Here's my Father's Day, about when my son - our first child - was born in China.
We were living on the west side of Beijing, and the main foreign-run hospital, where all the expats have their children, is way on the east side.
Outside of rush hour, it takes about 45 minutes to get there, by taxi. As the due date approached, I kept thinking that *as long as we can avoid rush hour* we should be fine.
A few days before the due date, my wife and I was in our apartment making preparations to meet another couple for dinner. All of a sudden I hear a shriek from the bathroom.
"My water just broke." Okay, stay calm. Time to go to the hospital. But it's the middle of evening rush hour. Uh-oh.
While she gathers her overnight bag, I rush outside onto Finance Street, where we were living. Bumper to bumper traffic near the taxi pick-up point, and all the taxis are full.
Finally I spy an empty taxi. I throw myself in front of it. The driver waves me off. In Chinese I frantically explain: "My wife is having a baby! We need to go to the hospital!" His demeanor immediately changes: "Get in!"
As we wheel (slowly) around to our apartment, I spy my wife standing at the corner. The driver raises his eyebrows. I can tell he's thinking "She doesn't LOOK like she's going into labor." As she climbs in, I say "Trust me, she has time, but we have to go!"
Traffic was ... excruciating. Hell, we might as well have walked - at least that's what it felt like. It took us over two hours of inching forward on the packed expressway to get there. Every few minutes the driver peeked back at us, half expecting to see a baby pop out.
Anyway, we did get there. They started monitoring my wife's contractions, but instead of getting more frequent, they just became longer, with longer gaps between them.
It became clear that no baby was immediately arriving. We would be there overnight. Since her water already broke, though, the baby would have to be delivered one way or another the following day.
The next morning the doctor comes in. She reaches up to check out the baby, and I immediate see the look on her face change. "That's his shoulder, not his head. He's sideways." I know what's coming next. "We have to schedule a c-section."
Long story short, it turns out later that our son had a "true knot" in his umbilical cord. Every time he got pushed out, the cord tightened, cutting off his blood supply. Being a smart little guy, he twisted himself to the side.
Anyway, the c-section happens that afternoon, almost 24 hours after we started for the hospital. I'm sitting there next to my wife's head, with a screen blocking us from whatever the doctors are doing.
There was only one point where I started thinking about her being cut open, and got a little woozy in my head. But then I though "Okay, don't be an idiot and faint now." and pulled it together.
I still remember the moment I hear my son, who is now age 10, cry for the first time. I thought, at that moment, "This is a voice I'm going to hear for the rest of my life." I knew my life was forever changed from this moment on.
They cleaned him up and put him next to my wife's face. They're still sewing her up on the other side of the screen, so she's understandably a little distracted! The two of them - mama and baby - just look at each other blankly.
Two more amusing events follow, over the next few days. First, I finally took a taxi back home to take a shower and gather some things ...
The moment I leave, the lamaze class woman shows up. She means well, but she's a bit fanatical. She believes, in particular, they the mother and baby should maximize skin contact to facilitate breast-feeding.
So the moment I'm gone, she appears in the room and starts prodding my exhausted wife to "Get naked with the baby!" Lady, please, we've had a bit of an ordeal. My wife still laughs at the story.
Next I had to pay the hospital bill. See, in China a lot of things are cash only. And the largest denomination bill is 100 yuan, or about $15. And we're talking about a hospital bill here of several thousand US dollars.
So my father-in-law shows up, in the hospital lobby, with the cash. It's literally a paper grocery bag with "mad stacks" of cash piled up inside. We hand it over to the hospital receptionist like some kind of drug deal, and she runs them all through the counting machine.
These are my Father's Day memories, from the day just over 10 years ago when I became a father.
