Timmy Ryniker 1978 – 1996
I looked around at all those young shocked faces. They had discovered that death could reach into their midst, youth did not shelter them, and they were confused. They had loved him, shared in fun, mischief, adventures. Now they shared the same anguish and stood together, like a flock of frightened birds, contemplating their memories and their loss. This experience would forever live with them, and make them grow, make them better, wiser.
-Kuki Gallmann
This post has been a long time coming. It’s about our midwife and has been brewing in my mind and in my heart for some time now.
Last March when I was halfway through my pregnancy, we ended our prenatal care with our OB/GYN and set out to find a midwife. My husband Jason and I had just seen The Business of Being Born which was an eye opener for us since we were new to everything regarding birth and babies.
We first met Beverly Woodard of Fruition Midwifery at her office in Chelsea on March 30, 2010. She was the only one of a half dozen women I had called who was willing to take me into her practice. I write about our decision to switch from an OB/GYN to a midwife in an earlier post, here.
Before I met Beverly my impression of a midwife was someone who was was warm, maternal and perhaps a bit crunchy. Beverly was anything but that. She was a whippersnapper. She was autocratic, and she took great pleasure in shooting down our fanciful, liberal hopes for a drug-free birth. She was also impeccably groomed.
The months that followed in the rest of my pregnancy I would come to question our decision to leave our OB/GYN for a midwife. Beverly’s care was top notch, but we were not gelling the way I had hoped. When I brought my mom along to my 34 week appointment to meet Beverly, she said she understood how I felt but that one thing was for certain: Beverly knew her babies.
And so I kept this mantra in my head for the next six weeks and it helped. At my 38 week appointment Beverly advised me to buy some castor oil from Duane Reade and to drink it if my water broke but contractions did not follow. This was the first of many signs that Beverly was in fact fully supportive of my plans for a natural birth.
My labor and delivery was long and arduous, but also all-natural. I say the following with not one iota of uncertainty: I would not have had the labor and birth that I did had it not been for Beverly. I have written in length about my son’s birth story, here.
I labored for 30 hours from start to finish. Beverly provided phone support via text earlier in the day when I was very functional and then over the phone with Jason later on at night when I had moved from the latent phase of labor to the active phase of labor.
Beverly was also very supportive in the hospital. She staved off interventions such as an epidural, excessive fetal heart monitoring, internals and more. She held me from behind and swayed with me when I was at my worst. She patted my forehead with a damp washcloth. She told stories to distract me from the pain. I was wrong all along. Beverly was in fact extremely maternal.
At 9:00 am on Monday, August 9th, after six hours of blood, sweat, tears and other bodily fluids, Beverly even let me deliver my own baby! How selfless. Here’s a woman who’s job it was to present me with my baby and instead, presented me with my crowning moment in life.
With our midwife Beverly Woodard who is not just magnificent and maternal but modest, too. We had to beg her to pose in this family photo with us.
Later that day, when the endorphins and excitement of the arrival of our son began to settle in, my husband said it best: “If you were going into battle, Beverly is just the kind of person you would want next to you in the trenches.” I could not have agreed more. Beverly is not just the person who delivered our first born. She is a part of our family now, and I cannot wait to go into battle with her again. Let’s just hope it won’t be for a couple of more years. 🙂
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What about you, do you have a lot of love for the medical professional who helped bring your children into the world? Why or why not?
My mom makes the best lentil soup ever. She makes a lot of things well but her lentil soup has turned me into a sort of lentil soup snob. The recipe, which happens to be 100% vegan, is quite simple from what I understand. It has four ingredients: water, lentils, salt and onions. The most labor intensive part is the mincing and sauteeing of the onions. And since onions make my eyes tear and my hair smell, I’ve never bothered to make it.
But it may be time to learn because not only do I love my mom’s lentil soup, but my husband Jason is a big fan, and, well, so now is our son! Mylo had his first taste of his granna’s lentil soup today and the child could not get enough. He delighted in every slurp and moaned in between spoonfuls while his dad would go back to the bowl and reload. And as you can see from the below photo, he sported the brown remnants of each bite with pride!
Granna, it's delish!
I watched adoringly from the side as this was all going on. But I was also quick to finish every last lentil in my bowl aware that Jason was frustrated by what started out as HIS bowl of soup, had quickly become our 6 month old’s. And, well, if you know Jason and how well he does NOT share food, then you would have gotten a real kick out of it, too.
NOT YOUR SOUP!!
February. Such a cold and complicated month. In 1996, when I was a senior in high school, a good friend of mine died in a tragic accident. In 2000, after nine months of battling pancreatic cancer, Netsy left us. Couple these indelible losses with my birthday followed by Valentine’s Day, my father’s birthday, and arctic temperatures outside and maybe you can understand why I call this month cold and complicated.
Today is the day my grandmother passed away in the home where I grew up on Long Island. It is a day ripe with details that I remember so vividly. It was a Sunday night like tonight and my mom and I were driving home from making funeral arrangements as we knew Netsy was close. I was dazed and upset and I missed our exit on the LIE which added an unnecessary 15 minutes on to our trip. When we got home I remember my father cooking in the kitchen – the smell of ginger and garlic permeated the house. I remember going to Netsy and just knowing it was time. I remember calling screaming for everyone to come to her bedside. I just knew she had waited for my mom and me to return and I immediately felt struck by guilt for missing our exit. Minutes later she would struggle to take her last few breaths. I remember Alfy, our cat, jumping up on to her stomach in the minutes after she passed and howling her head off. It was poignant and eerie. I can only think that she must have felt my grandmother’s spirit leave. My mom was speechless and looked like she was going to vomit. She screamed for me to get Alfy off of her.
By late January I had moved my mattress downstairs to sleep by Netsy’s bedside. I would spend one final night there alone, on February 13th. I remember being awoken in the middle of the night by lightning and thunder. I watched through the living room bay windows seemingly aware that Netsy was being greeted by a glory of Gods. I am certain that’s what it was because it was the middle of February, and never before and never again have I seen a storm of that caliber.
It’s been 11 years now and I have made my peace with my grandmother’s passing. She was 76 years old and lead a fascinating and complete life. But it doesn’t mean I don’t miss her. I miss the manicures, the shopping, the lunches and blowing raspberries on her neck. And it certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t lament that she does not know the woman who I have become, and that she will never know my son, Mylo.
There is not a day that goes by that I do not think of Netsy, especially because I am reminded of her now when I look at Mylo. My mom’s best friend was the first person to say so when she saw a photo of him taken the day after he was born and my brother says it all the time. They are right. There is something in Mylo’s chin and mouth area and the way in which he clasps his hands that reminds me of her. I cannot help but think that something larger was at play when Mylo’s physical makeup was being decided. How beautiful that I would be given a son who reminds me of someone I miss terribly.
Saying I was sad today when I read the news that Long Island College Hospital may close, is an understatement. I wrote about my experience giving birth at LICH in an earlier post, here.
I am not just lamenting the loss of the physical place where my son Mylo was born, but the loss of the place where I became a mom and where I first laid eyes on my son. Any time I drive by LICH now, whether from the BQE, Hicks Street or Atlantic Avenue, I feel indescribably moved. I glance up at the building where I gave birth and quickly count four floors up while trying to scan to the window that I labored behind until Mylo was born at 9:00 am. It’s not just any room. It’s a room where a lot of blood, sweat and tears produced precious life on August 9, 2010, and has been churning out babies since the 19th century.
Long Island College Hospital: Where I first laid eyes on my son.
And of course I can’t help but think about Janelle, LICH’s best labor and delivery nurse and Bebeth, the kindest nurse on maternity, and above all, Beverly, our midwife, whose only privileges since St. Vincent’s closed, is at LICH.
I know what this means for Mylo’s future siblings — we were already planning to have home births from now on, but what does this mean for Janelle, Bebeth, Beverly and the 2,500 other employees at LICH? What does this mean for New York City, home to more than eight million people, now that a third area hospital may close? Cabrini Medical Center shut it’s doors in 2008, followed by St. Vincent’s in 2010.
What can I say? I hope Cuomo’s administration forks over the grants. I hope jobs will be saved. I hope babies will continue to be born there. I hope more women will become moms at LICH and have their lives changed, forever.
There’s been so many milestones, or as I like to call them, Mylostones, from birth to 6 months. The rate at which my son Mylo has developed from 5 months to 6 months though, has been most remarkable. I had to tell my son “no” quite sternly for the very first time recently.
I can’t hep but marvel at how much he’s developed from a helpless little baby to a small human with clear likes and dislikes and the magnificent ability to manipulate the things, and the people, around him. He army crawls around the floor with amazing dexterity and speed, h kicks things forcefully, he pushes things towards him and away from him. He negotiates the space around him with the precision of a watchmaker. Ok, not quite. But you get my drift.
I turned 33 today. It’s the day I was born in Nigeria. It’s also my first birthday as a mom. And it’s for this very reason that the day I entered the world feels that much more important.
Mylo’s trying to open, make that, EAT, my present!
Ever since I turned 30, birthdays have served as nothing more than a reminder that I am getting older. But now that I have this new role as a mom, each year that I age will also be marked with more wisdom (and hopefully more grace). I am responsible for guiding my son Mylo through this scary, albeit beautiful shifting terrain called life.
On a note-so-deep note, I began my morning as I like to begin most birthdays: with a run. And that’s not always easy being that my birthday is in February, and it doesn’t help that New York City has been getting slammed by fierce weather this winter. Luckily it was almost 40 degrees out with the sun shining when we took a 4-mile run over the Brooklyn Bridge.
Last year, while preggers I ran on my birthday with Jason and our foster dog, Lucy. This year I ran with Jason and Mylo, which is an extra treat AND an extra workout pushing a 20 pound jogging stroller and a 16 pound baby! I made us a late breakfast (J did the dishes), and then Jason is taking me to dinner at Buttermilk Channel tonight. Never ate their before and they are known to have a pretty killer pecan pie sundae. So much for that run this morning!
A New York City Mylostone down the hatch! We celebrated the birthdays at Carmine’s in Times Square Friday night and I think my son Mylo enjoyed himself more in the middle of Times Square than he did at the restaurant. Lights it seem, are more fascinating than eggplant parmasean the size of Texas!
No, seriously, the boy loves just about ANYTHING that lights up. Our Blackberries, his baby mobile, and now the busiest neighborhood in Manhattan. While his dad carried him around, he stared dead ahead with his eyes affixed to the blinking billboard monstrosities and his mouth was agape with wonder. It’s anyone’s guess how I was even able to get his attention long enough to snap this photo!
Times Square is nothing. Wait until he see Vegas!
Times Square: A baby mobile on steroids.
We went to look at a new-construction apartment last Sunday in Brooklyn. We weren’t initially looking to move until this summer, when our son Mylo is about 1 year-old, but that ever-ticking time bomb that serves as a reminder that we need a bigger apartment, is beginning to tick louder and louder.
We saw a few different units, and the one I liked the most was the one with the biggest open kitchen – which is ironic given the amount of cooking that I do. Another appeal of the apartment is that the bedrooms and living room overlooked a New York City public school yard. Convenient, I thought seeing how we’re looking to get at least five years out of our next apartment. But my Internet search on the school when we got home quickly killed any visions of me baking a casserole in the big kitchen while watching Mylo play in the schoolyard.
The apt. overlooked this NYC public school.
The school rated a 1 out of 10 and was hurting in the test scores and in the quality-of-teachers department. We didn’t take the pad. But even more alarming was that some parents reviewed the school as home to “Brooklyn’s roughest”. These are kids mind you, PK – 5! One parent wrote that her son came home with bumps and bruises. Bumps and bruises?!
It fast-forwarded me to a place of parenting that I haven’t even considered yet. Math homework, mean kids, schoolyard scuffles, bullying… was I prepared for any of this? No, not yet. Which is why we high-tailed it out of there and back to our cozy one-bedroom apartment complete with Manhattan views and our innocent, not-yet-ready-for-school 6-month old baby.
I would imagine I’m not alone in thinking there’s not a whole lot of the word “no” being directed at newborn babies. But who knows, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are some moms out there who lay down the law about wrong and right behavior from the get-go. I mean, we do that with puppies, don’t we?
My son Mylo is almost 6 months old and he is beginning to do things that require the word “no” become more common place in my vocabulary and yet I am finding that word difficult to say.
How can anyone tell this child "no"?
Case in point. Just now as I sit at my desk typing away on my laptop, Mylo dragged himself off of his playmat and army-crawled his way to the basket full of our dog’s chewed up and dirty dog toys. I watched as he lifted himself into a half push-up and reached with one hand out hoping to dip the corner of the basket toward himself. I called out “NO” and he froze with his hand in the air. He then cocked his head in my direction and shot me one of those infallible smiles that makes my insides melt. He was waiting for me to light up in response. I’ll be honest, I almost failed right there. It took every microscopic muscle in my face to refrain from smiling back.
I can see where it’s going to get more challenging. I can see already where I am going to have to become more comfortable with saying and using the word “no,” and yet I question my abilities to not just say it, but mean it.
Are there any veteran moms out there who have tips on teaching babies about wrong and right behavior? If you found it hard, as I do, do you now say the word “no” with ease and confidence?