The most exciting thing about Eleanor’s birth was not knowing whether she was an Elle or a Peter. We had opted not to find out in advance, and it wasn’t until she made her beautiful debut that I realized how anxiety-producing the not-knowing had been.

I can relax now knowing, for example, that she’s (at least so far) a mild mannered, sweet girl like her big sister Audrey. Not the rambunctious Freedman boy I had been imagining (and, I can now admit, fearing). I now know that we can reuse all of Audrey’s clothes, shoes and gear. And that our girls, Audrey & Eleanor, can and will most likely share a bedroom. So, all our non-preparing and rearranging, in the end, worked out just fine.

I also know that all the signs & myths we’d come to believe about predicting the baby’s gender turned out to be just that, myths. The clairvoyant-seeming Hispanic woman who spotted me half an aisle away at Randall’s and approached to inform me that I’d be having a boy. The technician we thought had goofed by calling the baby a “him” during our 24-week ultrasound. The theories about basketball bellies and broadened noses – all supposed indicators of males. The fact that Joey’s father and brother had established a girl-boy-girl-boy birthing pattern, which we assumed meant that Joey would follow suit.  All those things had, over time, convinced us that our Numero Dos was indeed a Peter. Turns out, we were in for a big surprise – as we had hoped – when we opted to not find out the sex in the first place.

But let me back up. Before we headed into the OR and learned of Eleanor’s gender, I was dealing with some nerves back in the pre-op waiting room. Joey and I arrived at the hospital in the early morning darkness.  After quickly processing paperwork , we headed to the pre-op area where mini-bedrooms outfitted with IV trees, machines and monitors were partitioned by 3-sided curtains. There was a lot coming at me, lots to digest and adjust to. And somehow, despite my having nine-plus months to consider it all, the last weeks of my pregnancy snuck up on me and all of a sudden, it was go time, and I felt I hadn’t had sufficient time to process everything. I decided to deal with things in waves – the first wave being my surgery, which scared me a little. Next would be the baby’s arrival – girl or boy, healthy or not, fussy or easy, etc, etc. Then, there was Audrey and her adjustment. And finally, the thought of work and how to fit it back into the mix, with the new (fussy? easy? healthy?) baby and its (well-adjusted? jealous?) older sister both demanding my attention. Yes, take it in waves – it was the only way to ride out this overwhelming experience.

After an hour and a half delay, we were finally summoned to go meet our family’s newest member. I walked back to the OR, which already differentiated this experience from my first c-section. That time, I was wheeled down the hallway on a stretcher, anxiously counting the rectangular fluorescent lights as they ticked by overhead. This time, I entered the room and immediately took stock of the whiteness of the lights, the quietness of the personnel in the room, the fact that I was casually walking in to have my middle cut open and my baby extracted in mere moments. Read the rest of this entry »