“Are you feeling the urge to push?” “No.” At the time, this dialogue felt urgent - in few more hours of nothing much happening, this would feel almost comical that he had asked us. The scared-looking Physicians' Assistant immediately produced a wheelchair from behind the desk and made Brooke sit in it.  This was funny too, because we … Continue reading Emergency Room and OB Triage →

“Baby, I think my water just broke.”  Brooke spoke the words like they were foreign, like words she had learned in a textbook, like a phrase that didn’t really fit.  My first (three-quarters asleep) reaction was to distrust her. “What?  Are you …”  I wanted to say “sure?” but I was in such a fog that … Continue reading An Early Arrival →

To round out the prenatal part of this story, Brooke’s sister and her husband threw us a lovely baby shower.  Since Brooke has many friends in the clergy, this led to us using a large space, gratis, in the church of one of her best friends.  That church being Episcopalian, the space we used reminded me … Continue reading The Last Trimester Minus About 3 Weeks →

At a midwife appointment, one of the midwives suggested that we sign up to take birth classes, and proposed a couple of options: something called “hypnobirthing” (I’m still suspicious - but many people we care about and trust found it very helpful, so perhaps I shouldn't be) and also the Bradley Method.  At the time neither of those … Continue reading Birth Classes in Chicago by El in the Winter →

One of the big choices we faced was whether or not to find out whether the baby appeared to have male or female sex characteristics during our 20-week ultrasound.   This, of course, is not the way people usually frame this question.  The ordinary question is more like “are you going to find out what it … Continue reading Anxiety and the Gender Politics of the Unborn – or – Why We Didn’t Find Out →

“CHILDBIRTH IS NOT AN ILLNESS BUT A NORMAL HUMAN PROCESS.” This was the simple sentence I heard for the first time during a presentation at Illinois Masonic when Brooke and I went for a tour a few weeks later.  A attractive mid-thirties woman with an ambiguous European accent and short blonde hair led the tour.  These … Continue reading The Hospital Tour →

Our first appointment was in a tiny room on the third floor of an annex to the Illinois Masonic hospital, just a few steps away from the northernmost exit of the Brown Line’s Wellington stop (since this is where Sam was born, everytime we go by there on the train I get a shiver and … Continue reading Our First Midwife Visit →

Susan Sontag once wrote "strictly speaking, one learns nothing from a photograph."  This is the picture taken just a few hours after the birth of our child, deceptive in its immediacy and seeming transparency.  I want to tell the story of this picture (before and after) - for me anyhow, there's a lot more to … Continue reading The Birth of Our Child – Introduction →