeing her giving birth. I’ve always longed to see one of my grandchildren be born, so I sit here quietly with my hand over my mouth so I won’t make a sound; and I watch. I am overwhelmed with love and pride for my daughter at this moment. I’m also aching inside, knowing the pain she is going through. Yet I know she must go through it to get the prize at the end, to have this baby she will love so deeply. I know she will be a good mommy to the baby. She is already such a fine and loving mother to her son. I need to cry. I am so proud of her.

Oh, the baby is coming now. The head is out. I watch in amazement as the nurse is checking to make sure the umbilical cord is where it should be so it won’t hurt the baby. She tells Susan to push. As she pushes, I hold my breath, forgetting to even breathe. She gives one tremendously long, hard push. She screams with the power she must put into it, and it happens. The baby comes. She is so beautiful. She has the most stunning, thick, long, red hair I think I have ever seen on a newborn. She is my baby’s baby. I can hold back the tears no longer. They silently slide down my face. What an awesome thing to watch my daughter give birth to her daughter. A complete cycle of life has just taken place and I am in awe. I am overwhelmed at the very thought of it. My daughter now has a daughter.

The triumphant entry of Miss Lily Anne, as she will be called, has only taken an unbelievable eighteen minutes. Eighteen minutes I will never forget for as long as I live. Eighteen minutes that will change my outlook on life forever.

My Dad

I hope to offer you many kinds of blogs ranging from ecstatically happy or maybe funny to some of the saddest times in my life. I hope to offer you my pondering's on things taking place in my world.  I hope to give you insight on my hopes and dreams, on where I am living and how I am living. I hope to offer you seriousness and silliness.

The first blog I give you is not a happy one. On the contrary it is probably one of the saddest I will ever write but it is my hope that it will help you begin to get to know the life, the heart, the mind of this person who is Noor.

The following is a descriptive essay I wrote for a class I was taking in 2002. I have rewritten it with a few minor modifications for this blog. It is a short story. It is about my dad.

My Dad

As I sit here in the uncomfortable straight-backed chair in room 110 at the hospital, I am watching my father sleep. It is not a contented and peaceful sleep but a fitful, unrewarding kind of sleep that comes out of desperate need and the use of medications. So very different than the kind of slumber one has when going to sleep at the end of a hard days work, ready for and in need of rest. As I watch him I can’t help but think back to when he and I were much younger than we are now. How handsome my dad was. I can see him now, standing there on the springboard with his strong arms held upward, pointing forward, clasped together just at the fingertips, head down in the proper position as he gets ready to do a perfect dive into the deep end of our kidney shaped pool. His back is long and straight, his legs muscular, strong and perfectly aligned with his feet placed together, ankles touching. He is a lean man who has the most stunning, natural, tawny brown skin. But his skin is tanned to an even deeper tone of brown with golden hues from all the hours outside in the pool. His hair, which is coal black, is wet and shimmering in the sun as he gets ready to dive. He is not a very big man standing only about 5 foot-5 inches tall but to me he is huge. He is the biggest man I have ever seen. Not because of his stature but because of who he is. He was my hero when I was a child. He is still my hero.

My dad taught backyard swim lessons in his spare time. Among his many students were two of my sisters and myself. My older sister was about as graceful as the proverbial bull in the china closet. However, when she went from dry land into water the most extraordinary thing would happen and she became the most graceful, angelic creature I had ever seen. She learned everything about swimming quickly and easily and to this day she loves-more than loves, she has a passion for swimming. Then there was my little sister. She, like me, was terrified of the water and was fearful to get in past her ankles. She learned though with my dad’s patient teaching and guidance and she developed a real enjoyment for swimming. And then there was me. I was afraid to get in the water, afraid to put my face in the water, afraid to let go of the coping (the tile that outlines the pool all the way around it), afraid to try to float on my back, afraid to float on my stomach. I was frightened of every aspect of swimming, just sure I was going to drown even if my dad was right there with me. Yet, after two full rounds of classes, many tears on my part and quite possibly my  father’s, he taught me how to swim. To this day I  don’t really care a lot for swimming but I am an extremely competent swimmer. So many times throughout my life I have been the fortunate recipient of my father’s choice to practice great love and patience.

My sisters and I had very different upbringings because of the different situations in our home. Some good but unfortunately some were not so good. My father treated us girls all very differently, trying hard to teach and love us in the way we would best respond to. I must admit though that I was favored. Being obviously favored by my dad, along with my mom impressing upon the other kids “Daddy loves her and not your baby sister, so we need to love your baby sister” made for a terrible and sad situation that built many walls between my dad and the other girls. It also provided the basis for numerous problems with all the other kids in the family and myself. The one other thing and the one good thing that this unfortunate state of affairs brought was a necessary and significant bond between my dad and I. We became extraordinarily close. Him reaching out to me, trying to protect me from the hurt the rest of the family imposed upon me and me reaching out to him because I honestly believed he was the only person in the world who loved me. This bond has ended up making for a life-long closeness that nothing, not time or circumstance has ever been able to intrude upon.

When I was twelve years old my parents’ marriage came to a not so peaceful end. Our lives were forever changed and the innocence of childhood was forever lost to all of us girls. We were suddenly thrown into a world of fighting, courtrooms and hatred that ran deep. That is another story though and not one I will go into at this time. I bring it up only to say that on my fourteenth birthday, the first day I could legally choose which parent I wanted to live with, I moved in with my now extremely sad, angry, lonely and broken father. The roles we had suddenly became reversed and instead of him protecting me and taking care of me, I now became the caretaker and defender. I lived with and cared for my father the rest of my growing up years and watched him turn into a shell of the man he had been when I was a child. He was still so loving and patient with me but he was not the same. I watched him go from an alive, vibrant man who enjoyed so much of life to a man who essentially just existed. I watched him change from a man who was full of the colors of life to a man who could best be described by the color brown, just brown. And now, I am watching him turn from brown to an ashen gray as he fights for his every breath. Many years have passed since I watched my dad get ready to jump off that springboard into our pool. Now he is seventy-nine years old and full of disease. His body is fighting against him in so many ways. I listen and watch as he fights for that next breath, panic coming into his eyes when he can’t find enough air and I want to scream “I’m scared Daddy! Make it better! Protect me!” I can’t though. I must stay silent. He can’t help me. Now I must practice the love and patience he practiced with me. I must hold his hand and tell him “it’s okay, don’t be scared, all will be well in the end.”

So I sit in this uncomfortable straight-backed chair in room 110 and I wait, wondering will this be the time he doesn’t go home ever again or will we have a little more time together? Wanting so selfishly, so desperately to have more time to love him and be loved by him but wanting just as desperately for him to pass away so he will not feel the fear of wondering how much longer it will be or how much more pain he will experience, so he will experience peace.

*An added note* My dad lived only about two and a half weeks after I wrote this. He slipped peacefully out of this world when Allah decided it was the right day, hour, moment.