Words of Wisdom

It was Sunday morning, just an hour past midnight, a time at which most people are sound asleep with confectionery visions cavorting about, when everything began. For several weeks Diana had been suffering through bouts of abdominal contractions, some more powerful and increasingly punctual than others, and there was little difference that night. Unable to sleep, she lay on the couch reading a book and waiting for either an occurence leading to our baby’s emergence or for sleep to finally overtake her. As the night wore on, Hypnos continued to evade her grasp and the ever-painful wrenching in her belly continued.

It was at this time, around 1:00am, that our oldest daughter Rachel came creeping down the staircase from her second floor abode. Approaching Diana with an expression of terror and tears streaming down her face, she blurted out, “Momma, I threw up in bed.”

Being the ideal husband that I am, while Diana sat suffering the living room, I lay asleep in the bedroom, my mind off to some faraway dreamland. So, it was a bit of a shock when she awakened me from my slumber to alert me to our poor daughter’s predicament. Shaking the thick cobwebs from my mind, I arose and began trudging upstairs, taking deep breaths and preparing my senses for the disgusting onslaught to come.

That evening we had eaten a pork dish covered in a sort of tomato sauce, along with potatoes and salad, all of which was now splattered about the bedroom that Rachel shares with her younger sister. The red concoction was bespattered across both bedspreads, the floor, and the white wood ladder reaching to her upper bunk unleashing that ungodly stench of partially digested food now filling the room. Taking a deep breath from the relatively clean air in the hallway, I plunged into the disgusting morass. After cleaning all that my bleary eyes could see, evacuating Bekah, and completely stripping the beds, I made my way downstairs, filling the washing machine with soap and stuffing it full of children’s linens.

As I worked in the adjacent laundry room, Diana stood behind me in the kitchen and it was then that I heard those magic words that we had been awaiting for some time. “Matt,” she gasped, “my water broke.”

The timing may not have been the greatest, but really what can you do but just shrug your shoulders and smile at the absurdity of the whole situation. “Well,” I answered back to her, “I guess we’re going to the hospital.”

We quickly called our friends Chance and Teneshia, who immediately answered that they would take the girls for us, regardless of the hour of night. After loading our van with essentials and bidding our children goodnight, we took off into the city of Memphis, driving down the nearly-deserted streets of our neighboring urban area to the hospital decreed by my insurance.

We arrived at the hospital around 2:30, a time at which it is fairly simple to find a desirable parking space close to the door. I assisted Diana out of the car and the two of us hobbled along together to the front desk where, after hearing her tell of the broken water, they immediately whisked her back to a room in Labor & Delivery.

After the obligatory questions in which a woman is asked of the possibility of her having contracted every sexually transmitted disease known to man and the normal surgery prep work, the time had arrived. Around 5:00am, they wheeled her into the operating room for her C section and allowed me to follow and stand behind a curtain where my poor eyes would be shielded from the sight of buckets of bloods and my wife’s internal organs. The spinal shot that Diana was given kept her from feeling any of the pain, but she was incredibly aware of her surroundings and the two of us sat together, awaiting the emergence of our son.

After a few short minutes, the anesthesiologist smiled at us and nodded at me, “Would you like to see him come out?”

Having inadvertantly been witnessed to this sight before at the birth of our second daughter, Bekah, I politely declined and waited until he had been fully extracted before looking upon him. Our son, Jackson Dean Wisdom.

I held his little hand as they proceeded with the initial cleaning and as they worked to suck the liquid and goo from his throat. I watched him as he breathed in his first taste of the air about him and saw as his eyes tried to open for the first time to gaze upon this strange world in which he now resided. I heard his vocal cords come to life as he cried out for the first time in his short life.

He is a beautiful baby boy.

Both of his sisters are excited:

And we even have our first family picture:

It is an exciting time in the Wisdom household and I’m sure there are many more eventful ones to come.