Epilogue: Afterbirth

Sam’s birth and the subsequent drama, largely detailed at Choicywhiteboy.com, taught me a lesson that apparently I am still not done learning in my 35 years: things don’t always go the way I hope, plan, or expect. I had an easy, trouble-free pregnancy and yet it turned out that my baby was IUGR (Intrauterine growth restricted). Sam was low birth weight at 5lbs 4 oz, and 17 inches long. During labor she passed meconium, a sign of fetal distress, which is why the midwife needed me to push her out fast. Lori broke my water at 7pm on October 1; I started pushing sometime between 11pm and midnight, and Sam was born at 12:50am on October 2. That’s only about 6 hours of active labor! In the end we were really, really lucky that she came out okay.

Really, really lucky.

I think about that almost every day.

The whole experience has been a reminder of both the fragility of life AND its resilience. Sammy is still tiny. Six months later and we still worry about her growth. But I keep thinking of a scene in Truffaut’s “L’Argent de poche” when baby Grégory falls out of an apartment window only to bounce right up and declare “Grégory a fait boom!” The neighbors are discussing it that evening and one of them says: “Les enfants sont très solides”—children are very solid. That’s been true of Sam, thank goodness. Despite a rocky birth, despite her size, despite being exposed to group-B strep, despite a first week of antiobiotic injections & an x-ray at 4 days old, despite myriad difficulties with breastfeeding, & especially despite her jittery first-time parents, Sam is fine. Just fine. Beautiful, inquisitive, energetic, & changing every day. And that’s the best ending I could hope for her birth story.