It might sound like the tritest humblebrag, but when asked about my most impressive production, I always say it’s my two children—Rebecca and Steven. Not just that they are amazing people who surpass me in just about every way, but that having and raising them has been so rich with life-changing experiences. They have helped me become a better husband, friend, teacher, and boss.
Rebecca is the oldest. Helen and I had lived together and been married for a few years before we decided to start a family. In our early thirties, AURAS was just beginning to grow, and Helen was teaching dance and performing. As busy and happy as we were, having a child became too compelling an idea to put off. It wasn’t long before we were pregnant, or at least Helen was.
By the time you are an adult, few intimate experiences have yet to occur. Having a child might be one of the few things that happen to you for the first time when you’re an adult. You may have become mature in many ways, but you also don’t know sqaut about birthing babies. There are many choices to make. And everyone seems to have advice—so much and so contradictory that anxiety is always part of the mix, and you have months to worry.
Not much help came from my parents and their birthing experiences. My mother, raised in the ’50s, had births of the go-to-the-hospital, get-knocked-out, have-the-baby-pulled-out-with-forceps variety.
Helen absolutely didn’t want to have a baby in a hospital, no matter how tempting the then-new creation of “luxury birthing suites” might have seemed. We chose to have midwives escort the baby into the world at their dedicated birthing center. The Maternity Center was a retrofitted house. The upstairs bedrooms were the delivery rooms, the first floor was for orientations and group classes, and the basement housed the lab, offices, and examination rooms.
We vowed not to tell my parents about our plans to avoid the shock of such an outrageous and dangerous notion—even though women have been delivering children just about everywhere for the last million years. But it still surprised us when one of our close friends—adamantly opposed to the idea—said, “You’re going to regret that decision! What if something goes wrong!”
Well, they plan for that. Most first births are complicated by lack of progression, leaving plenty of time to move to a hospital, which rarely happens. The midwives were also certified nurse practitioners with years of experience. The initial orientation convinced us that having a baby in this home-like environment would be safe and gratifying.
The pregnancy proceeded with a few surprises. Helen had been an avowed non-meat eater as long as I had known her, but one evening as we were sitting in Timberlake’s, a casual joint near our house in Adams Morgan, she announced she wanted—was craving—a big hamburger. She ate it with relish, turning red when she realized friends were at the next table watching her violate her dietary beliefs.
But she said she was doing what her body told her it needed. Shortly afterward, we found that she was anemic and that without bringing her iron numbers up, she couldn’t have the baby at the birthing center. She needed a lot more than spinach and pills could provide. Helen even had me make her liver and onions, which she forced down with maximum disgust. But, with the aid of lots of Cream of Wheat, her iron numbers rose.
In the third trimester, Helen began making a Moses Basket, an old-fashioned homemade bassinet. As she prepared the woven basket with fabric bumpers and padding, I realized she was actually building a nest.
One night in July, we were watching TV, and Helen noticed that she was having contractions every 15 minutes (the VCR clock was right above the screen). After a few hours of constant timed contractions, we realized that it was the real thing—the beginning of labor.
In a class just a few weeks earlier for late-term pregnancies, the midwives warned there was a “bad” way and “good” way to react to the beginning of labor. The “bad” way was to stay up and try completing every last task before the baby came, refuse food because you were too excited to eat, and lay around obsessing about your contractions. On the other hand, the “good” choices were to get a good night’s sleep, eat healthy foods to keep your strength up and exercise lightly to keep from overreacting to contractions. Our midwife said to relax; it would be hours before we should come to the center. Yet how can you possibly sleep while experiencing contractions, the excitement of the imminent birth of your first child, plus the anxiety knowing the most common failure of labor to progress was exhaustion?
Somehow, we managed to get some sleep, but before 9 AM the following morning we were on our way to the birthing center when I realized my camera was at work. The contractions were about 10 minutes apart, and Helen was sure she would have the baby in the car, so stopping for the camera seemed an act of lunacy. But it was only a few minutes out of the way, so I illegally parked in front of the studio’s building and ran up for the camera. Helen was waiting in the car when Sharri Wolfgang, AURAS’s senior designer, came walking up to the car on her way in and asked Helen how she was doing. “I’m going to have this baby in this car!” she said.
But she did not. After we got to the Maternity Center and got comfortable in a room, things progressed slowly. We wandered into the lounge in the upstairs birthing area and watched the Iran Contra hearings, where Senator Sam Ervin questioned Oliver North. By midday, it was blisteringly hot outside, but the midwives suggested we go out for a walk to move things along, or if it was too hot, go to nearby Montgomery Mall. The thought of having the baby in a mall was enough to bring on transition surprisingly fast, and a baby girl was born at 5 PM to the theme of All Things Considered.
She was healthy, bright pink, and wiggly. As I held her near Helen, I thought my heart would burst. Every cliché about the birth of your first child seemed fresh and authentic to me. I was so proud of Helen. But after all the trouble of retrieving my camera, I was not particularly proud of my photography skills that day.
By 8 PM, we were ready to leave and descended the stairs to the main floor to discover an orientation session of a few dozen prospective birth candidates underway. As we came down, they saw Helen carrying a swaddled Rebecca, born just three hours prior. An appreciable murmur came from the group because they were not only impressed with this real-time example of a birth experience, but it explained why a stretch limo was waiting outside. Friends of ours had chartered the ride as a present. We got in the limo, Rebecca safely ensconced for the first time in her carrier and rode home.
We entered the townhouse we had left barely twelve hours earlier. Everything looked the same, except now we had a baby we would be responsible for raising for the next twenty years. Suddenly the phone rang, and Helen—a woman who had delivered a baby only a few hours earlier—bounded up the steps to answer it before I could move a muscle.
The midwives recommended that new mothers stay in bedclothes and a nightgown for several days, but Helen felt great and the next morning dressed as usual. That day, my parents and siblings came to meet the baby. They were their usual raucous selves and, seeing Helen dressed, behaved as if she hadn’t given birth just a day before. At one point, Helen excused herself and went upstairs. After a half hour, I went up to see if she was okay and found her in the bed, refusing to return downstairs. She just could not go back down and deal with the usual frivolity of my family.
I went back down and yelled at them, as any good husband would. I told them they were shamelessly treating a woman who had just given birth as if nothing extraordinary had happened. Then I threw them out of the house. The midwives were wise about staying in that nightgown. Not only was it to remind Helen that she was recovering from a significant physical event, but it also was supposed to let visitors know she deserved extra special TLC.
I stayed away from work for the next three weeks, and time seemed suspended as we bonded with a baby. But there was one thing that I had to do. As the owner of a design studio, I needed to come up with an excellent baby announcement.
A couple of years later, Helen began to get the inexplicable urge for a new, larger home. It wasn’t long before we realized that she was expecting again and that her maternal hormones had been acting up before we knew it. Even though we were in the midst of a small housing bubble, or maybe even because of it, we found a new home in Silver Spring and quickly sold our townhouse in Adams Morgan. I was no longer a mere 200 yards from AURAS, and, I came to realize, was much the better for it.
Without the anxiety of first-time expectancy jitters, the pregnancy went very smoothly. This time, Helen was determined to have the birth at home. If my mother found out, we would never hear the end of it, so we kept our home birth a secret. After the delivery, we told her things happened so fast that it was an unavoidable.
Most of the labor happened overnight, with Helen drowsy and comfortable in her own bed. Rebecca went to a friend’s house for a sleepover. At 8 AM, this time to the tune of the Morning Edition theme, Steven was born. And this time, I had a close-up look at the process as I “caught” the newborn and cut the umbilical cord. It is hard to see that and not think of the movie Alien. That inspired me to create a birth announcement to rival his sister’s.
I made omelets for the midwives, and a few hours later Rebecca came home and was invited to see her new brother. Already a savvy politician at age three, she cooed and smiled at Steven as Helen held him. But when the two of us were heading downstairs, she asked me if it was okay if Steven lived in the basement.
Happily, Rebecca overcame any misgivings about siblinghood, and she and Steven have grown up together as best friends and confidants, sharing success in the same field.
