“Where’d all the time go?
It’s starting to fly
See how the hands go
Waving goodbye
And you know I get so forgetful
When I look in your eyes” — Dr. Dog | Where’d All the Time Go?
Another lifetime ago, when I was in my first couple of summers out of college, I worked as a camp counselor. It was a blast — my job was, more or less, to play sports with kids while wearing a T-shirt and shorts outdoors all day in the summertime. But it was also a lot of responsibility. Because in addition to our counselor duties, we also served as bus drivers, which required us to obtain a commercial drivers license in order to shuttle campers from and back to their houses each day.
On my rides home — from the east side of the Oakland hills in Walnut Creek, where the camp was, back to where I and my cohort of riders lived in Berkeley and Oakland — we would play a game. To pass the time (and to make the non-air conditioned commute more bearable until we escaped back into the marine layer through the Caldecott Tunnel), we would take guesses on exactly when I would arrive at everyone’s door. I always went first, giving each camper the chance to go over or under with their guesses. Being behind the wheel of a bus, it may seem like I had more control, but I was on a set route. I was also at the mercy of traffic, and speed limits (which I dutifully obeyed), making full stops at every red, octagonal sign. Still, more often than not, I’d nail my guesses down within a minute or two.
There are, in my experience, three types of people when it comes to estimating time. There are those who leave for the airport three hours early, preferring to buffer for any and every possible delay in order to relieve the stresses of being late. They’re the first ones to any social gathering, ahead of their reservation times at restaurants, in their seats 10 minutes before previews start at the multiplex.
There’s folks like me, who try to think about the time it will take to reasonably get somewhere, and who budget for exactly that, plus maybe a slight cushion. We value other peoples’ time enough not to be late ourselves, but also value our own time enough not to waste it waiting around. I don’t want to speak for others, but I know that, as a generally on-time person, I do not like to wait for late people, as I’ve always felt being on time is a sign of respect for others.
Then, there are late people. The friends who text you that they’re leaving their house when they’re just hopping in the shower. The people who know it takes 20 minutes to get across town but only ever leave themselves 10. If you’re a member of the first two groups, these people probably drive you nuts.
My wife is a late person. She has missed multiple flights in her life. It’s funny, because she’s the more organized and prepared one of us by a country mile. She’s a whiz with spreadsheets. She keeps our budget. She absolutely carries our household. If it was just me, I’d still cook and eat lots of good food, but I’d also probably still be sleeping on a mattress on the floor, like I was when we met.
When I married a late person, I understood what I was signing up for. When I decided to have a child with one, the very first question of which parent she would take after came into focus through this lens. Would she be early? On-time like her dad? Or late, like her mom?
The Primex 72MHz XR Traditional square clock looks like many of the clocks you’ve encountered in school rooms or offices throughout your life. You’ve probably seen one and never realized it. Slightly rounded around its square, silver frame, it displays bold black numbers on a white background. It was one of the first things I noticed in our room at Sibley Memorial Hospital, not because it stuck out in any striking, visual way, but because of the odd way it was counting. For five seconds, the red second hand would sit idle, suspended in time, then suddenly jolt through its ticks to catch up, only to repeat this odd dilation and contraction of time, over and over again.
Parenthood is often described with the frame that the days are long, but the years are short. Spending time at a hospital can have the same feeling, especially if you’re stuck in the same delivery room for days as you wait for your own dilations and contractions, each hour stretching endlessly into the next, all while the world spins along outside your walls without you.
When we arrived on Saturday night for my wife’s induction, we’d already blown past our daughter’s due date by three days. This was the backstop, the measure to ensure that everyone got to the other side as healthy as possible. But we’d already been waiting in a sense of suspended animation for a couple of weeks. We’d fixed some outstanding items around the house, bought and constructed the bassinet, and the dresser, and the changing table, and the formula maker, and the carseat, and the stroller, and a whole collection of clothes and burp cloths and bottles and things I haven’t even figured out what they do yet (you can guess who researched and bought those). And we’ve just been waking up every day, waiting.
The hospital felt like more of the same. After starting on medication Saturday evening, my wife began contractions, but seemingly stalled out with them coming a few minutes apart, all night.
And it continued on the whole next day. There was, evidently, a huge glut of other deliveries happening around the ward, so our doctor was in no hurry to try to push us along. And so we waited. And waited. And waited, deep into another mostly sleepless night.
We were awoken, at long last, in the waning hours of our second night, and told the conditions were right to finally start pushing. And after waiting all that time to get started in earnest, it was still just the three of us in the room for about 45 minutes, my wife along with our nurse Joyce and me, each of us bracing one leg, the nurse assuring my wife she was making slow, but steady progress, that this was often a long process that could run several hours.
And then, very suddenly — much more so than any of us had planned — there were four of us. This did not include the doctor, who Joyce was calmly but urgently dialing on phone with one hand while trying to manage the delivery with her other.
We didn’t have enough time to register the things that were concerning in those first moments, other than to know that our newest family member needed some immediate attention. The important things to know: Her initial Apgar score, one minute after birth, was a three. She had a true knot in her umbilical cord. The gravity of things like this take time to fully set in. But before they could, the worries about what they might mean were washed away.
The knot doesn’t appear to have caused any issues. A true knot happens in less than 1% of pregnancies, but if you make it through birth without issue, the potentially catastrophic results are behind you.
Her second score, four minutes later, was a nine. As we would later learn, babies’ hands and feet are nearly universally a little blue, meaning 10s are basically unheard of. Nine is as good as it gets. (The next morning, another one of our nurses joked about how seriously some of the D.C. parents take those Apgar scores, as if they were some prerequisite for preschool applications, nudging doctors to try to bump them up after the fact, like they were an arbitrary grade on some under-baked term paper about The War of 1812.)
I went over to the nurses’ table to see our daughter once she was stable, instinctually offering my pointer fingers to give her hands something to hold as the medical team performed a battery of tests. She immediately latched a hand onto each one, strongly, and held on throughout, not fussing beyond her initial cry, the vital, vocal indicator of life.
The nurse apologized to me for the shot she was about to give and for the crying that would ensue. Instead, our daughter let out a single meep. She’s shrugged off each ensuing heel prick as nothing more than a small bother. All in all, she’s been overwhelmingly agreeable and more patient than we had any right to expect in the days since. She was born ready.
Neither my wife nor I are the types to try to plan out every detail in advance. We enjoy being as prepared as we can be, but the surprises in life are what make it memorable, and often the greatest things happen when you least expect them to.
Our daughter’s due date had no particular significance to us, and neither did any of the days immediately preceding it. But Sunday, the day it seemed like an induction would deliver her to us, was my late mom’s birthday. While that would have been quite the stroke of timing, it also would have been a pretty heavy happenstance. And although I’m sure it all would have been fine, I’m happy she won’t have to always think about her birthday in connection to a grandmother she never met.
Besides, the ticking of the clock past midnight brought about another reality.
After our dog Bear passed last month, some good friends of ours gave us a wonderful gift, a plaque referencing something I’d written about his ubiquity in our lives: Bear’s House. We’d already talked about finding a way to work his name into our daughter’s. Because labor took the extra day, she wasn’t born until the nautical twilight in the predawn hours of Monday morning. That meant, improbably, her birthday landed on the same day as Bear’s.
And so there she was, all at once — Emerson Adeline Bear Frank — five days late and right on time.
And so the adventure begins. Welcome to the human race, Emmy Bear.
Hi Emmy Bear! xox Bev