For a start, since this is grandpa speaking, I will include the piece I wrote to a friend announcing Sam's birth and my adventures surrounding that birth. I hope this will stimulate birth experiences/stories (how did you first hear? what did you first think? What did you imagine? you know the drill).

This friend of mine, by the way, is currently in prison fighting a murder conviction, for which he spent 4 years on death row before it was overturned. Unfortunately for him he was convicted of a crime he didn't commit (even the guy who confessed to the murder says that my friend, Rich, was nowhere in the vicinity), but that's another story with nothing really to do with Sam except that it makes for a different slant on his birth story: Rich was scheduled to be executed prior to Sam's birth, so we got a birth/re-birth thing going on here...

Well, it finally happened! Just call me pappy, give me some suspenders and a porch railing, preferably with a couple of good rocking chairs, and just let me sit and while away the day with my brand new grandson. Sonja gave birth to a 71/2 pound little guy named Sam on September 19th. The birth went just fine. The only real problem was politics and economics: Sonja was supposed to deliver at the Seaton Birth Center, which is this wonderful place run by midwives in downtown Manhattan. John had been delivered at a Birth Center back in the early 80’s, so when Sonja was looking around for a place to get her prenatal care from we naturally assumed that it would be easy to find a birth center in Manhattan. Not so. It seems that there are too many Obstetricians in New York City and they’re all fighting for pregnant women, so they’ve been doing everything they can to destroy midwife practices. [side note: you ever see all those sob stories- I certainly have- about the malpractice costs being so high that Obstetricians are giving up delivering women because they can’t afford the insurance? It’s a load of bullshit. OB’s are making out like bandits] It turned out that there was only one. It was a beautiful place, though. In existence for 25 years, with a great professional staff with thousands of births between them. The room where she would deliver was like a plush hotel room, and included a Jacuzzi. The family room, where we would wait, was also very lush, and included things like cooking facilities, TV/VCR/dvd/video game units, great stereo system, and plenty of space to have as many family and friends as we’d like. Sonja could have anyone in her room for the labor and birth part that she wanted. No muss no fuss. As births should be.

But that wasn’t to be. Four days before she delivered, the Birth Center lost its physician backup (legally a midwife has to have an OB willing to provide backup; in case there’s a need for a C-section for example). The hospital it was affiliated with, St. Vincents, told them that their women would have to deliver at the hospital (where the hospital would get the extra $$$). There was quite an uproar. One of the Board members of the Birth Center is a labor organizer and he wanted to have a picket line outside the hospital of very pregnant women. It certainly would have gotten the press’s attention! They decided not to go that route, and it looks like they’ve found someone who will back them up, and thus allow them to re-open.

But not in time for Sam’s birth. After almost 24 hours of labor at home, Sonja was well enough along to head down to the Birth Center. So Mary drove her and Paul down to the Center, where she was checked out and told that she was fully dilated and was ready to deliver at any moment. That’s when they had to break the news that she wouldn’t be able to give birth there. At least the midwife who she’d been seeing for the previous nine months was going to be able to deliver her, so Sonja was happy with that (at this point she didn’t care where she was going to have this baby, she just wanted it to be over with). So Sonja needed to go over to St. Vincents, about six blocks up the street. She refused a cab or ambulance and said she was going to walk. So it was a true New York scene: this woman, ready to drop the baby at any moment, walking slowly down the sidewalk in downtown Manhattan, chanting (she’s a yoga instructor, remember), and occasionally leaning up against a wall and trying to hold herself together against the contractions. No one on the sidewalk even looked twice. That’s Manhattan for you!

Prior to arriving at the hospital I had been running a race down in lower Manhattan, in the Wall Street area. I knew that Sonja had been in labor for a good 18 hours, and figured she last for another few hours. It was only a 5 mile race anyway. Just in case, I took the cell phone with me. During the race itself I turned it off. I don’t like it when I see people walking down the street talking into their phones, or have to listen to their conversations while I’m on the bus, so I sure as hell wasn’t going to take a call in the middle of a race! I can think of few things more obnoxious. So John later says to me: “So Dad, what you’re saying is that you were willing to risk missing the birth of your first grandchild because of how you would ‘look’ to a bunch of strangers who you would never see again in your entire life.” Yep, I guess so.

At the end of the race I had five messages, detailing the progress of their movement down to the birth center… But I made it in time.

Now, Sonja being in a hospital (scum of the earth) meant that Mary and John and I had to fight just to get into the building to be near her and Paul. John and I arrived about 20 minutes after Sonja got there and the guards wouldn’t let us past the lobby. The guards kept telling us ‘them's the rules,’ (sound familiar?), wouldn’t give us a reason other than that's "just what they tell us; we're just following orders." You can probably imagine my response: hollering that this place was run by a bunch of Neanderthals, and didn't they know that it was now the 21st century and it was time to get their asses out of the dark ages, etc. etc.

I noticed that a few more guards quietly slipped into the room.

Mary and Paul had made it up to be with Sonja, and we were told that only “two people” were allowed in the Labor & Delivery waiting room. So I said that I wanted to speak with someone in charge, and they paged the hospital administrator. At this point Mary came down to get a cup of coffee, and discovered that they weren’t going to let her go back up. I said to the guards that I was going up, and ‘suggested’ that they’d have to physically drag me out of there. But Mary, in her usual wonderfully diplomatic way
(while I was getting ready to be arrested) found the administrator, who was actually quite decent and apologized for their rules and brought us up to be with Sonja and Paul.

And it was amazing. After a very short time, there was Mary and I, John and Desiree, Sonja and Paul, and the newest addition to our family. Who looked at us, stuck his tongue out at us, chewed his fingers while trying to deal this whole strange world. A moment for the ages. There are few things that come so close to heaven.