Seminar in Fiction class Unit 2

Finding the Moment


Hours slid by excrutiatingly slowly. The minutiae that I dealt with during that time I barely remember. I kept making small talk with my wife and stared out the suite’s window. However, I can tell nothing specific about those hours of time.
I remember nothing about the evergreens outside the suite. The only reason I know there are evergreens outside the hospital is because I have driven past it in the two years since. I couldn’t relate anything we talked about. I do recall singing a playful song to my wife as she lay there in the bed. There was a hit by Avril Lavigne that I mockingly dramatized. She needed the laugh.
I didn’t laugh. I had never been through anything like this before. I’ve never even had a broken bone, let alone a serious procedure. I think the only thing I’d ever been to an emergency room for was five stitiches in my thumb once. My wife lay in the bed, groaning every few minutes, and I was forgetting each moment as it passed.
However slowly the previous hours crept by, the next fifteen minutes were light speed. I hazily recall half a dozen people in white and blue uniforms surrounding my wife. My heart rate shot to a million beats a minute. This was it.
The machines chirped furiously. Two nurses held my wife’s hands. She breathed horribly with purpose and I wished I could take upon myself that pain I saw in her eyes. I watched sweat drip off her brow as I stood there, wringing my hands with nothing to do. I saw dust motes floating in the new light of morning. The cacophony around me was like listening to a tape on fast forward.
My wife’s time had come. I was told to get in closer. Moving closer was like walking through cobwebs. I was so scared. No, that wasn’t the word. I was apprehensive. I said I’d never been in this position before.
My wife’s feet were in the stirrups. I heard the vulnerability in her gasps for breath. She wanted it over. The nurses kept repeating in those soft voices that it was almost over.
And then those final spasms. A gut-wrenching cry. Someone said, “There it is.” The duest motes paused and I heard a symphony that came iwht the next push. My wife expelled the baby.
I knew before it was told that I had a daughter. I didn’t need the camera because I’ll never forget that moment, but I took pictures anyway, as if I would forget. In that moment, as my wife was being taken care of (she was fine—she would go for a walk in the next half hour), I felt my whole life condense. Thirty years shrank to a window of time written on a birth certificate. Eight thirty-five a.m.
As she was being cleaned, I was the first to call her by her name. In that moment, I made a promise for the future and to the past. All this time, all this time, I was here for this moment, and all the moments to follow. My time is for Madison. That moment changed everything.