To-Do Lists

Just before our aging biology settled it, we decided there’ll never be a perfect time, when our lives ease and the lists are crossed out. So, along with the switch in jobs and locale, we turned from contraception to proception. It didn’t take long, and at forty-one weeks, we watched your heel and hand protrude from Mom’s abdomen like a scene from a B Sci-Fi flick. I swore that no man could handle that. 

You were late at forty-two weeks when contractions started. The hospital room contained three uncomfortable women in steel beds designed for efficiency rather than joys of a birth. Worn gray walls and dull vinyl floors absorbed light and heightened the anxiety. Mom paced, ignoring my half smiles, and begged you to move along. When her contractions became unbearable, we moved to another room for a pain block, and appearing better, Mom joked with the staff about the magic of chemistry. 

Labor was long, and the OB attached an electrode to your scalp for monitoring. After noting occasional decelerations in your heart rate, he put Mom on oxygen and told us it’s only a precaution. However, the decelerations became more ominous, coinciding with contractions, and when he told Mom to push, your heart rate plummeted. That’s when all the smiles vanished. His examination revealed a prolapsed umbilical cord—wedged between your head and her pelvic bone, and in a surreal moment, he pushed you back inside, restoring your heart rate. Climbing onto the bed, still keeping your head off the lifeline, he calmly told the staff to prepare the O.R. for an emergency C-section. Mom panicked as her bed wheeled down the hall with me beside it, and the OB reassured her that he’d handled this exact complication before and that you would be fine. Then, with surprising humor, he said she could be part of the longest pelvic exam in medical history. After the double doors closed behind you, I cried alone in a waiting room full of dated magazines and stale smoke, reacquainting myself with God.

*

Thirty-six years later, wishing we were with you, Mom and I are a blend of pride and hope as we watch the county’s ceremony online. During COVID restrictions of the 2020-2021 school year, the award for Assistant Principal of the Year is presented remotely. You are among three finalists, and we don’t breathe as they announce the winner.

Hearing you accept it, I flash back to your birth again, and how in addition to the prolapse, they found the cord knotted and wrapped around your neck. In the newborn nursery, you were called the miracle who survived a trifecta of complications that occurs just once in 150,000 deliveries. But it wasn’t a miracle. We owe your health, and maybe your life, to a cautious obstetrician who ordered oxygen hours before the crisis and protected your beautiful mind. Two decades later, he would become your OB.

In the nursery, holding you for the first time at the end of that long and distressing day, a part of my own mind, inaccessible over four decades, suddenly opened, releasing ancient emotions—preparing a father for new tasks—my most vital and welcome to-do list.

End