Your mama is a courageous person, but by the time you are able to read this, you will already be well aware of the fact. I thought it important to put the story of your birth into writing because over the last twenty days of your life, your mama's courage has been something worth marveling over - something worth remembering - and I thought you might someday want to know all that happened on the day you arrived in this strange and beautiful world.
My alarm was set for 5 am on Friday morning, my normal waking hour for a normal work day. I don't have to be at work, a measly 10 minute bike ride away, until 6:30, but the quiet at that hour, if I can slough myself out of bed, is really one of God's many good gifts.
Mama was already awake:
"Hey, I've been feeling contractions all night long."
"Really?" I smiled, then sat up in bed quickly as I tried to make sense in my half-sleep stupor of why she had been so courteous as to wait for my alarm clock to share this somewhat important news with me.
"Yeah, they've been coming on and off for a while now. I can't decide if they're the real thing or not." (This playing down of what the old-timers refer to as "the pains" was sort of the hallmark of 80% of mom's laboring to birth you.
Needless to say, I was excited, but lest we get our hopes up and this train of pain come to a mysterious halt, as labor tends to do, (or so they tell me), I went ahead and put my carhartts and long underwear on, made a cup of coffee, and filled up my thermos with green tea (a macho combination if ever I've heard of one) to head out for a day of gardening.
Mom and I, being the decisive types, debated about whether or not I should "call out sick," finally settling that I should head on out, knowing that I could get home pretty quickly if the proverbial weather began to change. So I wrapped myself up in polarfleece, clicked on my headlamp, and pedaled out into the rainiest day I can remember since we moved to Berkeley...
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