Pink Bubblegum Cigars
The year was 1977. I was twenty-seven years old, working as a welder in a factory in Birmingham, Alabama. The company was Plantation Patterns, and we made wrought iron patio furniture. Sixty or eighty times a shift, I grabbed variously-shaped pieces of iron from the barrels surrounding my workstation, locked them into a framework designed to hold all the pieces in place, and then flipped down my welding shield to run the hot metal beads that welded them into a chair or table, complete with curves and filigrees.
It was a union job — the Steelworkers Union — but my hourly pay was still only $4.75 an hour, little enough to support a family. We were all guys — no woman had ever worked on the shop floor. Nine of ten welders or laborers were black, and the better paying jobs — mechanics, electricians, machine shop — were reserved for white guys, so the plant was still mainly segregated, years after the formal legal structures of racial segregation had been dismantled in Birmingham. Chris was my wife, and she worked at Blackburn Draperies, where most workers were women, most of them black, who made a lot less than my hourly pay for work that was just as hot and hard.
I don’t remember exactly how Chris told me she was pregnant. It may have been one evening in our little white house in Birmingham’s West End when we sat down for a gourmet dinner of black-eyed peas from a can, boiled hot dogs, macaroni and cheese — our food budget was meager, and neither of us was much of a chef. And it would have been in the month of January, several weeks after Chris had unknowingly begun the work of motherhood. All I remember is that I was dumbfounded, incredulous, worried and excited. I knew I wasn’t ready for this baby, hadn’t planned on it, didn’t know how to do any of it. I was pretty sure I understood how babies got made, but I couldn’t remember anyone offering useful advice on how to be a dad, including my own father.
I suddenly got interested in learning everything I could about babies and birthing. One of my best sources was a sizable paperback titled Our Bodies, Ourselves that had started as a roughhewn, mimeographed collection of articles published a few years earlier by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Chris was a member of the Collective when we’d lived in Boston, and she helped assemble and publish the 1973 edition of the book. In the preface, its authors described how they had “experienced similar feelings of frustration and anger toward specific doctors and the medical maze in general, and initially we wanted to do something about those doctors who were condescending, paternalistic, judgmental and non-informative. As we talked and shared our experiences with one another, we realized just how much we had to learn about our bodies.” It was when I read Our Bodies, Ourselves that I first began to understand what actually happened when a woman experienced pregnancy and gave birth, and when I began to empathize with that struggle and pain. I wanted to support Chris, to help her be in charge of her own experience. I also wanted to feel directly and completely what it meant to become a dad, to experience the whole crazy, magical, unbelievable process.
It was Chris’s idea was that we, together, should attend a Lamaze class, learning a set of practices and skills designed to support a safe, healthy, and natural birth. The principles of Lamaze included letting labor begin on its own rather than inducing labor through with drugs, letting the mother walk around and adjust her position during labor, avoiding unnecessary medical interventions like episiotomies, and letting the baby stay with the mother after birth instead of being whisked off to a nursery. Best of all, as the father I could be a full partner in the birth of my baby, present throughout labor and delivery. We signed up for what may have been the first Lamaze course offered in the state of Alabama. In a classroom full of nervous parents-to-be, Chris learned breathing and other techniques for easing labor and I learned how to make soothing noises and rub her back.
Chris attended a pre-natal clinic at Cooper Green Hospital, a public hospital funded by the State of Alabama for indigent care; it was the only hospital for us, given that we had never been able to afford health insurance and had no savings to speak of. Her doctor and nurses knew in advance about our plans for a Lamaze delivery, and they were welcoming and supportive. We cleared out a room for a baby bed. I found a used crib at a yard sale, and a rocking chair at the Sears store downtown. I painted the walls robin’s egg blue and bought yards of cheap indoor-outdoor carpet that I could tack down on the worn wooden flooring. We started to read lots of books about babies and parenting. The more I read the more excited I got, imagining what it would feel like to have a child. After a few months of Chris’ pregnancy, I found it difficult to remember why we had never talked about babies. We didn’t know whether ours would be a boy or girl; using ultrasound to reveal the sex of a fetus was still unavailable in Birmingham hospitals, or at least at Cooper Green with low-income patients like us.
As Chris’s body changed, we started calling her bump “the Bump,” and including it in our conversations, asking for its opinion on various day-to-day matters. We learned that babies respond to sounds in their environment even before birth, and I wanted the baby to grow up listening to words and books, loving the sound of stories as much as I did. So I started reading a bedtime story to the Bump every night as Chris stretched out on the bed with her eyes closed and hands clasped over her expanding belly. Over the last few months before the baby was due, we made our way through most of Peter Beagles’ novel, The Last Unicorn.
In the last month or so, we started to take the Bump for a slow walk around the neighborhood every night after dinner, introducing it to its surroundings even before it officially arrived. And one of those Saturday nights close to her due date, after we got back to the house, Chris was hit by her first major contraction, followed shortly by her water breaking. We were catapulted into action. Chris grabbed the bag she had prepared and we rushed to Cooper Green Hospital. The labor room they set us up in was as boring and uncomfortable a place as anyone could have designed — bare beige walls, a steel bed for Chris, an orange plastic chair for me, no color accents, no windows. Soon enough, though, we were deeply engaged in the hard work Chris was doing, unaware of our surroundings. I stayed with Chris all through our next twelve sleepless hours in that room. I walked her up and down the hall between contractions, told her stupid jokes, sang a silly song, held her hand, massaged her back, and read to her from The Last Unicorn.
The whole notion of fathers being allowed in the delivery room was new, and it turned out that I was the first father who had asked permission to be present for a birth at that hospital. But I had been through my training and the hospital delivery staff were ready for me to join them. By mid-Sunday morning, Chris was sufficiently dilated and the baby was ready to pop. By this time, I was delirious, sleep-deprived, exhausted, and buzzing with caffeine. They wheeled Chris into the delivery room while one of the nurses got me dressed up in green pajamas and little paper booties. I walked down the hall and started to open the delivery room door when an official-looking man in a business suit and tie came bustling along the hallway and grabbed my arm.
“Who are you and where do you think you’re going?”
“I’m the father of the baby being born in there, and I’m going to join my wife.”
“No, you’re not! We don’t allow that kind of thing in this hospital. Fathers wait in the waiting room. That’s why we call it a waiting room. You come with me and I’ll put you there.”
He grabbed my arm and pulled me down the hall to an empty, isolated little room and sat me down in another orange plastic chair. After a night with no sleep, I was in no condition to argue. I stared at the wall for the next half hour until the nurse came looking for me.
“What are you doing down here? We were expecting you in delivery!”
“Some guy in a suit dragged me down here and told me to stay out.”
The nurse rolled her eyes, ran back to the recovery room and returned holding a tiny baby wrapped up in a white blanket.
“You’re the father of a little girl!”
I sat there holding the baby for five minutes or so, crying and looking at her, praising every square inch of her and repeating the name we had chosen for her: “Amber. Amber.” I then went to say goodbye to Chris, and walked out to the parking garage.
As I drove home to the West End along Sixth Avenue in Birmingham, the sunshine seemed overwhelmingly bright. My heart was beating rapidly, and the colors of all the objects along the way — cars, bushes, trees, flowers, buildings, the clothing of the pedestrians — were extraordinarily vibrant. Time slowed down, birds floated rather than flew overhead, my own car seemed to inch along the street, and the music on the radio sounded tinny and distant.
Gradually, I became aware of a loud and annoying honking sound, and I was drawn back to the present. I looked in my rearview mirror and realized that I was driving along at approximately five miles per hour and that a dozen or cars in a line behind me were all honking madly. I sped up and the cars stopped honking. When I got home I sat on the bed and called my parents in Murfreesboro and Chris’ parents in Cincinnati. I listened to their congratulations and then stared at the wall until I fell asleep, dreaming of little round babies floating around bedroom.
The next day, I arrived at Plantation Patterns with a box of one hundred pink bubblegum cigars and walked around the shop floor passing them out to my coworkers. When I dropped by the hospital to visit Chris and baby Amber after work, the nurse on duty pulled me aside to tell me how sorry she was that I’d been pulled out of the delivery room by the hospital administrator. “That was not supposed to happen,” she said, patting my arm. “We figured that letting you in the room was a medical decision, and it could only be a good thing considering that you had been through Lamaze training and knew how to behave yourself. I just want you to know that all the doctors and nurses signed a protest letter to the administration, demanding that fathers who’ve been through training should be able to be with the mothers during delivery. Too late for you, I know, but hopefully it’ll be better for others in the future.” I learned later that things were in fact soon different at Cooper Green. In the future, fathers would be welcomed as partners for mothers.
I had missed out on part of the richness of the moment of Amber’s birth, but my participation in Chris’ pregnancy created a subtle, permanent difference inside me. All other preoccupations receded for a time from the center of my consciousness, replaced by a sense of amazement at the fragility and wonder of life, the loveliness of my baby daughter. For the first time there was something other than an abstraction for which I was prepared to give my life. For the first time in my life, I cared about another individual human being more than anything, more than myself. The reality of my daughter in my life began to chip away at my certainty, at my absolutism, at my self-righteousness.
I started to discover that I had emotions I hadn’t used in some time, or maybe never. I found I was more easily saddened or gladdened by stories I heard, more naturally delighted with life for no particular reason, not as bothered or indignant as I might have been at some perceived slight. I found that I especially loved to read bedtime stories and sing little songs to our baby. After she fell asleep in her crib I would sometimes sit for an hour in the dark, just rocking and looking at her, overcome with love.
