The Fruit of the Tree by Jacquelynn Luben

Author:Jacquelynn Luben
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Personal Memoir
Publisher: Untreed Reads Publishing
Published: 2012-08-24T04:00:00+00:00

13. Little Things

I awoke in the early hours of the following morning—the contractions were well under way and I congratulated myself on having missed the first couple of hours of labour in sleep.

I woke Michael, who was surprisingly sceptical, asking, ‘Are you sure this isn’t a false alarm?’, although the baby was already nine days late. We sat down to a cup of tea, and left almost immediately after for the maternity home. Robert slept the sound sleep of the innocent and could be safely left for three quarters of an hour.

Outside the rain teemed down and the whole scene could well have been portrayed in a second rate film, anxious husband turning to pregnant wife—‘Are the pains bad?’

Instead, my husband said to me, ‘Press your feet down on the board and stop the rain blowing up through the hole in the car!’

‘I’m supposed to be relaxing and breathing with the contractions,’ I admonished.

Sheets of rain blew across the road.

‘Shall I stop the car?’ asked Michael.

‘No, drive on, for goodness’ sake,’ I replied, impatiently. However did he imagine I was going to benefit from sitting in a stationary car? Luckily it was only a fifteen-minute journey.

We were welcomed at the maternity home by a brisk midwife.

‘Unpack your things and put them in that locker,’ she directed me, and to Michael, ‘Are you staying?’ and ‘Oh, what a pity!’ at his negative reply.

‘Couldn’t you stay for a while?’ I asked Michael, but he couldn’t wait to make his escape and was relieved to have Robert as his excuse.

It was three-thirty in the morning. How many hours, I wondered, before the baby would be born? Outside, the howls of the wind and rain were ominous.

An Asian auxiliary nurse arrived to shave me—I remembered the weeks of itching after the thirty second shave I had had at the time of Robert’s birth, and requested that she treat me with gentleness. She chatted to me for about three-quarters of an hour while carrying out her duties and I was only too pleased to have company to help me pass the dragging time.

Finally, I was left alone and listened to a woman in labour in an adjacent room. Suddenly the exhortations of the midwives were followed by a baby’s cry. I felt a moment of emotion, and fellow feeling with the unknown mother, followed by envy that she had reached the end of those arduous hours of labour. ‘If only I was in that position!’

But a later on, I found out that there had been complications and the mother had been swiftly transported to the local hospital for treatment under anaesthetic.

The midwife hurried into my room to collect something.

‘What did she have?’ I asked.

‘A little girl. Do you want the light turned out?’

‘No. I’m not going to sleep,’ I replied, remembering that other awakening in the night, when for the moment I had been aware only of pain, loneliness and darkness.

I lay on my side and tried to rub my own back, watching the clock with one eye.

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