first meal home

Lest there be any question what the first meal post-pregnancy was...

If you're in the Sunnyvale/Cupertino area, I'd recommend Kitsho Sushi.

It's a beautiful thing.

I have a son.

As of Tuesday night, September 22, 8:57 pm, I have a son.

His name is Kazuyoshi Hobbes. He was 6 pounds and 15 ounces, was 19 inches long, and was delivered by Dr. Inouye at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, CA.

He has been in this world for all of 4 days, and he is already the center of the universe.

I don't know if there's room for two egomaniacs in the same house.

I have not written about the pregnancy much, for assorted reasons, not least among them the fact that all of my creative energies have been spent on work of late. Work was a relief from thinking about stuff that was Not Work, namely Pregnancy, namely: Will I Be a Good Mother and Holy Shit Why Did I Think This Would Be a Good Idea? In a way, this was just as well; as a result, I had a remarkably smooth pregnancy, with very little of the hormonal up and downswings that might have resulted if I'd prepared better or thought about it more. My work and coworkers reciprocated with charming gratitude and a lot of mockery, most of it along the lines of, "Holy crap. Haven't you given birth already?" And, "Are you thinking of taking a full week off for maternity leave? Have you considered maybe taking just half of one?"

In the end, I took off 4 days before the baby arrived. Not 4 consecutive days, exactly. Just ... 4 days.

I enjoyed pregnancy, after I reached the viability milestone. I briefly alluded to that in my last post, but between June and September there is a vast difference, and by the time I was ready to pop, I had bonded enough with Filbert to think of him as a bulbous imaginary friend -- minus the imaginary. I chatted with him in the car. I asked him his opinion on work issues at my office. We studied the lyrics of old Japanese songs together.

Giving birth, I decided, was going to be sad. In my stomach, Filbert was safe. Once he was outside, there would be all sorts of things that could go hideously wrong, most of them things I could end up doing to him. Drop him, say. Give him a bad example. Raise him poorly. Cause irrevocable emotional damage that could end up forever stunting his chance for future happiness. The last I was actually looking forward to -- a grand old Japanese tradition, that one is. The rest, though. Those would be bad.

The baby was due on September 30th. As a diabetic, there's always a high risk of having a large baby. I am, yes, a chubby woman, but I am not a large one; my doctor decided, with great foresight as it happened, that I should be induced on the 22nd, which was a Monday. Despite my fairly rigid diabetic control over the course of the pregnancy, the last few weeks are always a little chancy with sugar control and fetal growth.

I started my maternity leave on Friday the 12th. The following Wednesday I was back in the office to do some things that came up or were leftover from the previous week. "Go home," my coworkers said.

"Guh," I said, and eventually did.

My mother arrived on Sunday to help us over the first week hump.

"Your what is coming?" one of our friends expostulated when he heard she was going to come and stay with us. "Are you nuts?"

"It's okay," the Guy reassured him. "You have to know Yuhri's mom. She doesn't interfere."

"Much," I interjected.

"She'll probably just clean things and help out -- she doesn't try to run things."

"Much," I muttered, again.

The Guy gets along with my mother quite well, at times better than I do with her. "She'll be a real help," he said.

Our friend looked mildly unconvinced. "My mother-in-law offered to come when our first was due," he said. "I was, like--"

"No," said his wife. "No. She would've driven me crazy."

I opened my mouth, thinking about Mom. I closed it again. "Crazy," she repeated. I thought dark thoughts.

As I say, Mom came on Sunday to help out, and by Sunday night I was in labor. It is a long story, not worth telling in its entirety; the short form is that the planned induction of Monday went out the window, and the labor that was supposed to be short and productive ended up being 22 hours of misery, much of it under an epidural that wore off repeatedly, and culminated in a C-section because the labor was not going well. "The baby's heartbeat drops with each contraction," the OB said. "At this point, labor doesn't seem to be progressing as it should be. You should consider a C-section within the next hour. The baby is showing signs of stress."

"Stress," I mumbled, when the OB left to let us make up our minds whether to go ahead with the C-section or ... go ahead with the C-section. "Want to talk about stressed?"

Our choices were limited; the baby's heart beat was erratic throughout the entire process, so in the end it was down to what was best for the child. Less than 30 minutes after we'd made our decision, we had a new baby, and the surgeon was stapling me back together. I didn't feel a thing.

I love drugs.

(Mom and the Guy are in the kitchen, arguing about the dishwasher. She keeps cleaning the dishes before putting them into the washer. He thinks, not unreasonably -- but also not realistically, given the dishwashers we've had until the present one -- that this is what the dishwasher is supposed to do.)

I don't have a clear memory of what those first two days were like, starting with labor and straight through meeting my son for the very first time. The Guy, who sat by my head through the surgery and distracted me with the most idiotic commonplaces, got to cut the umbilical cord and meet his extremely angry son while I lolled on the operating table with my uterus open to the world, thinking hazy, happy thoughts about how much I liked anesthesiologists.

The initial pictures of the sprog were not promising. He looked like he'd been on a colossal bender for the last nine months, and was only dragged out of the latest biker bar under protest. Behold him making a gang sign to his father.

"He's so pink," I said, viewing the photos later. "And he looks ... dissipated."

"You can't really blame him," said the Guy. "The world outside is probably a lot like a hangover."

I do remember blinking back tears when I heard him crying. Awash in hormones, anesthetic, and the uplifting effects of a sedative, I wallowed in sentiment and a firm conviction that I adored my new son. Like any respectable Japanese woman, I launched straight into denial the second I suspected someone might be watching. A masked face appeared in my peripheral vision.

"I'm ... uh, cold," I told the anesthesiologist. I doubt he was fooled, but he was nice enough to pretend.

"Congestion is a normal side-effect of this anesthetic," he said nicely.

I snuffled defiantly. Damn straight.

(...And now the Guy is reading her the manual that came with our dishwasher. Mom is countering with some confusing explanation about Chinese dishwashers. I'm not entirely clear whether she is referring to machines or people. For the sake of political correctness, let's say she's talking about machines.)

Mom wasn't allowed into Surgery, but she met up with us again in Recovery. Photos that the Guy took of me at the time show that I was pasty white and looked like death warmed over. I certainly felt like it, that much I recall; the bucketloads of hormones raging through my system resulted in a case of serious shakes, so intense that a good week later, my jaw was still aching from being clenched so hard. Rattling as much as I was, it was impossible for me to hold the baby.

He was unmoved by the lack. Mom was a little leery about holding him initially; for all her experience with children of all ages, this particular one, her first grandchild, had her doubting herself I think. She accepted him gingerly and then held him like he was made out of finest crystal, apt to shatter at the slightest mistake.

I shouldn't mock. I'm still doing the same thing. Surely babies aren't as breakable as that, are they? Otherwise we'd none of us have made it to adulthood.

Right?

It took almost an hour for the shuddering to stop. They bore me off to the maternity wing while the Guy trotted off to the Nursery with Kazu to get care and feeding instructions: the user's manual, as it were. He returned, full of information that he dispensed in small morsels to me as my eyes unglazed.

With a C-section, I would need to stay four nights in the hospital, I was told. Of course, I could leave earlier, but-- (said the nurse, leaving the last word unspoken but significant.) But.

Would we like to have the baby stay with us the first night?

Yes? we answered, bewildered. Why? What are the options? We can put him back where he came from?

...Or you could leave him in the nursery and we could bring him to you when he wakes up and wants to feed, the nurses said, patiently ignoring our ill-timed flippancy.

Well, why wouldn't we want him with us? Puzzled and naive, the new parents announced they would keep him overnight. Hands off, nurses.

The nurses patted us kindly on the head. Just keep an eye on him to make sure he doesn't turn blue, they said. We'll give you diapers and you can call us at any time if you have any--

--wait, we said. Blue? What blue?

You'll need to keep the light on a little so you can see his color, the nurses added.

Blue? Blue?

He spent his first night in the Nursery, under the eye of qualified medical experts, while his appalled new parents huddled together in the maternity wing, muttering querulously: Blue? What blue?

"Did we bring that hat?" I asked, puzzled at the little yellow bobble-tipped cap my new son was wearing. The entire creature was a mystery to me -- the nurses, kindly but matter-of-fact, persisted on wrapping him up like a burrito in a hospital blanket, so I was at a loss as to whether he had the correct number of fingers or toes or, for that matter, limbs. What was the protocol for unwrapping babies? Was it like gifts? Do you do it in the privacy of your own home, or in a circle of expectant spectators, with one to take notes and inventory as you go? "From Aunt Dahlia ... ten fingers with nails attached. Thanks, Aunt Dahlia! From Tom and Jennifer, a nose. Wow. That was so sweet of you guys. We could totally use a nose!"

"That's from the hospital," the Guy told me, padding quietly around the room. "They have a big box full of knit hats that a volunteer makes for the babies, and they told me to pick one. They had blue ones, but I thought you'd like yellow better because I know you like yellow."

"Kupo," I said vaguely, though the Guy didn't hear me. It was the only word that came to my still-befuddled mind. "I love yellow." I twiddled the fuzzy bobble contentedly, while the baby snuffled in my arms.