The Birth of Sudi

It doesn’t take a truckload of imagination to turn an ordinary birth story into a legend. It happens daily. And soon the legend has more value than the ordinary story. Every birth is a miracle of legendary proportions. The birth of my youngest child was a miracle, a legend, and a lot of fun.

I wonder if home births are going out of fashion these days. Back when I started having my children, in the 1980s, there were many homebirth midwives. The ones I knew selected their clients carefully and refused to attend a homebirth if there was any indication of danger to the mother or the baby. All conditions had to be right for a safe homebirth. Parents had to have a backup plan that included a hospital in case the mother needed to transfer during labor. Fortunately, I am one of those women who practically sneezes the baby out. In other words, a prime candidate for homebirth, which was my preferred method of delivery. I had all three of my children at home.

When my second child was born, I had only one midwife in attendance. Not by design. Home birth midwives come in pairs so that one of them can tend to the mother after the birth and the other can look after the baby. As it happened, one of my two midwives (Midwife Number One) had a baby of her own during the night before I went into labor with mine. My other midwife (Midwife Number Two) had delivered Midwife Number One’s baby and had just returned home in the wee hours to go to sleep when my husband called with the news that I was in labor. Midwife Number Two explained that Midwife Number One had just given birth and wouldn’t be attending our birth. Midwife Number Two said she’d be right over and that she’d call another midwife she knew when she arrived. My father gleefully refers to this as my “midwife crisis.” As it turned out, we never got to Midwife Number Three since my son was born only a few minutes after Midwife Number Two arrived. Too quickly for a phone call to Midwife Number Three. Labor hurts. I like to get it over with quickly.

On the morning of the day that my third child was born, the power went out. Since our water pump was electric, and we lived on a remote forty acres of land accessible only by a dirt road, this meant that we couldn’t depend on having running water. Speaking of water, my waters had broken the evening before so I expected to go into labor any minute, even though it was a couple of weeks before my due date. This time around we were short one midwife because she had gone out of town to a midwife conference. Reasonable. My baby wasn’t due for another couple of weeks. Not quite a midwife crisis. Just a midwife glitch. Fortunately, our primary midwife has a sister who works as a nurse in a hospital neo-natal nursery. When I called to say I was in labor, midwife and sister hopped into the car on their ranch in another remote area in our community and headed to our house. Meanwhile, my husband Ron attempted to thumb through the home birth book to refresh his memory. He had not reread the book yet because he is a notorious procrastinator and he thought he still had a couple more weeks to reread the book before the baby arrived.

A close family friend, Linda, had spent the previous night with us in case we had to make a mad dash for the hospital and needed someone to watch our two older children. Linda had attended both of our previous home births. By the time I went into labor, we had power again, so Linda put on a Bugs Bunny video for the older children and then joined Ron at the end of our bed where they sped-read the home birth book together, attempting to keep ahead of my contractions. Evelyn Wood, the speed-reading teacher, would have been proud of Ron and Linda. But before long I announced, “I’m never going to last until the midwife comes.” Ron’s reply was, “You can’t have the baby yet, we’re only on Chapter Three.” I was too fast even for Evelyn Wood.

Linda read aloud from the home birth book, “Boil the scissors and cord clamps for forty minutes.” Linda looked up from the book and said, “OK, now we’re in trouble.” The home birth kit had not arrived in the mail yet so we had no cord clamps and I wasn’t going to last any forty minutes for scissors to boil. Fortunately for Linda and Ron, I am pathologically organized. I had already put the scissors on the stove to boil and I had asked Linda to pick up a pair of white shoelaces on her way to our house. Shoelaces work well in lieu of cord clamps. It’s a good thing one of us reread the home birth book.

I was never a mellow laboring mother. No water birth, low lights, candles, and gentle oil massage. Not for me. I paced around the house banging on walls and furniture and bellowing like a demented water buffalo. Looney tunes played in the background. When my darling husband offered to check to see how close I was to delivering, I snapped at him, “You won’t know anything by checking me!” Had he checked, he would have seen the baby’s head about to crown, a definite indication that the birth was imminent. From my point of view, I thought I had to use the toilet. So I trotted into the bathroom. I never made it to the toilet. I squatted beside the sink and had a baby.

In the next room, Linda and Ron heard me yelp “help” and then they heard a small cry from the baby. Ron appeared instantly in the doorway to discover me holding the baby’s head. The body had not yet been delivered. He dashed over just in time to catch the body. Newborns are as slippery as a greased watermelon. We held on with as many hands as possible as we inched our way back to the bedroom where I finally crawled into the bed and put the baby on my stomach.

Throughout my pregnancy, I had been sure I was going to have a girl. I had been sure about the gender of both of my other children (one girl, one boy) and I had been correct. It never crossed my mind that I was wrong about this one. I didn’t even check the baby’s sex right away. From Ron’s angle, however, he couldn’t help but notice and couldn’t resist teasing me when he remarked, “Look at the balls on that girl.”

My ex-navy husband had quite a time tying off the shoestrings on the umbilical cord. The cord was tough and difficult to secure. He later confessed that he was thinking “Hmm, square not? Half-hitch, bowline, sheep-shank? Trucker’s hitch? Tie it like a shoe?” He eventually figured it out. The scissors had boiled for a mere twenty minutes.

The baby was sleeping quietly, wrapped cozily in blankets that I had put in the oven earlier to warm (pathologically organized, remember). Linda read aloud from the chapter about delivering the placenta. Then we heard a car coming down the driveway. Yay. The midwife at last. Ron met her and her sister-the-nurse at the door with a delighted shout, “It’s a boy!”

The midwife laughed, “C’mon, we made it in time, didn’t we?”

“No,” Ron answered. “It’s a boy.”

“No, really, did we make it?” She couldn’t believe she’d missed the birth. It had only taken her forty-five minutes to get to our house.

“No,” Ron repeated, “it’s a boy.”

Because she missed the birth, the midwife would later give me a discount on her fee. She charged me half price. Our son was a bargain baby. His older brother would later taunt him by telling him we got him on sale.

Because I had expected a girl, we didn’t have a boy’s name picked out. I left it to Ron to choose a name, with the stipulation that I needed to like whatever he chose. It took us a week before we settled on Joseph Sudi. Joseph after Ron’s late father and Sudi for common usage. Sudi means “lucky” in Swahili and it has served our youngest child well for nearly seventeen years now. Yes, that baby born in that wild and whacky country birth will graduate from high school this year. He’s a talented artist, dedicated skateboarder, terrific water polo player, gifted writer, smart, generous, funny, handsome, all-around great guy who made his entrance at that zany frontier birth.

Every once in awhile I talk to someone who has recently attended a birth and, as they tell me about it, I can see that they are touched with sparkle. Each new spirit entering changes the dynamic of the world by a tangible turn, a significant turn however small. To us parents falls the vital task of nurturing that spirit, of raising our children well; so that we build an army of good souls capable of facing the work of advancing evolution into a positive future. The potential of each new spirit to make a difference enters the magic, the awe, and the grace of a birth. I pray that one day every baby born will be as cherished as my babies; wrapped in warm blankets made toasty just for them. I pray that every birth be held in wonder as the beginning of a miraculous, momentous, legendary journey.