A belated leprechaun

When my OB told me that my due date was March 17, I asked her to change it.  She tried to explain that it was a target date—it was not likely that the baby would actually be born then, and it would not appear on any official records.  I argued that it was a bad juju for someone with alcoholics littered throughout the family tree to be born on a day when college kids and Irish folk alike gather together to drink mass quantities of green beer.  For all of her medical background, my OB could not understand this.

As far as pregnancies go, it was without incident.  I blew up to gigantic proportions, lost my ankles and suffered from ghastly heartburn.  An ultrasound revealed that Hyacinth and I were quickly becoming minorities in a sea of y-chromosones.  Another penis would join the Bean family. 

St. Patrick’s day came and went without event.  I was tired of being pregnant and told the OB I was giving notice and to schedule eviction proceedings for the following week. 

With the moon still out and Jax sleeping, my friend Joe drove me to the hospital where I was hooked up to an IV drip of Pitocin to begin the eviction.  For several hours I watched TV and waited around for the contractions to come on.  Papa came in later and kept me company and then Mimi and Belle.  Things got a little hairy when the resident couldn’t get the epidural in the right place. 

Third time is a charm.  That’s right—THEY HAD TO PUT THE EPIDURAL IN THREE TIMES BEFORE THEY GOT IT RIGHT, and by the time it was in, I was a wreck and blathering on incoherently, and they got me so dosed up that I couldn’t feel my toes, and then I was happy again.  But when you can’t feel your toes, it’s kind of hard to push because you can’t feel what you’re pushing or that you’re pushing.  Still, I was over the whole thing, and I gave it the ol’ college try, and it didn’t hurt that I’m pretty determined (and have child bearing hips).  I pushed three times and out came my little Moose—all 8 pounds, 10 ounces, 21 inches with 10 fingers, 10 toes, two blue eyes, and, yes, a peanut.  And I cried because I was so happy.

Then they took him away for a couple of hours, and I asked for a shower. 

“You have to pee first,” the nurse told me.

“Okay,” I said, and hopped up and headed toward the bathroom, except that my legs were all rubbery, and I wasn’t walking so well. 

I woke up to the smell of ammonia.  I was sitting on the toilet in that nasty hospital gown with four women trying to revive me, and my first thought was, Good one, Bean!  You’ve just blown your chances of taking a shower. And then I thought about how glad I was that I sent the well wishers home and that nobody I knew was around because I was a disgusting mess, half naked in my hospital gown that was gaping open for God and everybody to see. 

Next there was the EKG, which is what happens to you when you pass out on a hospital toilet from an epidural overdose because no one wants to get sued if you have an undiagnosed heart condition.

Then the bitchy nurse came on duty.  She wouldn’t let me take a shower even though I’d been promised by her predecessor that I could take one if I passed the EKG.  So I did what any smelly woman who’d just given birth would have done—I took a damn shower without a permission slip and got into my Eileen West nightgown and called for my baby.

Baby Moose cuddled up to me and went to sleep in my arms, and I marveled at how perfect he was. He was named for my grandfather, a strong hard working man, whose beginnings as the son of a sharecropper had been humble, but whose life went on to be rich and filled with love and happiness… and my little leprechaun was born on his birthday.