Maternity Ward. Psych Ward. Repeat.

Shuttling back and forth between two very different hospital wards on the night my son was born

photo by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash

The tabletop was littered with an abandoned game of Uno as the television in the communal visitation room roared at full volume, some inoffensive TV movie on the screen. An angry resident started urinating on the floor beside the orderly, eliciting no apparent reaction from anyone in the room.

“Emily’s doing great,” I said to my father-in-law.

“Okay. You better get back.” His instructions were one part concern for his daughter, one part desire to be rid of me, perhaps embarrassed by his state and current environs. The nurse asked how Emily was doing as she buzzed open the lock on the massive doors to the psych ward.

“Great,” I said, as I pushed open the buzzing doors. “She’s doing great. A lot of pain but she’s tough.”

“Wonderful,” said the nurse. “We can’t wait to meet that baby.”

The buzzing doors led to a series of hallways, each with its own set of locked double doors, each guarded by a sentinel closed-circuit camera the nurses monitored from their station. I waved at each camera and the nurse unlocked each door remotely.

Eventually, I stood before the elevator bank pounding the down button, anxious that my wife was giving birth to our first child one ward over while I was there, advising her father on her progress as he rattled with the depression and anxiety that have plagued him for years.

****

Two years earlier, on the day Emily and I planned to make an offer on our first house, a small Chapel Hill starter home, everything fell apart. I was out for breakfast with my father, who was visiting from New York, encouraged by Emily to spend some time with my dad despite our needing to tie up a few loose ends concerning our mortgage approval.

As both she and I were self-employed, me as a writer and musician, Emily as a professional health coach, a co-signer would be a necessity despite our sufficient income.

Emily’s father, a recently-retired drug abuse counselor with the city of Charlotte, volunteered and assured us that his longtime tax attorney would have the requisite information our mortgage counselor would need.

After breakfast, my father and I returned to our slim townhome to find Emily on the couch, sobbing, her phone pressed to her face. She looked up at me with a mix of fear, rage, and sadness as tears poured down her bright red cheeks. She had been on the phone with the tax attorney who, shocked at her call, told her that he hadn’t heard from her father in years and presumed he’d hired new counsel. Upon this discovery, Emily dug deeper, and with the help of her sister, contacted her father’s neighbors, former coworkers and friends, the city of Charlotte, and the Department of Motor Vehicles.

With each passing call, the stacked layers of years of deception began to fold back. Emily and her sister soon discovered that their father’s lifelong battle with depression and anxiety, one he assured us he was winning, was far darker and more paralyzing than he had ever let on. Taxes were left unpaid, his cars sat in the driveway unregistered and uninsured, while bills piled high on every inch of his kitchen table. It was as if his life was frozen, stuck on the last day he was capable of handling everything.

We decided that Emily’s dad would move in with us immediately and our search for a home would start anew, our focus shifting from starter home to home-with-in-law-suite in which he could live.

Arduous months passed as we looked at what felt like hundreds of houses, all advertised with in-law suites or independent apartments that usually turned out to be windowless basements with dank bathrooms and shoddy kitchenettes.

Eventually, we found the perfect home, one with a beautiful basement apartment that flooded with natural light and had an actual kitchen. After some negotiation, we moved in, continuing to live by the routine we’d developed with Emily’s dad in the months spent in our townhome.

Every day, he was required to walk two miles before lunch, recreating his daily routine from Emily’s childhood. Every other night, he would come upstairs to our part of the house, where we would eat dinner together. Every weekend, he would fill us in on what he’d discussed in his various sessions with his team of therapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and doctors.

Soon, however, he began to whittle away at the two miles and at the near-nightly dinners. His legs would hurt, he’d claim, or he would be too exhausted by six in the evening to wait for us to cook. Soon, he was once again spending the entirety of his days inside as Emily and I wondered how we had allowed this to happen on our watch. Soon, we heard screaming and banging emanating from the basement apartment. Soon, we saw the self-inflicted cuts and bruises on his hands. Soon, Emily and I sat across from her father at our kitchen table, telling him that he could either come with me and admit himself to the nearby hospital’s psychiatric lockdown ward or we’d be calling the police to take him there against his will.

Soon, our near-nightly dinners became near-nightly visits to the psych ward as Emily’s belly grew with our first child.

Soon, my wife’s water would break and we’d rush to the maternity ward of the very hospital where her father had lived as a resident the previous few months.

****

As I dashed through the winding hallways of the hospital, the psych ward’s harsh fluorescent-lit hallways gave way to the airy main atrium which then led to the warm pink halls of the maternity ward where life was beginning everywhere.

By design or otherwise, the air in the maternity ward felt warmer, the lights more dim, the halls more welcoming. Every few minutes, a gentle lullaby echoed quietly through the halls, signaling the birth of a new baby boy or baby girl, the start of a new life. The hushed repose of the maternity ward’s hallways stood in stark juxtaposition to the cold brightness and abrasive volume of the psych lockdown. 

By the time I made it back, the sun had set outside of the room-length window where Emily would be giving birth, the lights of our little university town flickering below us.

We could see the outer edges of the adjacent tower that held the psych ward from one of the window’s corners and I thought that Emily’s dad might be able to see us if the outer surfaces of all of the hospital’s windows weren’t reflective. 

“It’s better that he can’t,” I told myself.

I listened to Emily breathe and looked at her bulbous belly, wondering where our son might be at that very moment. 

“How can I help?” I asked. 

Emily assured me there wasn’t much I could do. Refill a few water bottles. Cue up our carefully curated birth playlist. Set up the Bluetooth speaker near her bedside, but make sure it was out of the doctors’ way.

She instructed me to get some sleep as she bounced on a big, grey yoga ball, breathing deep and wincing with each passing contraction.

“It’s going to be a while and I’m going to need you later,” she said.

I stretched out across the hard couch. Just as I shut my eyes, Emily asked, “Hey, how’s my dad?”

“He’s okay,” I said. “Nervous.”

****

I slept for a fitful hour or two, lulled by the rhythm of my son’s amplified heartbeat, when the nurse tapped my shoulder.

“You might wanna wake up, daddy,” she said in a North Carolina drawl. “You’re about to have this baby.”

I grabbed my phone, pressing play on the playlist. Vashti Bunyan’s “Winter Is Blue” was punctuated by my wife’s heavy breathing and the nurses’ instructions on how to push. 

“Curl your pelvis up,” one said, “and push toward the ceiling.”

Emily moved her hips and shimmied her lower back down toward the doctors whose heads disappeared between her thighs.

“That’s exactly right,” the other nurse commended. “Now when the contractions come, I want you to push.”

Emily grabbed my hand and squeezed with a power I had never witnessed in our decade together.  

She was pushing.

“You’re doing great,” I whispered in her ear as the first contraction subsided.

“Emily,” said the doctor, whose head was buried in my wife’s crotch, “you are doing great.”

The second contraction rose like a tide in Emily, my fingers crushed between hers. She curled into herself, her chin meeting her upper chest as she pushed.

“Deep breaths, girl,” said the nurse.

She pushed again. I looked over the top of her pelvis and asked anyone who might answer, “Is that his head?”

“That’s his head,” replied the doctor.

I had no idea it could go so fast.

“Em. His head is already there. I see the top of it. He’s almost here.”

“He’s almost here, mama,” replied the nurse. 

The doctor repeated the sentiment.

“He’s almost here.”

The third contraction. The push. Nothing.

“That’s good, Emily,” said the doctor. “Just keep breathing.”

The previous two contractions had moved our son along so fast and I had assumed that this meant Emily was settling into a long labor. No way it would be over so soon. 

“That’s good, Emily,” said the doctor. “Just keep breathing.”

Harry Nilsson’s version of “Everybody’s Talkin’” began lilting from the little speaker. 

The next contraction, the next set of pushes, the deep breaths, the tight grip, the nurses’ instructions, the doctors’ hands grabbing at the baby’s head, the bright lights, the sheets twisting beneath Emily, the darkness over Chapel Hill outside of our wall-length window. Everything repeated in cycle once more.

Emily breathed one last time, pushed again, squeezed my hand in hers, and just like that, she was done.

I saw the mass of blue-white flesh fall into the doctor’s arms. I saw the nurses rush to clean some of the birth off of him. I watched his little mouth open for the first time, his first breath of air rush through his tiny lungs, his first scream come back out to the world. I saw them bring him to Emily’s chest, to place him skin to skin on her, the residue from the birth canal intermingling with the sweat pooled on her sternum. I saw the elation in my wife’s face as her iron grip loosened between my fingers.

I took a deep breath and looked down at what had very suddenly become my family. 

I wondered if the gentle birth lullaby was playing in the halls outside of our comfortable room, the one with the wall-length window and the beautiful view of town, the birth lullaby that belonged to my son.

For the first five or ten minutes of my son’s new life, my mind was more clear than it had ever been before. Gone were happiness or sadness, fear, resentment, or excitement. I felt neither regret nor fulfillment. 

Awe was the only emotion I could recognize. To look at my son—his tiny creature, this amalgam of cells that came together to form a life whose safety and serenity Emily and I would now be charged with indefinitely—who we created out of nothing, was lucidity. 

I thought of Emily’s father and the clear was shattered. Like a freight train through a glass door, I began to think about him. Perhaps he was awake. Perhaps he hadn’t slept at all that night, pinching his forearms until they bled, as he was wont to in moments of extreme anxiety, worried about his daughter and his new grandson. 

I convinced myself that he had a good night, that the serenity of the maternity ward’s dim hallways had somehow extended to the cold psych lockdown, if only for that night. I convinced myself that he was calm and comfortable, sleeping without worry for the first time in months, maybe years.

It was four-twenty-eight in the morning and I thought that I could spend the rest of the night holding my new son, how I could just be here with my wife, how I could be with my family, all ten or fifteen minutes old as we were then, and how I didn’t have to rush back to the psych ward with an update as I had several times the night before. Emily’s father wouldn’t be awake for at least a few more hours.

Michael Venutolo-Mantovani is a writer and musician living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic, WIRED, GQ, Catapult, The Guardian, and elsewhere. He also publishes the Substack 'Being a Dad is Hard as F*ck,' which focuses on honest and earnest conversations about fatherhood.