Birth in the Time of Covid: A Tale of bat and ball
This is the first piece in a two part subset within “Birth in the Time of Covid” that details the memories of pre-labor and the birth of our daughter, Luna, on January 21st, 2021. Although there are no words to describe the phenomenon of giving birth, there are images and feelings that can be described in words. Any event is a collection of moments, and moments from time can connect to any event if we let them.
I remember the specific moment in 5th grade when my little league baseball career abruptly and thankfully ended. I was standing in the outfield on the grass at Brewbaker Field Sports Complex in my hometown of Lexington, Virginia, feeling nervous about being there. Baseball was not a sport I particularly enjoyed, and I’m not sure why I even joined the Rockbridge Area Recreation Organization (RARO) little league baseball team. Perhaps it was the peer pressure or the opportunity for camaraderie with others my age. Maybe it was part of the requirement of growing up in small town America. Regardless of the reason, I wasn’t particularly good at baseball, and I didn’t have much of a desire to improve. It just seemed like once you reach a certain age as a child in the US the options for organised extracurricular activities need to include competitive sports. But…baseball…why does the ball have to be so goddamned hard? Why does it have to move so dangerously fast? From my perspective as an innocent youth, it seemed like a bullet disguised as an object of play trying to hunt me down. It’s a good thing hockey wasn’t an option.
On that fateful day in 5th grade, at that particular moment, Daniel Penick was up to bat, and I could already feel my heart beating. Little did I know that he would bring about my baseball career’s retirement. As Daniel was not particularly tall or strong-looking at that age, I didn’t think that he would hit the ball out to where I was standing. Whenever someone new stepped up to bat, however, I would have that same familiar anxiety as I anticipated what would happen next, thinking, “here we go again….it might come to me.” I could feel my palms sweat, my left hand clammy inside of my baseball glove, my testicles beginning to tighten, slightly ascending into my body as a defensive reflex. I wondered if the batter would connect his bat with the ball, arguably one of the hardest things to do in sports anyway.
What if he hits the ball and it comes to me? Will I drop the ball? Will I make a mistake? Can I catch it? Will I be able to throw the ball to the baseman or will I fumble it, make a mistake, and will my teammates will hate me?
My mind was a fuddle with all of these thoughts and more as Daniel Penick eyed down the pitcher. Currently at 41 years of age, I actually don’t remember the other players on the field, they have become phantoms of memory as they aren’t integral to this event. They disappear and melt into the memory matrix as if they never existed. But there must have been a pitcher there — otherwise, why would Daniel be up at bat? I looked down at the grass fluttering in the wind like a small wave, envious of its carefree nature, hoping that Daniel wouldn’t hit the ball. But if he missed the pitch, why would I be relating this story in the first place?
My wife’s sport of choice in high school was basketball. The sport I took up was tennis, long having abandoned baseball to the days of my childhood, instead choosing to balance my extracurricular activities between tennis and drama. I remember watching tennis matches with a mixture of glee and anxiety as my favourite players would spar on the courts of Wimbledon, the US Open, the Australian and French Opens. I was always a fan of the perennial underdog, Michael Chang, and I loved that his strength came from a combination of his speed and boundless determination. My wife has never played tennis in her life, and so it came as a surprise to me when I looked into our labor-ready-bag on the morning that we would head to MacKay Memorial Hospital in Taipei and I discovered a tennis ball inside.
“What’s this?” I asked her, feeing the tennis ball in my hand, the felt on its surface clearly never having met Michael Chang, perhaps never having even seen a tennis court before.
“I thought I might use the ball for my contractions and labor pains,” she said, having researched suggested items to take to labor.
I sniffed the ball and was reminded of matches in high school where I would try my best to utilise a backspin slice as a weapon against my opponent on the court. I never had a lot of power. Power wasn’t my game. I aimed more for placement, finesse, and spin. At the high school level a player could do that. Today was going to be a different sort of match for us. My wife would need all of the above attributes and more in order to produce a human life. We would enter the court as two people, while returning as three. I put the unused tennis ball back in its bag.
CRACK!!!
From the sound of the bat hitting the ball, it was instantly clear to me that this one was going high. Even as a 5th grader I could sense it and knew it was a fly ball just from the sound. Baseball is a game of sound — fly balls, home runs, bunts, foul balls — all of these sounds are different, but fly balls and home runs have a kind of sound connected with magic and cinema. I looked up into the sky to see the baseball rising as a speck towards the Sun and held up my left hand, my baseball glove wobbling without confidence, sliding over my clammy palm. The glare of the Sun was in my eyes. I pulled a small wedgie that had gathered in my sports shorts out of my butt-crack with my right hand, a sure-fire sign of nervousness. The ball was definitely coming to me, it was showtime. I shaded my eyes with the baseball glove, but I couldn’t see where the ball was. I stared into the glare of the Sun like a blinded bat.
There are those moments in sports and in life that define turning points. There are the moments where the momentum may shift definitively towards an eventual fateful outcome, and the shift may happen with the movement of the second hand on a clock. One such moment happened in 1989 at the French Open when 17-year-old unseeded challenger, Michael Chang, brought the tennis world to a standstill as he was playing №1 ranked Ivan Lendl. After battling back from two sets down and overcoming leg cramps to even it up at two sets apiece, he continued to use creativity through improvisation in his tennis game. Chang knew that he had a chance, but he needed to try something different if he was to survive. It was in the 5th set when he made the split second decision to hit a surprise underhand serve. At that time in the match Chang was leading the set 4–3, down 15–30 in his service game. From this point, everything turned around in Chang’s favour.
“It created a very interesting element to the match and certainly made the battle, not only physical, but mental as well. It actually never crossed my mind to ever use it again, strangely enough.” — Michael Chang
We sat in our pre-labor room where we had been spending the afternoon and would spend the evening during my wife’s labor. A few hours prior, the doctor had applied the medication for inducing the contractions; now they had already started, a dull pain that became sharper as time went by.
We were sharing a room with another couple, separated by hospital curtains. I could smell the smell of McDonald’s french fries that they had ordered and were already munching. It struck me as surprising that they would even want to eat McDonald’s prior to giving birth, but I wasn’t the one giving birth, so I didn’t know and couldn’t judge. I can still smell the greasy fries mixed with clammy burgers, and I have to admit that I wanted to take a fry or two from the couple.
Prior to labor, we had requested for a painless delivery with an epidural needle. During the process itself; however, the nurses repeatedly told us that the anesthesiologist was unavailable during the window of time where contractions were still far enough apart to safely apply the medication. Apparently, there were other operations the anesthesiologist was attending to. I could already see that my wife was in a great deal of pain and it was difficult to relate this information to her.
“Tennis ball,” she replied, holding out her hand and grimacing with exhaustion.
I reached into the bag and found the ball, handing it over to her immediately. She placed it under her back and moaned, a sound coming forth from her throat that I’d never heard before.
BAM!!!!
Darkness. It was the kind of darkness you see when you squeeze your eyes shut so tightly that there are patterns of faded red and green dots throughout the spaces within the darkness. This type of darkness is what I imagine it to be like in the depths of space, except it also resides in the depths of one’s consciousness.
I was on the ground, lying on my back, my right hand covering my right eye. The pain was such an instant shock that it hadn’t registered in my mind what had happened. But of course I knew what had happened. [I had dropped my hand entirely.] At the last second, I had dropped my hand, letting my face catch the ball instead of my baseball glove. I don’t remember screaming, but I’m sure I was a sight to see. It’s at this point in the memory that those phantom teammates reappear, a coach as well, crowded around me checking to make sure I was okay.
I held no ill will towards the batter. As strange as it sounds, there was something deep inside myself at that time that expressed a sort of gratitude towards Daniel Penick and thought:
At least I don’t have to play baseball anymore.
I could hear the unmistakeable sound of someone vomiting coming from the side of our room where the other pregnant couple sat as they battled through their own pre-birth contractions. The anesthesiologist had administered the medication to the expectant mother some 40 minutes to an hour prior. One of the potential side effects of administering an epidural needle is nausea, and I don’t think our roommate’s McDonald’s meal lasted in her stomach for more than an hour.
Unfortunately for my wife, she wouldn’t be able to experience the epidural needle or the nausea, and instead she would need to go through the birth without medication entirely. Her contractions were too close together, and the anesthesiologist warned that in order to administer the medication she would need to remain perfectly still for fear of the epidural needle causing possible spinal damage should she move. The two choices were an intense and finite pain, or no (or at least lesser) pain, but a risk of unknowable spinal injury. We chose the former.
Seeing how much pain she was in, neither of us thought she would be able to stay still for a full 10 minutes as the contractions were now washing over her in waves. Her water had broken some time before, yet despite the pain she reassured me everything was okay with an occasional nod of her head, an exhalation of pent up carbon dioxide, and a twinkle in her eye. Together we breathed through the contractions as she gripped my hand tighter than I thought possible. I stared intently into her face, her eyes shut tightly like two locked doors, behind them only the darkness from the depths of space. My face remained only centimetres away, and yet my physical condition was worlds apart. I was trying as hard as possible to channel what she felt, capture everything I could visually and mentally, wondering what she was feeling and how she was feeling it. As each contraction came, the nurse encouraged my wife to push during the pain for a full count of ten seconds. The tennis ball was somewhere under her back on a water resistant sheet which was now awash amidst a mass of blood and amniotic fluids. This was a five set match which required full effort from her physically, mentally, and emotionally. Her inner strength was enough to humble champions from any arena.
I could not and will never understand the type of pain that my wife was experiencing that day, and I don’t know how much of it she can remember. I know I can remember her screams and the smiles she managed to squeak through during and after the pain itself. She obviously held no ill will towards the cause of this pain, and the pain would end with life-changing results. Through it all , I could see a kind of strength and boundless determination I had never known before. It was the kind of determination that pulls off upsets of an underdog against those ranked number 1 in the world, the kind of determination that brings life onto the Earth, fighting all the way through pain that no man can ever know. Looking back on the stress and trauma of the pre-delivery, I later asked my wife to try and verbalise the pain in words.
“It was like Ichiro Suzuki was using his baseball bat to hit me as hard as possible directly in my spine.” I had seen the famous Japanese player live in a stadium some years before (I want to say it was 2003). Little did I know he would be showing up during my wife’s labor. Although Ichiro was not known for his home run hitting power, the man could hit. The impending delivery of our first child was certainly a home run to be celebrated amidst blissful pain.
Ichiro struck again and again, unrelenting. He was “a master of using the head of his bat to direct his hits.” — Nicolas Stellini, How to Swing Like Ichiro.
Chang dusted the clay off his shoes. “Catch a player off guard, and you can win the point, or, as Chang did, alter the match.” — Jonothan Braden, Resurfaced: Chang Popularised The Underarm Serve 30 Years Ago; Now Kyrgios, Bublik Use
I opened my eyes. The darkness disappeared.
My wife opened her eyes and we began to count to ten again, a gentle smile firmly rooted in the center of the pain. We were in the home stretch.
