The phone rang tonight.
I answered and said ‘hello’.
The voice familiar to me, it was an old friend of ours.
We met when I was twenty. I was young, in a scary sterile hospital setting.
Our first child was to be born and the doctor wanted to induce labor.
Not knowing what that really meant or what to expect. I listened to the doctor and felt he was the one who knew the most. When you are young you believe they know more. The doctor felt the baby was too big for me and wanted to watch the delivery really close.
Labor was slow. Inducement slow.
The clock on the wall moved into long anxiety inducing minutes, as the hands seemed to be frozen in time.
Very stressful for a young couple, not knowing what was going to take place in the next few hours.
Our lives would never be the same.
We would leave there with a baby.
The nursery at home prepared and waiting for the bundle of love to go home.
The three pm shift began. A new nurse came in said to me, “Oh you are not in labor yet, let’s turn this pit drip up and you can have a baby by dinner.’ A pit drip is an IV mixture that moves labor faster than a normal labor schedule. That is why they call in inducement. They force the contractions to move fast to allow the baby to be born through an unnatural process.
The intensity moved quickly, as I watched each liquid drip fall faster and faster down the IV bag.
The nurse got her wish. The delivery came very fast, from 3:30 to 5:35 pm I moved from no labor pains at all, to hard labor in minutes.
A whirlwind of feelings and emotions slammed me.
At 5:35 pm our beautiful baby boy was born.
We named him Christopher.
As I rested in my bed, I heard the moaning and groaning of another lady down the hall.
She was not quiet in her labor journey and I was feeling the anxiety with her.
Hours passed as I listened to her ‘difficult labor’.
I kept asking the nurse, who is that??? As I listened to her screams in the background.
The hospital was small, and I could hear almost everything that took place with her.
Eleven hours later she was wheeled into my room.
She was exhausted and worn, and I knew she needed her rest just as I needed my own.
As we both woke up we made small talk, and our husbands visited.
We both had our first born sons. They were so similar one weighing 6.3 and one weighing 6.8.
Our son was very beautiful
although the nurse had to reassure me his cone head ‘would go away’.
Their son had lots of hair.
Two boys born eleven hours a apart.
Each day we would visit and share small talk. Those days in maternity wards the baby’s went back to the nursery and the moms actually got to rest. They also kept the moms for 4 days so we had lots of time to establish a ‘friendship’.
When the time came, we bundled our son up and left for home.
They left for home a day later.
Weeks had passed and one chance meeting in a local grocery store, rekindled the friendship.
We exchanged phone numbers, addresses and wished each other well.
It has been 35 years. A friendship long and treasured.
At least once a year we get together and share stories of children and life.
Their children grown. Our children grown.
A friendship that has kept strong throughout the years.
We were young, they were almost ten years older.
It has been a friendship that has lasted, and it is very interesting to watch our aging process.
We have a warm understanding of ‘who we are with them’.
It is good. It is treasured, and valued.
We were two couples in different stages of life, learning together, the ideas of being a parent for the first time.
It is no different whether you have been a professional working person for years
or a newlywed young mom. She worked full time and I was a stay at home mom.
The journey is the same for both.
New babies: equal fatigue. New babies: equal anxiety.
It has been a warm wonderful friendship that has lasted for years.
We often joke about the ‘nurse’ who was not so gentle to both of us.
It is a story of friendship.
God is so wonderful to keep us close to those who really matter to us.
Friendship is wonderful.
I thank God for all of the special people in our lives.
