Coop_ A Year of Poultry, Pigs, and Parenting - Michael Perry [57]
“Are you saying I should come home?” I ask. Specific instructions work best.
“Yes.”
The crew is just making supper, so they send me on my way with a tin of homemade lasagna. Someone wrote “Good Luck!” on the container. I thought that was nice. Driving home through the lowering light, I don’t know what to think. In fact I am numb to the idea of what’s happening. When I get home, I stow the car in the garage and walk in to find Anneliese. She’s on the couch. I hug her, ask her how she’s feeling. The contractions are steady, she says. Cripes, I think, here we go. I get a watch and time a few. Then I call my mom. And then Leah, the midwife.
Leah arrives around 8:00 p.m. Her student and assistant arrive shortly after. When Mom and Anneliese’s friend Jaci join us, I look around at all the women and I’m grateful, but I’m also wishing my buddy Mills was available. We have a twenty-year history now, having met when he was a medical first responder and I was a freshly minted nurse and EMT. These days he is a full-time firefighter and paramedic and I am a medical first responder. Now that I am back down in this area, we occasionally respond to the same emergency calls again. Only now, when we meet on scene, he is the one in charge. It’s not the first time I’ve experienced responsibility role reversal—truth is, I enjoy it. In his career, Mills has delivered six babies, so a while back when I realized the home delivery team was trending all-female I asked Mills if he would be my doula. “Y’wha-wha?” he said. Only partially tongue in cheek, I explained that a doula provides physical and emotional support through the birth process. He beamed and accepted. Unfortunately, tonight he’s pulling a twenty-four-hour shift back at Station #5 and won’t be off until tomorrow morning.
We move upstairs to the bedroom so Leah can examine Anneliese. For the first time I notice Anneliese is trembling. I’ve never seen her so vulnerable. I hold her hand and she squeezes back and it hits me how powerful this is going to be, and then Leah says, “You’re only two centimeters.” Quite a ways to go yet, then. Anticipating the long night ahead, Leah and her helpers go into a back bedroom to sleep. Leah recommends that Anneliese try to do the same, but Anneliese is too nerved up, so we go back downstairs. I stoke the woodstove, and we time some more contractions. Then Jaci takes some goofy pictures, including one of me staring at Anneliese’s bare belly with a look of bewilderment. I really don’t have to dig too deep for motivation.
Many years ago when we burned the old feed mill in New Auburn, I was allowed to rescue the blackboard where the managers used to update feed prices. It’s made of enameled steel and reads CO-OP FEED—ANIMAL HEALTH across the top. It hung in my New Auburn kitchen for years. When we moved into the Fall Creek farmhouse, I hung it from a nail in the kitchen here. Jaci has been using the blackboard to log contractions. Beneath the times you can still make out faint renderings of the price of cracked corn and sunflower seeds. It’s nice, sitting there on our old couch with a good fire going in the stove and my mother off to the side knitting, her aluminum needles clicking softly in the yarn as Jaci keeps time.
And then it all stops. The contractions fade, then cease. Hoping for a kick-start, Anneliese and I go for a walk. Outside, the wind is wintry cold, and oak leaves skitter across the driveway. The warm spate is over, and it feels more like autumn than spring. We walk out the drive and down to the mailbox, then back up the drive and out the ridge, where we stand quiet for a while. The moon glows behind a thin veil of clouds, shedding just enough glow so that we may see the general shape of the land. I hold Anneliese close, her cheek cool against mine. I can feel her trembling still, but I don’t feel very sheltering or strong. Sometimes I don’t make much of a grown-up. I’m a little boy who prefers to shape