Iwas born on a bright, chilly day in early November 1978 in Austin, Texas, neither early nor late nor exactly on time, as there was some general disagreement between my mother and two different doctors about when she could have gotten pregnant according to the calendars and my dad’s work schedule. I hadn’t even made my debut on the planet and already absences and calendars were exerting their contrary and tidelike influences. Since my actual gestational age was disputed, the fact that I jabbed a hole in my placental home with one finger and started the party on my own timing, was, by all accounts, problematic. My father was not yet home from his shift in the North Atlantic, and when reached by telephone and informed by my mother that she was in labor, his shouted, half-joking advice was, “Stand on your head!”
The delivery doctor, an all-around sleaze who would later impregnate one of his nurses and then perform her abortion as well since he was already married, was not ready for my arrival either. When it became clear that the Pitocin drip would not hurry my arrival by the time his shift ended, he slowed my mother’s contractions just enough to extend her labor overnight so he could go home and get some sleep. We spent a long night together, she and I, waiting on the men for whom our introduction had been delayed, for whom our timing was unexpected, inscrutable, a surprise, inconvenient. One man was on his way, hurrying through the fluorescent-lit netherworld of airports and baggage claim and parking garages and taxis. One man was home in bed. Here was my father, bleary eyed and exhausted, collapsing in a chair next to the bed, and a few hours later, here was the doctor, bright eyed and bushy tailed, exclaiming that it was now “time to have this baby!” After an on-and-off Pitocin drip, nearly nineteen hours of inexplicable delays, and a nearly too late epidural, my mother was so exhausted and fed up when I was finally delivered that she waved me off to my father to be bathed, weighed, blinded with eye creams, poked with immunization shots, and introduced to the bright stare of the world.
I offer this story in contrast to my brother’s birth in Aberdeen, Scotland, nineteen months later, which was evidently so low-key that my mother spent most of her labor wandering around the shops of downtown Aberdeen before arriving at the hospital (having sent my father home to arrange a babysitter for me), casually losing her mucus plug, or having a “bloody show,” neither of which phrase sounds less horrific than the other, and being hustled into a bed to deliver my brother thirty minutes later with no other medical intervention than the brogue-heavy encouragements of a red-faced labor nurse. “The Matty,” as the maternity hospital was called, was evidently so overrun with babies that Doug spent days peacefully mucky in his own birth funk and snuggled against my mother’s chest while she had tea around a communal table with a bunch of other new mothers and lobbied the doctors for her early release.
As with every story my mother told me, I sucked these in, held on to them, and then puffed them back up into the air like smoke rings to examine their shape and patterns of dissolution. What did they mean, how did they apply to me, and what was I supposed to do differently because they had been given to me? I decided Doug’s birth sounded preferable and had possibly shaped his character. He was always more laid-back than me, more adept at enjoying the moment and creating communities of friends on whom he could depend. Maybe this was from sitting at tea listening to Scottish accents in placental funk. I was always the worrier, the overthinker trying so hard to please but bad at extending enough trust to create many strong bonds. Maybe that was from being delivered by an asshole into a room full of exhausted people hastily reunited and watching the clock. Maybe our entrances have weight; very possibly they don’t. But after looking so hard and trying to figure it out, I can say this: we try so hard to avoid, correct, edit, and recast the mistakes we think our parents made that, more often than not, we end up slavishly repeating them.
Sam came into the world much as I had—heavily anticipated and wedged into a difficult timeline with a fluctuating and uncertain cast of characters. My pervasive anxiety about his arrival had taken root and flowered into an ornate Birth Plan, a detailed flowchart of premade decisions designed to wring out every last precious ounce of control over the situation I could gain in light of the fact that when the time actually came to have a baby, I would be relying most on the two people I’d seen the least over the course of my pregnancy: Ross and the doctor. I’d seen at least six different doctors and one midwife, the general wisdom among other Navy wives giving birth at the base hospital being that you should try to meet everyone at least once, since you could end up with anyone.