despite the discomfort, knowing that at last her difficulty would be

over soon. She had checked into the hospital three hours before to

have her labor induced. After waiting in the exam room, being

admitted, being settled in the labor room, being attached to a fetal

monitor and being stuck with a catheter that would deliver the drugs

that would start her belated delivery, her nerves were frazzled. She

had no idea what to expect. She wondered if a few moments of

misjudgement could really have caused this situation or if bigger

hands had spun events into motion to bring her here. She

remembered how it had begun?

Ali remembered climbing the stairs to her apartment with soggy

legs wondering how to deal with the dilemma of her pregnancy.

Ali and her fiance were still in college, not yet married, and barely

paying their bills. How would they support a child, she wondered. She

marveled at the idea of having a baby, hers and his, someone of

themselves. She imagined the concern, the worry that would be in his

face when she told him. She was unprepared for the rage, the insults,

and the blame that he flung at her.

"How stupid are you? ", he bellowed. How stupid am I, she asked

herself. He berated her for not using her birth control properly.

"Nothing smaller than a bean pod is going to derail my life," he

spat out as he slammed out of their apartment. A bean pod?

Ali had been stunned and could not really recognize for several

days that he had meant it. She believed it when he returned a few

weeks later just to collect his belongings from their apartment. His

only mention of the baby was to mumble that since she was having a

baby, he was taking their laborador retriever.

Ali finally saw him as a chameleon. He had been loving,

supportive, even gentle at times during their relationship. When it had

suited him, she thought with hindsight. In what had seemed like a

good and stable love that few people find, she now found warning

signs that their relationship had stood on a foundation built of wishful

thinking.

Ali spent hours that she should have been sleeping remembering their life and their plans. She spent hours that she should have been working daydreaming that he would return, charmingly apologize and beg to make all right again. She struggled through the next few weeks, working with a body that only wanted rest and figuring through chaos with a mind that only wanted peace?

The monitor, consisting of a vineyard of wires and a large, ugly belt

attached to her stomach, fed information about the baby?s vital

signs onto a paper tape and set itself off whenever she tried to turn

over on her side to sleep. Each time she set it off, a perky nurse

complete with a swingy blonde ponytail, freckles, and a cheerleader?s

smile came into the room to check on her.

"So the contractions are starting," the perky nurse chirped.

""Yeah, they?re jumping right in there," Ali replied, trying to match

Perky?s cheerfulness. She ended up sounding sarcastic and fake. She

remained quiet until Perky finished and flitted away to some other

crucial duty. She lay there listening to the rhythm of her child?s

heartbeat and marveling that the little heart would soon no longer be

supported by her own body. She frighteningly realized that if her body

would no longer be sustaining the little heart and life, then her actions

would be responsible for keeping the little one alive. One small error in

judgement could end it. Why don?t you stay tucked in there a little

longer, she thought with a slow breath to ease through a contraction.

Somewhere else in the maternity unit, she heard a woman start

screaming murderous threats to somebody named Jim. Goodness, Ali

thought. I hope it?s doesn?t get that bad. To drown out the noise, she

turned on the portable radio and headphones that she had threaded

through the monitor wires that were attached to her whale?s belly and

the oxygen tube that was attached to her face to help feed oxygen to

her and to the baby during delivery. When she turned the radio on,

she heard a song playing on the radio station that reminded her of

another song that she had heard while she was driving home to move

back into her mother?s house. The song had expressed a man?s

touching gratitude to his wife for the years of love and for the children

that his wife had given to him. She had tried to block it out, but the

song eventually had her in tears with its poignancy. It was the first

time that Ali had realized that her fiance had not just walked out on their

child, but on her as well.

After many nights of the same recurring dream of her chasing him

as he walked away toward a dense fog and her calling to his turned

back, Ali became frustrated with her own foolishness. Why keep

beating herself up emotionally? Could she not raise this child without

him? Didn?t she have enough love and enough common sense to give

to her child to make his non-existence unnoticeable? Her idea of

motherhood had seemed so simple that day. Eventually her worries

gave way to an irrational panic that he might want to someday return

and try to take the child from her. Don?t even go there, she thought

and dismissed the nagging of the disturbed thoughts.

Ali jerked to a sitting-up position with a gasp of pain in reaction to

a strong contraction. She pressed her call button to summon a nurse.

A nurse, she thought, just a nurse, any nurse will do. She had been

attempting to get to know the nurses caring for her even though they

were in and out of her room quickly and were too full of purpose to

really chat. The nurse, with smartly cut short hair and round-framed

tortoiseshell glasses, entered the room, and checked the paper read-

out tape from the monitor. The smart nurse remarked that it was a

strong contraction. She already knew this. Smarty checked everything

and said that she could receive an injection to help her rest. "It?s

gonna be awhile. First babies are always slow to arrive," said Smarty

with all of the confidence of her nurse?s wisdom. First baby and only

baby if this gets much worse, she thought.

After Smarty, the nurse, returned and administered the injection,

Ali drifted into a netherworld and the contractions seemed to fade

away. The echoes in the hospital were amplified so that she could

imagine what was happening on the other side of the walls. She could

hear the muffled voices of the hospital staff as they whispered by her

door. She heard her mother?s hacking cough from the waiting room

and pictured her sitting underneath a no-smoking sign puffing away.

Ali wondered how her mother was going to adjust to a baby being

in the house. A chain smoker with a severe allergy to housecleaning,

her mother was not going to be a poster-quality grandma. Her mother

had a red dust bunny with four tiny feet that she called a Pomeranian

dog. Her mother?s dog, named Yodel, would sing to her mother in a

small clear voice that was more than a whine but was less than a bark.

The first time she had heard the dog sing, she thought the noise was

coming from a mistuned radio. Between her mother and her mother?s

dog, her dreamy notions of a perfect June Cleaver-like home for her

child flew away at the speed of light. She doubted the baby would

ever be able to smell fresh-baked cookies in the house unless she

herself made an extreme effort.

wonder a part of their lives. She had poured through family and parent

magazines looking for ideas to be a better than average parent. She

bought a cookbook featuring kid-tested recipes that claimed to be

nutritionally complete as well as irresistibly appealing to kids. When

she had tried one of the recipes consisting of star-shaped squash and zucchini cut into crescent moons, her mother had commented Ali ought to just buy a popular breakfast cereal with little marshmallow hearts and green clovers. Ali had bawled with her hurt feelings and hyperactive hormones and had politely asked her mother to go get a cheeseburger and die of cholesterol poisoning. She clipped parental advice columns out of the newspaper and pasted them into a spiral notebook that was complete with an index for future reference. She

even had a friend who knew numerology read her baby?s chart based

upon her due date so that she could begin to grasp the person her

child would become.

"He?ll be a snake just like his father. He?ll probably be so mean he?ll

chew his own toes off by his first birthday," was her mother?s latest

expression about the baby. She chalked it up to her mother?s favorite

habit of trying to pick a fight to defeat boredom and an uneventful

life...

The next contraction woke her from a sound sleep. Once again her

movement set off the monitors. No one came to check on her. Ali felt

the need to curl into a fetal position and to stretch out her belly at the

same time. She was hot with her hair unflatteringly pushed back off of

her forehead in dripping tendrils. She was chilled with the wetness of

her perspiring body. Still no one came. She tried not to worry; the

monitors had sounded so many times when everything was okay. The

shrill, beeping alarm grated on her nerves. The viselike pain left her

breathless as the contractions came one on top of the other. Distress

was a small word for such a big pain, she thought.

Ali tried to stare through the hard contraction into the walls

covered with pastel stripes and teddy bears that reminded her of the

stuffed bear that she had left at home in the baby?s crib. The fuzzy

bear with plaid feet and a red satin bow was her only extravagance in

preparing for the baby. She had made the decision between buying a

second-hand washer and dryer or a lot of baby things. She chose the

appliances as the baby would outgrow everything else anyway. She

had only gotten a few sleepers and tee shirts. Her boss?s wife had

given her a second-hand crib and she had purchased an infant car

carrier at a yard sale. The other girls at work had contracted baby

fever and gone wild buying fancy little outfits and gadgets that she

traded in for a soft blanket, some gentle cotton crib sheets, and some

bottles and other essentials that she needed to care for the baby. I?m

prepared for you little one, so come on, she thought restlessly.

Finally, a petite pixie-like nurse came in, went through the

checking procedure again and announced that she could receive an

epidural injection. The pixie left to summon reinforcements for the

procedure. Once Ali felt the sword-like thrust of the epidural in her spine, she

decided she would rather feel the contractions. "I will not scream, I

will not scream, I will not scream," became her mantra.

"You?re about halfway to delivery," the pixie reported. Just

halfway? Ali felt alone. She felt there was no one to help push her

through the exhaustion of her delivery. Her mother had chosen to wait

in the waiting room, pleading squeamishness.

"Honey, the doctor put me to sleep when I had you. I don?t know

anything about this new birth coaching thing. The nurses do this every

day. They can tell you what to do." Her mother had reasoned that she

would just be in the way of the professionals.

Within herself, Ali would have to find the strength, the raw

courage to deliver her baby. She thought that courage was only found

in storybook heroes, but she sure needed some now.

Her father had been a hero who had died serving his country in the

Vietnam War, or so her mother had told her. One afternoon, while

trying to cool her swollen, overheating body with a plastic bag full of

ice, Ali remarked to her mother that she wished she could tell her

child that his father had been a hero like her own. Now, she would

have to tell him that his father deserted them before he was born.

"Oh, Honey," her mother cajoled, "I just made that up so that you

would not feel like a nobody. Your daddy was just somebody I was

seeing at the time." How comforting during a troubled time?She

pelted her mother?s head with imaginary eyeball-borne bullets and,

when that brought her no satisfaction whatsoever, she attempted to

bean her with the bag of ice. She loudly breathed her exasperation as

the bag fell at her mother?s feet and her mother nonchalantly and

innocently ignored it.

The delivery room was hazy and cloudy with her exhaustion and

her confusion. Ali was too tired to see or hear, only feel. The beeping

monitors grew louder to a nerve-shattering pitch. The fluorescent

overhead lights fired lasers into her fevered brain. The wires and tubes

became entangled ropes tying her to her trouble. Salty perspiration

rained from her brow into her polluted eyes. Her labor was no longer

known as pain, but as an irrepressible force, numbing and consistent.

Voices around her were urgent, ghost-like, and incomprehensible. The

mask welded itself to her face, suffocating, until she gave in to its

breezy relief?

The sun plowing furrows through the blinds of the window would

normally have woken her at an earlier hour, but the regular poking of

the nurses throughout the night had not allowed her much sleep. Two

nurses, no longer familiar after the shift change, pried her out of bed

and helped her shower. They painfully pushed her unyielding and still

unwieldly body into a chair and made her stay there to stare at a tray

of overly healthy food.

It looks like a school lunch, Ali thought. After she consumed a

few bites, the nurses left her alone while they tidied her room.

Ali peered over her shoulder through the plate glass window at

the churning streets below that were full of cars and people scattering

and streaming like termites. She felt overwhelmed at the world to

which she had awoken. She spied a shabby, gnarled old man pick up

trash with a pointed stick and toss it in a rusty child?s wagon that he

towed behind him. She watched him halt every few steps to

painstakingly sort the trash into the four corners of the wagon; with a

mind of its own and a laggard determination, the trash kept flowing

back together as the wagon began to move again. Ali assumed that

he was homeless and that he was collecting material to be recycled for

money. Ali was frightened by the sight of him; for he made her feel

that she and her baby were too vulnerable. She knew all too well that,

if it were not for her mother?s home and support, she and her baby

were just a month?s wages away from the same fate as the old man.

She wanted to teach her child many things, but not how to sort trash

and sell it for money.

Ali heard the door of her room open and someone enter. She

silently waved to her mother. In a rare deviance, her mother entered a

silent room without breaking the peace. It seemed to show her

mother?s reverence of the moment of meeting her daughter as mother

of her grandchild. Not wanting to lose the quiet of the mood, Ali again

gazed out of the window, watching the old man amble.

"How am I going to do this, Mama?" she asked, absentmindedly

with a troubled voice.

"When the wind blows harder than you can handle, you?re gonna

just do whatever the little one needs you to do. That?s the only secret I

know."

"Is it always going to be this hard," Ali questioned.

"Maybe. Sometimes, harder. This will help," her mother responded.

Her mother handed her a package covered with tiny footprints and

a giant pink satin bow. Ali opened it to reveal a beautiful book with

sweet playful lambs on the cover and the title ? Memories of Baby?.

"I picked up a camera at the pawn shop to help you fill that up,"

her mother offered. Her mother was calm and warm today instead of

showing her usual feistiness. She had not seen her mother this way

since she was a small child. She was grateful.

"Thanks, Mama. I guess if I?m gonna do this right I had better give

her a name." Ali resumed watching the old man until she muttered a

single word, "hope."

Her mother leaned to the window to see what her daughter was

watching so intensively. Spying the old man and understanding her

daughter?s concerns, she replied," Yeah, I guess you?d better name her

Hope."

As a nurse brought in the hungry, wailing baby girl in a bassinet,

Ali?s mother embraced Ali, wiped away her daughter?s tears,

considered her noisy granddaughter, and then said, with attitude, "Or

you could always name her Yodel."