Roses Are My Favorite

Really, they are.  Any color will do.  The last roses carried into this house by My Man, (who understands my penchant for the flower), were the sunniest shade of yellow I had ever seen.  They are hanging upside down on a hook in my hallway, completely dried out and still spectacular.  On my last birthday he had two-dozen of the eye-poppers delivered to my school.  They looked just a bit weathered when they arrived so he called the florist.  Two days later another two-dozen roses arrived.  For the first (and last) time in my life, I had four-dozen roses in my possession.  There were vases of flowers everywhere.  I had them on my desk at school, in my bedroom, on the kitchen table… it was a little ridiculous, but really fun.  I felt like Oprah.

Did I mention that I love roses?

Fifteen years ago the sweetest blossom of all time was laid in my arms.  She was slimy and red and bawling her lungs out.  We named her Rose.  Hannah Rose. 

She was the culmination of our childbearing years; the youngest of four children and the only girl.  I knew she would define our family in a unique way.  She did.

Her arrival was all fireworks and screaming sirens.  She was fashionably late – 15 days to be exact.  I couldn’t figure out what she was waiting for -- spring?   An invitation?  An alignment of the planets?  My dear mother flew to Vermont from Colorado three days after my due date so that she could help me once I got home from the hospital.  The first few days of her visit were lovely.  We sipped tea and chatted about anything and nothing.  And then it got ridiculous.  One week overdue and she started to look at me funny, like I had control over it or something.  Hey, I was the one with the wrecking ball sitting just above my bladder.  I was miserable.  No one wanted that baby to see sunshine more than I did.  Oh crud, just hand me a hacksaw and I’ll cut it out myself.

Days eight, nine, and ten were the longest of my life.  My suitcase for the hospital had been packed for so long that my labor lollipops had passed their expiration date.  On day ten, things really got exciting.  I had just lowered my girth into the Lazy Boy, and vaguely noticed that I had slopped spaghetti sauce on my shirt, when I heard pounding steps ascending from the basement.  John was busy renovating it so that we could rent it out, and I could continue to stay at home with our children.  I was too large to jump up to investigate, but my mother’s alarmed exclamations gave me energy to propel forward.  I got to the kitchen sink and my husband’s side as quickly as I could waddle there only to find him bleeding profusely and shaking badly.  I peeked around him to see the damage and was horrified to find fingertips gone and a bone sticking out of one exposed tip. 

My mother was making motions towards the door.  “I’ll drive,” she announced.  Somehow I found my steely core and contradicted with, “No, I’ll take him.  You stay with the children.”  She looked at me like I had been sipping the real vanilla.  “I’ll be FINE,” I assured her.

The ER was a nightmare.  He was in unbearable pain and I do not do well with chopped off fingers (or stitches. Or paper cuts.  I am a world-class sissy).  The medical staff kept casting worried glances in my direction, asking if I thought I needed to lie down.  I did, yes, but didn’t want to admit my wooziness.  They also asked often if I thought I might be going into labor.  Ha!  Fat chance.  It would take a beheading to shock my stubborn body into labor. 

We left several hours later, exhausted, swathed (there was nothing to stitch), and with a laundry list of instructions that included seeing a specialist in a few days. 

The next day my mother gathered her courage, steeled herself for the task, and descended to the scene of the crime to scrub the remnants of John’s fingers off the walls of the basement.  He had caught his right hand in the router and his shredded skin had sprayed around the room in a perfect circle.  How do you go about properly thanking someone for doing such a nasty deed? 

But still, no baby.

On day fourteen, the doctor finally cried “uncle” and declared Baby No-Show the winner.  He scheduled me for inducement on the following day.  As we walked into the hospital (John walked, I waddled and gasped for air), we passed a father and daughter holding hands.  My breath caught just a little at the beautiful sight.  And I knew I could lie to myself no longer.  I wanted a girl.  I wanted a daughter so badly I nearly burst (which would have made delivery infinitely easier). 

Don’t get me wrong.  I adore my sons.  In fact, at the outset of this journey called Parenthood, I really wanted a passel of boys.  Boys are such fun.  But after three of them, something in me wanted a female child that was a part of me and my femininity.  I wanted a legacy, I guess.

Labor was a piece of cake.  Seven hours and all the pain meds I could want did the trick.  The nurse had said early, “Mrs. Dahl, when you are ready for pain med….”  I cut her off mid-sentence.  “Now would be a good time.” By the fourth child my labor and delivery motto had become, unnecessary pain is, well, unnecessary.  Natural childbirth is overrated.  It hurts like crazy.  I’m a sissy, remember?

Bringing her into this world was easy too.  She was my smallest newborn yet; seven pounds and ten ounces.   Her brothers were all nearly nine pounds.  She was a wisp of a thing comparatively.  One final push and the first words out of my mouth were (after thank goodness, it’s over),  “what is it?”  The doctor said to John, “I think you should tell her.”  John gazed at his child and said in wonder, “It’s a girl.”  I was filled with ecstasy, but made him repeat himself just to be sure.  John and Vonda weren’t in the habit of bringing girls into the world.  Maybe I had misunderstood.   

I melted the moment her tiny form was laid against my exhausted body.  She was so incredibly perfect.  Tiny features and a mass of unbelievably long hair graced my baby.  So tiny and so beautiful.

We were in the midst of calls to anxious family members, the doctor doing her thing to put me back to rights, when I heard the doctor say softly, “There’s too much blood.”  And then she disappeared, which I found odd and was contemplating that weirdness when suddenly a couple of doctors appeared at my side, whom I had never laid eyes on before.  “You need surgery, and you need it now,” was all I heard. 

It was like at that moment I settled into the eye of a hurricane while gale force winds swirled around me.  Things suddenly began happening at lightning speed all around me and I could only lie there observing.  My baby was wrenched from my arms and placed in John’s.  My bed was hurtled down the hall and into a waiting surgery unit.  Medical personnel and supplies were whizzing by me at an incredible pace. 

As I entered the OR, I now experienced the physical side effects of severe blood loss.  Somehow I knew I was going into shock.  “I’m going to be sick,” I said weakly.  After retching into a pan, I was now being prepped for surgery, and I was scared.  I knew I was dying.  I could feel my life evaporating and my strength weakening at an alarming rate.  I heard the anesthesiologist calling out my blood pressure readings and the numbers were dropping like a stone off a bridge.  I was losing my life and I didn’t want to.  I wanted to live to see my new baby and my sons grow up.  I didn’t want my life to end on that cold table, my daughter just yards away in someone else’s arms.

Surgery lasted for hours.  When at last they wheeled me back, I had lost three-quarters of my total blood supply.  They pumped so much saline solution into me to prevent shock that my own husband did not recognize me.  Every part of my body was swollen beyond recognition.  My face, my extremities, even my tongue were horribly swollen and distorted. 

I came out of the anesthesia aware that John was bent over me, near desperate with worry, declaring his love for me.  When I awoke again, I was in the most amazing agony I had ever encountered.  Puzzled, the doctors shipped me off for an MRI and found a blood clot in my abdomen that had become infected during the night hours.  I had dodged one bullet, now I faced another.  It would take ten days in the hospital on round-the-clock intravenous antibiotics to fight a life-threatening infection.

Somewhere, I have a picture of John and I and our new baby during my hospital stay.  I am still monstrously swollen, in unbearable pain, and poor John is holding Hannah, his hand in a huge white gauze bandage, his own face drawn and tired.  We were the most pathetic new parents on the face of the earth.  It was pretty awful. 

And yet, I kept stubbornly trying to figure out a way to get myself home to my own bed and my other children.  I knew I was sick, but I couldn’t just LIE here, for goodness sakes’!  I learned the routine of the nurses, and knew that if I asked for Tylenol about an hour before they took my temperature, then they would get a better reading.  Mind you, my fever was so high I laid there shivering under blankets most of the time, but I had to get home!  On one of the early morning rounds of doctor visits, they and their team of medical students gave me the rundown of numbers for various tests and procedures and I listened politely and nodded appropriately, but I knew the jig was up when they said on their way out, “And no more asking for Tylenol just before getting your temp taken!”  I smiled sheepishly.  Busted.

The one upside of that terrible time is, I could do nothing except hold my baby.  The nurses tried to give me rest and hold her in the nursery as much as possible, but I wanted her with me.  I was determined to breastfeed, as I had the other three, so the night staff would obediently bring her to me from the nursery.  But I found she slept better and longer, (and therefore, so did I), if I kept her in my private room with me.  By day seven, the hospital could not justify her presence in the nursery any longer (she was fine).  So it was either send her home with her dad (who wasn’t that great at breastfeeding), or keep her in my room with me full-time.  Not much choice there, really.   So I held her all day, and most of the night.  After lunch when my fever would spike and I could keep my burning eyes open no longer, I would tuck her tiny body between the bed rail and me and we would sleep, she and I.  Sleep all afternoon and into the evening.  Both of us resting and healing from the ordeal of her birth. 

Something tender and wonderful happened in those hours of her body lying against mine.  A bonding took place like I had never experienced before.  Insurance companies are so quick to kick mothers out of the hospital, that moms do not get a chance to properly greet their New Wonder.  Once we are back home, we are right back into the business of care taking.  It’s a little screwy, to be honest.

But since I could do nothing but lie there helplessly, I felt a deepening kinship growing between myself and her, this tiny elfin creature.  A metaphorical umbilical cord nourished us both and knit our spirits tightly together.  It was an amazing experience. 

I have always said that she was born in a ray of sunshine.  Many of you will question my truthfulness here, but that is because you don’t really know my Rosie.  The honest truth is, she has never given her dad or I a moment’s heartache.  She is respectful, compliant, obedient, and helpful without complaint.  She is the most emotionally even-keeled person I have ever encountered.  No theatrics.  No tantrums.  No fights.

Does she seem too good to be true?  She nearly is. 

There is a place within the soul of a woman from which the most special love on earth is generated and overflows to those she loves dearest; her children.  We love our husbands, and we love our parents and siblings and friends.  But that love is different by far from that which is reserved for our offspring.  It is the stamina that keeps us up all night with a newborn or a sick child.  It is the white-hot anger that places us between any potential threat and our children.  It is the unconscious urge to touch a toddler’s cheek or brush our lips across a fevered brow.  It is the all-consuming focus we have when college children are traveling in stormy weather, or curfew is ignored.  It is what makes us nurturing, perceptive, and strong in the face of devastating diagnosis.  It is the essence of Mother.

Hannah my Luv, I know you will read this (you always read these).  Please know that every glowing word I have written here is absolutely true and wells from that deep place in a mother’s heart that only another mother can understand.

I am thankful beyond words that God spared my life that night and handed me the privilege of watching you grow into the breathtakingly lovely woman that you are becoming.  I both admire and respect you, Sweetness.  I am honored and humbled to be your mother. 

You are Joy itself.

Thank you for being forgiving when I have made mistakes and thank you for allowing our relationship to grow and unfold into less one of a parent and child, and more of a mutual friendship.  I believe with all my heart that our future will be filled with warm interaction and deep fondness for one another.  Will I annoy you from time to time?  Of course.  I might even embarrass you once in while.  It’s what mothers do (and we are GOOD at it).  But you will look beyond that and see me with eyes of unconditional love, as I do my mother, she her own mother.

And someday, you will hand me your own newborn daughter, and the circle will be complete. 

I was wearing a pair of simple pearl earrings the night you were born.  I wore them when you took your first breath.  They adorned my head through surgery and all through that long night when life hung in the balance.  I discovered the next day that one was missing, and was alarmed until I felt around the bed and discovered it hiding underneath me.  At that moment, I knew I wanted to give them to you when you were old enough to appreciate what they represent.  When you have finished reading this, go find them in my jewelry drawer and claim them as your own.  I want you to have them.  When you look at them or wear them, be reminded that life is precious and sweet, even when your own may be difficult.  God loves you even more than I do and has an amazing plan for your life.  Embrace and enjoy each day of your own journey.

Happy birthday, my precious girl!  My Hannah Rose.  May your life be filled with blessings too numerous to count…

… just as mine is.