What is it about them, anyway? They’re all so clean and white and have the same pictures on the walls and the same countertops and cupboards and everything else. I had occasion to be in the ER at one of the local hospitals last night for a couple hours (nothing serious, as it turns out), and it reminded me I haven’t been in a hospital room since Ava was born. It was an interesting sensation. I kept looking up at the clock, not because I was so concerned with the time, but because the clock brought back the nervous, uncomfortable feeling I had sitting in the delivery room with Leah when she was receiving one ineffective epidural after another and begging to be killed. I stared at that clock for a while and considered whether I really wanted to go through all that again…or even something like it. Leah’s already made up her mind on the matter.
Leah’s mom has already stated that she won’t be in the delivery room if Leah tries for a VBAC. It would be nice if I could opt out, too, but I’d never leave Leah at a time like that, and you’d never be able to keep me out of the room where my child was being born.
After our birth experience with Ava, Leah and I would see a TV show every once in a while that would depict all these quiet, serene, drug-free births in people’s homes with soft music playing in the background and attentive midwives hovering assuringly off in a dimly-lit corner of the room while the mother labored silently. We were not amused, Leah especially. But it’s true that everyone labors differently, a fact that hopefully offers Leah’s sister some small measure of solace. See, “they” say that a woman labors more like her sister than her mother (another kick in the shins for Leah, whose mom labored for something like five hours total with her two children).
Of course, a hospital is the place you want to be if something goes wrong with your delivery. We’re using a different hospital for our next baby, if and when it comes. It’s a nice place. Clean, with white patient rooms and tidy cupboards and framed photographs on the walls taken by locals. They depict rainbows and trees and shots of the sun going down over long, dusky farm fields. It’ll do.