Oh, Baby!

“Still, ‘Stay out of the way,’ just like that? What a—”

“Don’t say it,” I warned. “Just because Reynolds doesn’t like doulas, it doesn’t mean he isn’t a good doctor. Frankly, after watching him in action, I think he’s a great doctor. He has so much compassion for his patients that it practically oozes out of every pore. He was gentle, kind, patient, encouraging and supportive, all necessary things when a mother is giving birth to a baby the size of my bowling ball.”

“You’re defending him?”

“He didn’t kick me out of the hospital.”

“I’ve heard he’s campaigning with the hospital board to limit the number of people in a birthing room. Everyone reads that to mean that he doesn’t want birthing coaches or anyone but spouses or the very closest family involved.”

“Maybe I showed him that it can be a good thing.” I cleared my throat. “Unless he didn’t like my singing.”

“Your singing? I thought you were at a birth, not the opera.”

“It was totally embarrassing,” I admitted, “but Brenda heard me humming once and told me I had a pretty voice. I never dreamed she’d demand that I sing to her during delivery.”

“No kidding? You sang this baby into the world?”

“If I’d been that baby, I would have hung on to my mother’s rib cage and refused to come out after listening to me for five minutes. My repertoire is limited. My mind went blank, and all I could remember was the theme song from The Brady Bunch, ‘Farmer in the Dell,’ ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and ‘How Great Thou Art.’ Brenda enjoyed it, but Dr. Reynolds’s jaw was twitching by the fourth or fifth time through ‘and the mouse took the cheese.’” I shrugged. “But whatever a client wants, including distraction, she gets.”

“When I have a baby I want you to be my doula,” Lissy said. “And I want you to start learning words to new songs right away. I would not deliver a baby to the theme song from The Brady Bunch. Do something more contemporary, will you? Or show tunes like the soundtrack from Les Mis or Phantom.”

Lissy washed down her peanut butter crackers with milk from my refrigerator and started to dig in my cupboards for candy. She’s as comfortable here as she is in her own home. Lissy and I have known each other for years. We met in an exercise class and bonded because we were the only two that had actually come to exercise and not to meet men. She and I in our ponytails and sweats had stood out in a room full of beautiful women in Danskin with full face makeup and hairdos sprayed so as not to move even during tae bo. After class, while all the others mobbed the instructor, a hunky guy with protruding veins and bulging muscles, to ask questions and to get a closer look, Lissy and I went to the juice bar and drowned our sorrows in chocolate-banana smoothies. We’ve been friends ever since.

Lissy is a nurse at Bradford Medical Center and the one who actually told me what a doula was and suggested that I should become one.

“What do you think makes him that way?” I asked.

“Dr. Reynolds, you mean? I don’t know. It’s his particular hangup, I guess, the nobody-but-medical-people-present-during-birth thing. Too bad you’re on the opposing team. I guess he can be really nice when he wants to be.”

“Tell me about him.” I didn’t really care, but I didn’t want Lissy to go home, either.

Two months ago I broke up with a fellow I’d been dating from church. To be truthful, the relationship was more serious on his side than it was on mine, but I do miss his company. Nights are longer without him to talk to on the phone or drop by.

It was for the best. Hank Marcus has a plan for his life. It includes a wife, which could have been me had I said yes, and a fast track in his business. He’d begged me to marry him and come with him to Mississippi where his company is opening a new plant. That was a huge part of the problem. My life plan does not currently include marriage or Mississippi. Although I miss Hank, I’m not devastated without him, either. When I marry, it will have to be to a man I refuse to live without. And that, I’m learning, may take some time to find. The prospects are dim right now, but I’m so busy it doesn’t really matter.

“I don’t know much about him. No one does. He keeps to himself. He’s well respected in the medical community and when he speaks, people listen. The board is giddy with joy at having him here, of course. His patients love him and the nurses are scared of him because he is so meticulous and exacting. He spends almost no time in small talk with anyone. He leaves immediately after his work is complete and doesn’t ever tell anyone where he is going or what he is doing. I’ve heard he has a child, a little boy. He’s great with kids. I’ve seen him with the brothers and sisters of new babies. I’ve never heard anything about a wife, but who knows? He’s certainly not telling.”

“For not knowing anything about him, you seem to have quite a bit of information,” I observed. I dug into the bag of chocolate chips Lissy brought to the table.

“People talk, I listen.” Then she grew serious. “Listen, Molly, I really think that since you are the first doula ever to darken Dr. Reynolds’s doorstep, so to speak, you should tread very carefully if you want him to give you his stamp of approval. He’s got a lot of influence in this hospital.”

“How did he get so powerful, anyway?”

Lissy looked at me, shocked. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“Bradshaw Medical Center. Dr. Everett Bradshaw?”

“Sure. He funded the hospital forty years ago. He was a relatively young man at the time. His picture is hanging in the front lobby where no one can miss it.”

“Exactly. Dr. Reynolds is Clay Bradshaw Reynolds. His grandfather funded this hospital. If it weren’t for the Bradshaw family, this facility wouldn’t exist. When he moved here to be on staff, the buzz was that when he spoke, everyone was to listen.”

My heart sank. He really could put the kibosh on my idea for a fledgling doula program at this hospital.

“He hasn’t been as demanding as everyone expected,” Lissy continued, “but he is fanatical about what happens to what he calls ‘his’ mothers. All I can say is, watch your step.”

His mothers? And all along I’d thought they were my mothers.

Chapter Two

“How’s my favorite Irish lassie?” Tony DeMatteo grinned at me and dangled a Snickers bar in front of my nose. “Want to share?”

“Of course I do, but only if you promise to quit calling me a lassie. I feel like you’re talking to a dog every time you say it.” I took a swipe at the candy bar, and he pulled it neatly away.

“That’s the last thing you are, Molly.” His dark brown eyes twinkled with warmth. “But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Tony is the only male nurse on the ob-gyn floor, a Shakespeare buff and an incorrigible romantic. Combine that with his unquenchable enthusiasm for living, passion for good food and lots of fun and Tony is virtually irresistible. All the single women in the hospital are, or have been at one time or another, madly in love with Tony. He has a knack of dating and breaking up with women and leaving them still loving him. He is a professional bachelor and masterful at it. At one end of the spectrum, Tony is the ultimate charmer. Dr. Reynolds, according to the hospital rumor mill, is the other. The men at Bradford Medical Center run the gamut.

I love Tony, too, but as a friend. I might have succumbed to his charms myself if I hadn’t watched him sweep woman after woman off her feet and then, after a few weeks or months, let her down gently. It was easier, I decided, to go directly to friendship with Tony. I’m glad I did. He might have been harder to resist than Hank had he decided to propose to me and move to Mississippi.

“I have Almond Joys in my locker,” he whispered seductively. “An entire unopened bag of miniatures. Want to go to the cafeteria with me and eat them with whole milk?”

“What are you trying to do, make me fat?” It’s a joke around the hospital that Tony can eat anything and not gain an ounce. That’s another reason I’ve avoided a romance with Tony. The women who date him usually gain ten to fifteen pounds during their relationship.

“Why don’t you ever fall subject to my charms?” he asked conversationally as we walked toward the lunch room.

“You’re a slippery slope, Tony. I just don’t get too close to the edge.”

He looked at me thoughtfully. “But you could be coaxed a little nearer, couldn’t you?”

I glared at him. “Don’t get any ideas in your head about romancing me, big guy. I’ve got your number. You love women and you love dating. You just hate committing.”

“Commitment. Such a problematic word.” He sounded put-upon just saying it.

We entered the cafeteria and picked out our lunch. Cottage cheese and a pear for me, three slices of pizza, a strawberry shake and a Dove bar for Tony. Oh yes, and several Almond Joys—with milk.

“I just haven’t found the right one yet, that’s all. Once I do…” He gazed thoughtfully toward the large aviary outside the cafeteria’s glassed windows. “‘Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’”

“What’s the Shakespeare stuff, anyway? Why do you always quote it?”

He grinned. “I figured out by the time I was fifteen that girls love romantic junk, poetry, flowers, candy. I could get ‘older’ women, the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds, to date me with that stuff.”

It probably didn’t hurt that you looked like a young Adonis, either, I thought.

“The unexpected part was that, while I was researching good pickup lines, I discovered I liked it—Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Shelly.” His eyes twinkled again. “Better yet, I found I couldn’t go wrong with those guys.”

“You are an incorrigible, totally irredeemable, unmitigated flirt.”

He leaned back to look at me and put his hands behind his head. The fabric of his white uniform stretched tight over a great set of pectorals. “I know. Ain’t it grand?”

Tony’s gaze flickered from me to something just over my shoulder. I turned to see what had attracted his attention.

It was what—or rather, who—was attracting everyone’s attention these days. Dr. Clay Reynolds.

“Have you worked with him yet?” I asked.

“He’s a perfectionist,” Tony said, “and a control freak during delivery.”

“I just had my first experience with him.”

“How’d it go?”

“I didn’t feel very welcome. It probably didn’t help that my client kept telling Dr. Reynolds that she wouldn’t have been able to get through the delivery without me. She didn’t exactly praise him for his part in it all. In fact, I think she included him with all the other men in the world who should be shot by a firing squad. You know how touchy these mothers get when they’re dilated to nine. The birth went well, though.”

“Maybe you’ll grow on him,” Tony said encouragingly. “You help with Lamaze classes here all the time, and the volunteer program at the free clinic would fall apart without you. He’ll get used to you.”

I could hardly disagree with Tony. He’s fought some uphill battles himself as a male nurse in the utterly feminine obstetrics ward. His competence and professionalism ultimately win people over. I had to do the same.

Of course I’m hopeful for a little more than that, like a good working relationship and a shot at starting an agency and clearing house for doulas right here at Bradshaw General.

It was late by the time I got home. My German shepherd, Hildy, was standing, legs crossed, by the front door dying to get out. We took a quick run through the streets of my neighborhood, a quiet little area that is slowly and inexorably being absorbed into the city. It is still, however, a quaint and quiet haven for me to retreat to and regroup after a long, intense labor with one of my moms.

I live life simply. Home, family, friends and faith are what is important to me. Someday I want a family of my own, but until that happens, I live vicariously through my clients bringing new life into the world. Oh, yes, and animals. I adore animals.

Hildegard, Hildy for short, led me on a circuitous route through the neighborhood to sniff at fire hydrants, shrubs and a popular squirrel hangout before bringing me back to my front door. I put out her dog food and fresh water and walked through the house to my bedroom.

Knowing I wasn’t alone in the house, I went looking for my other roommate. Geri usually hangs out in the sunroom when I’m not home. I found her there, looking out the window, dressed in her glitzy denim jacket studded with rhinestones.

“Bedtime, Geri.”

She moved away from me.

“Come on, Geri, don’t give me any trouble tonight. I’ll help you take your jacket off.” Feeling bone weary and ready for bed, I wasn’t ready for an argument. Geri is a bit of a night owl. “You aren’t going to a fashion show, you know.”

She grunted in protest and planted her hefty backside on a floor pillow as if to say, “Make me.”

“Let’s take off the jacket.”

Geri looked at me as if to say, “Who, moi?”

She can be so willful and obstinate sometimes—especially when I’m already exhausted. “Okay, you stubborn, vain, egotistical sow, I’ll teach you!” And I lunged for her thinking I could wrestle her to the ground, but Geri squealed and escaped like the proverbial greased pig. She ran into the bathroom and skidded into the side of the bathtub.

Geranium is never very good on tile. Her little hooves just can’t get a grip.

It’s not every woman who owns a pig—or wants to—but I’ve never considered myself an ordinary woman.

Geranium was, for a time, a preschool mascot at the private school at which I taught. When I announced my resignation, the staff and children voted that Geranium should come with me, a bit of tender pork by which to remember them. This was much to the relief of the administration, who had been wondering how to break it to the kids that Geri’s feed bill had been cut out of the budget.

Although my mother did become hysterical for a while upon learning her first grandchild was actually a potbelly pig, she’s come to appreciate Geranium. Pigs are very smart. Geranium is capable of similar reasoning and mischief making to that of a four-or five-year-old child. She needs me. Having been a kindergarten teacher, I’m able to stay one step ahead of her most of the time.

I wrestled her out of her little denim jean jacket with the industrial snaps on the arms. Geranium loves her jacket. She’s very vain and self-important for a pig.

Once she realized I wasn’t going to back down, she willingly let me unsnap the jacket, and trotted outside through the pet door that leads to her sandbox-size litter box and her bed. Geranium is small, which is fortunate for me. She weighs about sixty-five pounds and stands just over a foot tall and approximately two feet long. Pigs are very compact and have hard bodies, so Geri actually takes up very little space—not much more than a large footstool. She’s at least twenty pounds lighter than Hildy and has no tail to sweep everything off coffee tables. In truth, she’s a lot easier to handle than Hildy, who, when I enter the front door, sometimes jumps up and puts her paws on my shoulders to lick my face.

That was another thing about Hank that made me know we’d never work out as a couple. He thought pigs belonged in pigpens in the state of Iowa and nowhere else on the planet. He’s going to have a bad shock when he sees his first pig farm in Mississippi.

He also bought into all the clichés and fallacious stigmas about pigs, and wouldn’t be convinced that the term “dirty as a pig” is pure falsehood. Pigs are very clean animals if not forced to live in untended stys. In fact, even under those conditions, a pig will use only one corner of the pigpen as a toilet. It’s where they’re forced to live, not the pigs themselves, that is to blame for the phrase “stink like a pig.”

Pigs have no odor. I tried to make Hank smell Geranium once to find that out for himself, but he refused. Yet another chink in our relationship.

The other public relations problem pigs have is that they like to roll in the mud. They don’t like being warm and can actually get sunburned if they’re exposed too much. Therefore they roll in the mud to cool off and keep the sun off their skin. Does anyone criticize a woman for using sunblock? I think not.

The telephone rang just as Hildy and I were settling in for the night. It was Mandie, a young single mother whose parents had just hired me to be her doula. She was crying.

“Molly?”

“What is it, honey?”

“I’m so scared. I went to the doctor today, and he says that I could give birth any time now. I don’t want to give birth, Molly.” She hiccuped tearfully. “I want it to stop!”

It’s a little late for that now. Tactfully I didn’t point that out.

“Things are going to be fine,” I assured her. “You’re a healthy young woman. You have a wonderful doctor to care for you, and I’m here for you, too.”

“I’m not a woman, I’m just a kid!”

Truer words were never spoken. Babies having babies. I see far too much of it and it breaks my heart. But it’s not my place to judge. I’m called to be salt and light to these girls, Jesus embodied in me.

“How do you feel?” I asked. “Are you having pain?”

“No. I just keep thinking…”

“How about if I talk you through some deep-breathing exercises? It might be time to give your brain a rest.”

I stayed on the line until Mandie was calmer and ready to sleep.

Hildy snuffled wetly and shifted so that her legs were rigid, managing to take up two-thirds of the mattress. I could hear Geranium rooting around in her pen for nonexistent truffles and the tick of my grandparents’ old clock in the living room. All was right with the world.

The telephone rang at 8:00 a.m. I tried to ignore it and let my answering machine pick up, but then I remembered Mandie. She might be in labor.

“Hullo?” I snuffled into the phone, my voice scratchy from disuse.

“Wake up, sleepyhead! It’s play day!” Lissy sounded annoyingly chipper.

Saturdays are always play days for Lissy. She tries to pack an entire week’s worth of fun into eight or ten hours and always wants company doing it—me.

“I might have a baby coming today.”

“Then we should go soon so we can get a few hours in before you have to be at work.”

“I need to do laundry,” I reminded her. “I’ve had a busy week.”

“Nonsense. We’ll just buy you new clothes. If you can’t go two or three weeks without washing, you’re definitely short.”

“I thought we were going to a museum one day.”

“Fine, be cerebral and dull. How about the Science Museum? That’s my speed. They’ve got lots of dinosaurs.”

“Do we need to borrow a child to go there?”

“Nah. We’ll just pretend ours are already there, running around. That place is always stuffed with kids. You shop with me, I’ll go to the museum with you. Deal?”

Why fight it? Lissy is a lot like Geranium and Hildy. It rarely pays to argue with hardheaded females.

Chapter Three

Of course Lissy had her way and I didn’t. We went shopping.

Lissy pulled a navy-blue suit off the rack and waved it under my nose. “How about this? This would be great for church and it would subdue that red hair of yours.”

“Why on earth would I want to do that?” I held up a broomstick skirt in all the colors of the rainbow. “What do you think of this?”

“It’s a bad accident in the crayon factory. Too many colors.”

I held it up and looked at myself in the mirror. My red hair was fighting against the bond of the braid I’d woven, and so a wild cloud of rusty red framed my face. The bright teal shirt I wore accented the giddy colors in the skirt.

“If that skirt could talk, it would say—” Lissy covered her ears “—too loud, turn down the volume!”

That helped me to make up my mind. I handed it to a hovering clerk. “I’ll take it.”

“She’s a free spirit,” Lissy muttered grimly, as if in apology for my fashion blunder. “I’ve been trying to tame her but it is like domesticating the wind.”

“I think it’s lovely,” the clerk assured me. “Distinctive.”

“See?” I hissed when the woman moved away. “Distinctive. Like me.”

“I can’t shop with you any longer,” Lissy announced. “I’m having a color overload. Let’s get something to eat.”

That was fine with me. I’d rather eat than shop any day.

After we ordered lunch, Lissy sat back into the padded booth and studied me.

“How’s The Project going?”

The Project. My big idea, my dream.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that as a kindergarten teacher I used to like things orderly in my classroom. Everything had a place and that’s where we kept it. Although I actually thrive in chaos at home—my arty side coming out, I suppose—I was very different at school, the only teacher at school who had a Rolodex and a tickle file to remind me of upcoming events. Things make sense to me when they’re organized into groups. Snow pants go in closets, blocks go with blocks and crayons go into the crayon bins.

And doulas, I think, would fit nicely into an agency where they are available and easy to find. When patients start asking questions about birthing assistants or coaches, I believe a doctor should be able to hand them a business card with the name of my big idea—Birthing Buddies—as I fondly refer to it, and allow women to research dozens of doulas before they pick the one best suited for them.

My biggest hurdle and one of the most important parts of the dream is to be an independent agency that has office space and headquarters within the facility. Just being under the Bradshaw Medical roof would be an amazing way to let people know we exist. They rent space to the people with coffee and snack carts on the main floor. Why not me?

Why they should oppose it, I can’t imagine. Labors are shorter by twenty-five percent, and the use of C-sections, epidurals, forceps and medication drop significantly when doulas are involved. We also help the bonding process between mother and baby. When a laboring mother has someone mothering her, things simply go more smoothly.

“It’s going to be an uphill climb. Worse, now that Dr. Reynolds is at the hospital. I suspect he will be opposed to a doula program, especially one offered in conjunction with the birthing classes with which I’m involved.”

“Why Bradshaw General? Why not an independent office somewhere?”

“Because a gift was left to the hospital for the express benefit of encouraging them to enhance a doula and midwife program.”

“I heard something about that. Why? What happened?”

“Some wealthy grandparents watched their daughter breeze through her labor and delivery and credited it all to her doula.”

“And that would be you?” Lissy asked suspiciously. “Why didn’t you tell me until now? That’s a huge affirmation to doulas everywhere.”

“I was just doing my job. Apparently the woman had been very difficult prior to hiring me, that’s all.”

“You do much more than that,” Lissy said. “I’ve had patients tell me that if they could have one person with them through labor and delivery, they’d pick their doula over their spouses, even over the doctor.”

She eyed me thoughtfully. “So that buzz about the hospital getting some sort of gift was because of you. Impressive.”

“It’s not that big a deal.” There’s been more than one time in my life—and less stressful ones than giving birth—that I would have liked someone to watch over me, give me ice chips, rub my back and turn up the aromatherapy. “A doctor I met at another hospital while his own wife was giving birth encouraged me to pursue it. Dr. Chase Andrews seemed to think it would work.”

“Then why don’t you go to his hospital and ask if you can coordinate Doula Central there?”

“Bradshaw is the hospital that received the money. I’d like to see it here. It’s a five-minute drive from my house. I help Tony with classes here at Bradshaw and—” I hung my head, ashamed to admit I’d been snooping in the nooks and crannies of the hospital “—they have a couple of unused rooms right now. It would be easy to have something up and running there in no time.”