My Spiritual Autobiography - Part VI

It's worth it to pause for a moment and remind myself that the purpose of telling this whole tale is to give glory to God, and this entry is probably the one that deals with the part of my life that most does that.

It likely goes without saying that the birth of my daughter Theresa Rose was an experience that changed who I was. In my case, the most operative aspect of that change was about letting go of control of my life. It started with the birth itself. During that first pregnancy, we did all of the usual "first pregnancy stuff" - we went to birth classes (my wife was interested in a natural childbirth experience), read books, shopped at Babies 'R Us (even giving serious consideration to things like an electric "wipe warmer") and mapped out a birth plan that would make NASA proud.

And then it came time for the birth. My wife had read in serveral books that "getting out and walking" is a good way to help labor progress. As a red-shirt father, I didn't have the experience to recognize that my wife's background of having run over twelve marathons skewed her perspective of what it meant to "get out and walk". I am actually not exaggerating when I say that we walked nearly 10 miles with my wife in labor. It was as if we were of a mindset that we could just "walk the baby out". Here it was a clear case of the two of us unwittingly believing that the birth of a child is under the control of the parents. The net effect of all of this walking was that we spent our energy too fast and didn't have the stamina to make it the thirty-nine (yes, "39") hours we would wind up in labor (including two, yes two, two-hour periods of pushing separated by a two-hour "rest" with contractions still going on). I can honestly say I have never been so tired in my life, to say nothing of where my wife was at. I had been coached in the natural child-birth classes, to "be strong" when the woman asks for pain medication - "when she is asking for pain medication, it means the baby is almost there, take her one contraction at a time" is what the book said. But seeing my wife, a Division I athlete, shaking and begging for pain meds like a heroine addict, brought home the verse from Genesis "in pain you shall bear children" in a different way.

In the end, Theresa was in a funny position and wasn't coming out. We were going to a C-section, something my wife wanted to avoid more than anything else. In my delerium of fatigue, as they took her from me to prep for surgery, I had what I can only explain as a supernatural experience. I was sitting on a chair outside the surgery suite and I started feeling very sorry for myself. I was thinking things like, "nothing went as planned" and "we're never doing this again". I was sobbing, trying not to let anyone see. Suddenly, a thought filled my entire mind: "YOUR KID IS HERE IN SEVEN MINUTES, YOU NEED TO BE ON-LINE RIGHT NOW". I write it in all-caps to convey some sense of the forcefulness with which the thought took over my entire thinking. I wouldn't say that I heard a "voice" per se, but without anyone saying anything to me (I was alone in the room at the time), my thinking did a 180-degree turn and the fatigue and self-pity cleared themselves from my mind. I was on my feet with a feeling like I used to get just before I ran down the field on a opening kickoff in football. A short while (7 minutes?) later, they came and got me. I went into the surgery room and met the girl who was to change the course of my entire life. From my vantage behind the curtain, I saw them lift her up and when my eyes fell upon her for the first time, it was as if I had tunnel vision and the sound completely cut out from my ears.

I carried her (floated?) from the surgery room to the nursery. The nurse put her down in the baby warmer in just a diaper. She looked so small and vulnerable that I instinctively put my hands over her like a blanket. The nurse came back and showed me that I wasn't helping since I was blocking the warmer. What followed next was another lesson in life not being under my control. The doctor who had done the initial examination of Theresa had noticed that she had a cleft palate (like a cleft lip, but inside the mouth - not visible from the outside). She didn't mention this to me but left to organize a team of doctors who then converged on the situation. They were talking to me, by myself (my wife still recovering from surgery), in the nursery, using language I could barely understand in the condition I was in. One doctor actually said to me "We think your daughter has an excellent chance of survival". If this was meant to console me, it instead had the exact opposite effect, I was scared to death. There was talk of a genetic screen, CAT scan, other tests. By the time my wife got to the room and the pain meds were wearing off, we had learned that Theresa was born with Pierre-Robin Syndrome, a rare condition where in the childs lower jaw grows small, causing the tongue to grow up into the roof of the mouth, resulting in a cleft palate. The scariest part of the whole thing was that she was "apnic", meaning she had difficulty breathing because of the position of her tongue in her mouth. She spent the first week of her life in a special care nursery, hooked up to an oxygen sensor and a heart rate monitor. She had to be laid on her side and supervised continuously - on several occasions we could see her blood oxygen content get to such a level that the machine would flash red. We would rush over and re-adjust her so her tongue wasn't blocking her airway. Breast-feeding, something my wife had looked forward to, was out of the question.

At the end of the weeklong stay in the hospital, we were visited by an apnea counselor and told we would be sent home with a breathing monitor. This is a device that the child wears through the night that will alarm if they stop breathing (I don't remember exactly how it worked). The bottom line is that the device will make a sound (literally) more obnoxious than a fire alarm if the baby stops breathing. The problem is, the device has plenty of "false alarms". After the first few times we awoke with a noise that might as well have said "Your baby is dying, your baby is dying" we learned to hate this device more than I thought I could hate an inanimate object. The doctors told us that Theresa would "grow out" of her apnea and for me that couldn't come fast enough. I was a novice at sleep deprivation and was having a baptism by fire. I couldn't believe how my wife was able to go on two hour intervals seemingly forever, when I wasn't even safe to drive the car anymore.

In time, Theresa did grow out of her apnea. She gained weight slowly but steadily and ate solids at the normal time. The breathing monitor went aways. She was a beautiful child, and in the light of three more I have been blessed with since, she was unique. She was somehow "introspective". She didn't giggle and gave smiles somewhat sparingly. She seldom cried and was long-suffering. When I try to describe her personality, people have sometimes suggested she may have been autistic, but that doesn't fit (there were plenty of specialist doctors of all sorts looking at her and none ever suggested this). She wasn't a mommy's girl or a daddy's girl, as some of our later kids have clearly been. She was always just watching, seemingly fascinated with everything and anything that was going on. One of my favorite memories of her was when I would sometimes come home from work and she would be upstairs with my wife in the bedroom. I had this particular song I would sing, an exultant medieval version of the "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) antiphon from the mass that I had heard on a chant CD my wife had gotten me for my birthday. As my wife would tell it, when Theresa heard my voice as I started to sing "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi... (Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world...), she would light up with a smile that can only be described as "electric" and she would bounce up and down waving her little arms as I came up the stairs to grab her and hug and kiss her. I never got tired of it.