Writing class Prompt:
What is the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you?
Does it still frighten you?
Does is still impact your life in any way?
“BREATHE IAN, BREATHE!!”
I’ll never, ever forget hearing those words.
I had just given birth to my first child, my son Ian. We were living then in Christchurch, New Zealand. My husband had taken a consulting job there while I was 6 months pregnant. Sure, I had wanted very much to go there and had visions of vacations in nearby Fiji and Australia. It sounded wonderful, and we had moved everything into a storage facility, said goodbye to our beachfront apartment in Oxnard, California, and said, “Ta” to our new Kiwi neighbors.
“C’MON IAN! BREATHE!” our mid-wife Cyndy yelled once again. What was going on??? I was terrified. I knew something was wrong with my baby. The frightened look on my husband’s face said it all. He looked pale and about to pass out. My legs still up in stirrups, the room was completely calm except for the frantic urging of our midwife begging our new baby to breathe.
Unbeknowst to me, the umbilical cord was wrapped around my baby’s neck. He wasn’t breathing when he was born. My husband had timidly taken the sharp instrument from our doctor to cut the cord, and looked up at me proudly. It was a moment he knew he’d always remember, no matter what. The cutting symbolically made him a dad.
Cradling our baby, our doctor scurried to the exam table with him and from where I was laying in the hospital bed, I couldn’t see my baby. All I could hear was her pleas for him to breathe. And just like a movie, it seemed that time was moving slow as molasses. What was going on??? And OH MY GOD IS MY BABY DEAD???
And then, oh man, did he let out a cry. Like he’d been holding it in for 9 months. Nine months and 21 days by the way. He wasn’t planning on ever coming out on his own. I’d had to be induced. And just like the teenager he’s grown up to be, he’s absolutely terrible to get up in the mornings for school.
He’s a freshman in college now, and every now and then, my husband or I will reference that fateful day, and we know that we will never forget hearing those horrific words that day. And we thank God every day that there was something that moment he definitely had to cry about.
