birth stories

i think we all enjoy a good birth story. especially our own birth story. now that i'm a mother, i love hearing my parents recount how i was born. how i was a month late (truly!) ... how drawn-out and never-ending my mom's labor was ... and how, after waiting as long as he could, my father went home to feed the dogs and when he returned, i had arrived. (yes, you read that right. my father missed the birth of his first child because he was feeding the dogs.) so on sunday, as we four ate our dinner together as we do almost every evening, i asked liam and susanna if they wanted to hear a story. a story that unfolded on the same night three years ago, when our family of three turned into a family of four. we told them how we had put liam to bed the night of may 17, mommy's belly huge as she leaned down to give him a kiss goodnight, and then how he woke up the next morning and found out from his grandmother that he suddenly had a new little sister. a crazy whirlwind of a night, that was, involving a lightning-fast labor, three pushes, and a hearty wail as chris and i learned we were now parents to a daughter. and i realized that this is how family histories are woven -- over a meal at the kitchen table, with a mesmerized three year old girl and her big brother, listening raptly as their parents took a trip down memory lane. while liam kept peppering us with questions about himself: "where was i?", "what did i do?", "who took care of me?", susanna was content soaking it all in, since it was all about her. a generation from now, this story will assuredly be part of our history, after having been told and re-told and owned and adored by our children. susanna will share with her kids how she was almost born in the hospital bathtub. liam will laugh about the fact that the only thing remotely interesting to him when he arrived to meet his sister for the first time was the reclining button on the hospital bed. i'm sure chris will exaggerate about how tightly i gripped his knee as i suffered contraction after contraction on the ten-minute ride to the hospital at three o'clock in the morning. other people have far more spectacular stories, of course, like my friend liz, who brought home a son to a wall-to-wall pink nursery after having multiple ultrasounds confirm she was carrying a girl. (surprise!) or my friend mary beth, whose baby had open-heart surgery performed on her in the womb. or my friend laura, who was born on the bathroom floor, delivered by her father when her mom realized she was just not going to make it to the hospital. so, no, susanna's birth is really not a spectacular story. but to us, our little family of four, it's where our history begins. it's our genesis as a family. it's when we became us. i guess it's pretty spectacular after all.