“We know your other half won’t approve,” they said, “but it would be safer if you deliver early, and at the rate you’re going, you will most likely deliver prematurely.”
I felt rotten for doing it without telling my husband. I was crying when I did it, but I did it. He came back, elated with the response to his international promotions for Emancipation, which could now live up to its name. The C-section was scheduled a week later on October 16. Thinking like a protective husband and a seasoned showman, he arranged for a plastic surgeon—someone who’d understand that I was a belly dancer whose life and livelihood were in his hands—to come in and oversee the procedure and close me up afterward.
The night before the Cesarean, my body roared into full-blown labor. They kept trying to drug it down as I lay in agony, hour after hour. My husband sat beside me, gripping my hand. The only relief was when he stroked my face and put me under, talking softly in my ear. “We’re going to get through this, and everything will be fine. I love you. I’m here for you. Nothing bad is going to happen.”
I had requested that Angela be the OR nurse. I needed that positive, loving energy. I laughed when she told me, “That man of yours is gonna have scrubs on. I told him, ‘You’re not in charge here, I am.’”
“No way,” I said.
“Way,” she assured me.
They shaved and prepped and carted me in, and I burst out laughing when I saw him in those scrubs with the booties and puffy hat.
“You look really cute,” I said.
“I know.” He asked the doctor, “Do all these lights need to be on?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
A burly nurse introduced herself to me and said, “You’re going to hate me.” It was her job to hold me in a headlock while they did the epidural.
“Tell me when it feels like a sore tooth,” said the doctor.
I said, “What do you mean—oh! Oh, God. Okay. Yeah.”
“Do you feel this? This? How about here?”
“Yes. Yes. I feel everything.”
“Okay, she’s ready.”
“I feel it! I feel everything!”
“You will,” she said. “You’ll feel it, but it won’t hurt.”
My husband gripped my hand as they cut me open. He kept his face close to mine, speaking softly, comforting and encouraging me, clowning around like he couldn’t breathe behind the mask until I begged, “Oh, don’t make me laugh.”
It seemed to take a very long time. There was this weird tugging sensation. Like the unzipping of a dress that’s too tight. There was soft music playing—harps, guitars, spa-type music—but I heard a liquid sound. Suction. The clinking of instruments. I felt them pull the baby out of me.
“It’s a boy!”
I don’t know how to describe the look on my husband’s face. Pure joy. Pure love. Pure gratitude. I’d seen his face when he stood in front of a stadium filled with forty-eight thousand screaming fans. I’d seen his face as he scored platinum albums and received the highest awards in his industry. I’d seen him experience the ecstasy of creative genius. None of that compared to the look I saw on his face in this moment, when he became a father.
And then they held the baby up in the glare of those harsh lights.
For a suspended second, I saw nothing but my son’s beautiful soul. I heard nothing but his perfect silence. He made no sound. My heart called his name.
Amiir.
The pure elation on my husband’s face turned to pure terror.
On the cold white page of a medical text, Pfeiffer syndrome type 2 is a genetic disorder that causes skeletal and systemic abnormalities. Craniosynostosis is the premature fusing of the bones in the skull, sometimes resulting in “cloverleaf skull,” in which the eyes are located outside the sockets. Brachydactyly is the fusion of bones in the hands and feet, causing a webbed or pawlike appearance. Anal atresia is the absence of an anus, indicating life-threatening abnormalities in the colon and bowels. I learned all this later. I became fluent in a language I didn’t want to speak. But in that first moment, I couldn’t understand what I was seeing. It was as if we were at the center of a whirlpool, and the room around us was turning in on itself, contorting, twisting everything.
There was only an instant of fear. In the next instant, we became parents. Our love for him embraced everything he was. And then—chaos.
The OR nurses swooped in and took him. Everyone was talking at once. I heard my husband saying, “He’s not crying. Why is he not crying?” He wasn’t breathing. They whisked him to a table and began frantically working on him. Everything inside me said, Let him go, but someone told me later that they were required by law to revive him.
Suddenly my husband’s face was close to mine. He gripped my hand and said, “It’s going to be okay. He’ll be okay.”
“Oh, God… oh, God…”
We heard him cry. My husband disappeared for a moment. Then he was there again. “It’s a boy. It’s a boy. They got him breathing.”
“Let him go.”