October 1996

It’s request week here at Oleoptene, apparently.

You want a Prague birth story?

I have given birth three times since then so that first time feels less coherently narrative like, and more an impression, the longest, greyest day… The one thing I remember clearly was what it was to finally and for the first time hold my son, to have that steady knowing gaze, so calm, his eyes holding my eyes, the exhaustion I had been feeling melted away in my transformation into a real, honest-to-God mother, and there was nothing I wanted to do so much as hold him, look at him.

But I can make a story out of it, I think.

I go back to the American obstetrician who ignored me at my appointments and wanted to ask Raven about this brand new internet thing, to get himself a webpage, his nurse lecturing me on weight gain, and how little those things mattered compared to hearing the baby’s heartbeat for the first time, on my birthday, March 20, 1996, which started to make it all a little more real. But I think settling for that moron doctor and worrying about money and the fact that we were living in a city between his job in Los Alamos, 45 minutes away, and mine in Albuquerque, an hour away, and knowing I wasn’t really ready to have a baby and work full-time to pay for daycare added to a sense of not really having choices. And then on April Fool’s Day, Raven saw a posting for the Radio Free Europe job, and I couldn’t have found Prague on a map, but I willingly went along with him deciding to apply for it, though it felt a little like a joke. And then Raven was flying off for an interview and every objection seemed to melt away, there were people at RFE who had given birth in Prague, they could help us find an English-speaking o.b. and by the time it was July our apartment was packed and moved and we were on our way there.

We got in with the doctor fairly quickly after getting to Prague — early enough we didn’t navigate the public transportation very well, I remember it being very hot and walking and walking and realizing we had gone the wrong direction and then walking and walking and walking in the other direction looking for the Ústav pro Péci o Matku a Díte, the Institute for the Care of Mother and Child — where the doctor’s office was. He was a kind man, but clearly overworked, and he spent a lot of that first visit helping us fill out the endless paperwork that seemed to characterize every aspect of life in Kafka’s hometown. Subsequent visits were a little surreal, I’d enter a waiting room full of pregnant Czech women and be whisked in for labwork first because I was a paying customer and they were getting socialized medicine, and still my idea of things like a birth plan were alien enough to make me understand that medicine as a consumer commodity was not How Things Were Done. I remember the lab techs as slightly scary women in short skirts with impossibly long, painted fingernails, communicating with me by gesture and sign language and impatiently taking me by the wrist and leading me where they needed me to go because none of them spoke a word of English and my Czech was not even rudimentary yet.

At a certain point it was discovered that the baby was still breech, and that I would have to have a caesarean, which was terrifying and accentuated my general feeling of helplessness. I must have communicated my panic to my parents on the phone, because my mother went and researched homeopathic options and sent me a bottle of pulsatilla. I then spent hours resting with my hips up on several pillows and my head on the floor, hoping that would help him turn, and even though a week before he was born he was still breech, when I went into labor he was head down and ready to go, so something must have worked.

I think I moved to Prague confident that everything I needed to know I could get from reading the right books, and I chose Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin as my source for everything related to childbirth (though a friend had also given us the dreaded What to Expect When You’re Expecting (the Worst)). I don’t know if that deafened me to the information given by the Australian midwife in what was Prague’s only English childbirth education available that summer. She held that childbirth hurt and one should get the epidural, gave us handouts of convenient Czech phrases to use in the hospital, and spent a lot of time showing us how to swaddle a newborn. Still, I went into childbirth convinced that they weren’t labor pains they were labor rushes, and that one just needed the proper attitude.

The other thing about moving to Prague was that Raven’s employer took care of all of the moving for us, hiring professional movers, we just needed to separate out a smaller, lighter quicker delivery by air from the slower, heavier delivery of freight. And nobody quite explaineed to us how these shipments wouldn’t even be leaving the United States until we signed a lease on an apartment, but that once we signed the lease on an apartment we would lose our fully furnished temporary housing. So this resulted in our staying in our apartment with the newly signed lease with nothing but the things we’d brought with us in our suitcase on the airplane — that is, no furniture or dishes or anything. We’d put all the baby stuff into the air shipment, which arrived a few weeks after we signed the lease, but we didn’t have a bed. A friend who worked at a real estate company was able to lend us some foam pads to sleep on, but they weren’t beds, which didn’t lend itself to a comfortable third trimester. All of our furniture and other belongings arrived the day after Aodán was born, and this was only ok, because so did my mother, and she spent the week I was in the hospital after the birth unpacking and putting together the apartment for me.

So the day of the birth? Our due date had come and gone, and finally I awoke one Sunday morning not with contractions but with a bit of bloody show, and I must not have read about that or been prepared for it, because we called the hospital, alarmed, and with nobody who spoke English there, our rough Czech and the word blood got them to ask us to come in right away. We took a taxi, and once there learned our doctor was hours away, there was nobody working at the hospital who spoke English, and there were long forms to be filled out (all in Czech) before I could be admitted. A woman in labor who did speak English, started helping Raven with the forms, and I was taken away from the one person who understood me. I don’t remember everything that followed, but it wasn’t a happy time.

The day was long and grey, a woman down the hall screamed operatically — or perhaps it was several women because the screaming came and went throughout the day. I was showered, put in an awful gown, shaved, had my waters broken, and an i.v. put in before I saw my husband again. Our doctor did show up in the afternoon. I was given demerol, something I don’t remember asking for or agreeing to, but I think some of fuzziness of the day has to do with that, I remember throwing up, being given oxygen. having my life flash before my eyes and when I was finally at the pushing stage having several people pushing on my abdomen (which worked to give me doubts about my own ability to push out a baby on my own in subsequent births). Raven was my only comfort that day, valiant with the back rubs and cheering me on. If I had wanted an epidural we would have had to have paid an anesthesiologist to be on call for the weekend, and anticipating rushes, rather than pains, we didn’t.

The standard of care was three or four nights in the hospital after a vaginal birth, and I might have made more of a fuss about that except for the fact that my mother was busy unpacking my apartment. Aodán had to stay in a nursery, which made him feel less like he was really mine, I felt like I was peeking to unwrap him from the swaddling and examine tiny fingers and toes, and some nurse was always trying to correct my hold when I was nursing him, again, using more sign language and rough gestures than English. The recovery room I stayed in had an electric pump or sanitizer or something on the toilet that was really noisy, so Raven unplugged it, and when my mom arrived and Raven brought her straight to the hospital, jet-lagged, from the airport, and used the toilet the room flooded.

You don’t think you will ever forget any of the details, of course, and then you do. Looking back we were so young and knew so little and still had all of this surprising confidence. I felt like motherhood made me so much stronger that I was willing to face challenges for my son that I would not have for myself alone, to face down calling the Czech pediatrician whose scheduler spoke no English in order to make an appointment, to face down the little old ladies who tried to tell me I was doing it all wrong. I was really fortunate, I think to have a mother and mother-in-law who believed I was capable of handling it all and doing a beautiful job, who built me up with their loving support. The births of Aodán’s younger brothers were, of course, marked by a much stronger sense of knowing what I was doing, of knowing what I wanted and still somehow being able to accept things as they came, especially once I found the world’s greatest midwife, in Dallas. And yet Aodán’s birth was a perfect one, it forged us into a family, a unit of three that didn’t exist before that day, and I remain profoundly grateful for the experience.