The doctor was sitting outside in the waiting area for the clinic. Perfect, I thought. I wanted to talk with her without making a big deal out of it. No one was around, so I entered and pulled up a chair next to her. After making the usual greetings, I got straight to the point. “I would like to buy a pregnancy test to do at home,” I whispered. The whispering was not because I was embarrassed, only that I didn’t want any passersby to hear what I was saying. I had not even told Christian I suspected I was pregnant, and I would hate for rumors to start from a child who overheard my request.
“You think you might be pregnant?” she asked kindly and curiously.
“Maybe,” I admitted. I told her how lately I had been feeling especially tired, and how my stomach had felt a little off for two or three weeks. There were no big signs, but once the seed of possibility entered my mind, it grew until I knew I needed to take a test just to be sure.
“It’s probably nothing,” I said, “but I just want to double check. And please don’t say anything to Christian about it.”
The doctor raised her eyebrows. “He doesn’t know you are taking a test?” I shook my head. She seemed amused, or perhaps honored that she was literally the first person I had told about my suspicion. She gave me a pregnancy test to take home. I hid it in the back pocket of my jeans, then pulled my shirt down over it, just to be sure nothing could be seen. When I reached home, I hid it in the bathroom until I was ready to take it that evening.
I would not have been surprised with a negative result, but I was also not surprised when the two lines grew dark on that tiny stick. I would even say there was a twinge of happiness.
Christian, on the other hand, was shocked. After I told him, he just stared at me and I swear I could hear the gears in his head turning. We had not planned this. In fact, we had planned not to have this happen. I had an IUD. On top of that, I was still breastfeeding Patricia, who was two weeks shy of a year old, three or four times a day. When I wasn’t breastfeeding her but still had milk, I was pumping for two babies in the children’s home. When we told my parents two weeks later, my mom’s first reaction was, “How can you be pregnant? You’re constantly breastfeeding!”
Take note, women: Breastfeeding is not birth control.
That is how we came to know about Little Peanut, as we affectionately called our surprise baby. After a few weeks the shock wore off and we were able to joyfully adjust our plans for the year (and beyond) to accommodate this new little life.
Fast forward to August, and we were all prepared for the arrival of Little Peanut. I cut back on work when I was 37 weeks pregnant to give us time to organize the house, get the last supplies we needed, and spend some quality time with Patricia while she was still an only child. In the last weeks of my pregnancy with Patricia we were impatient to have her with us. We would have gladly welcomed her before her due date so we could meet our first child.
We did not experience that with Little Peanut. For one, we were both working a lot and simply didn’t have time to sit down and think, We can’t wait for something to come and make our lives even busier! But more than that, we enjoy Patricia so much—and she takes so much energy—that we were very happy to have a few more weeks where we could give her our complete attention.
Or so we thought.
Like the pregnancy, the delivery caught us a little bit off guard.
Monday, August 24, started like our other Mondays: Christian and I dropped Patricia off at daycare, grabbed our Bibles and went to staff devotions. After devotions I went down to the library for a couple hours to organize some of the mess I had left when the lockdown program ended a week before. That day I finally felt like I had made enough progress that it looked like a library again, not a storeroom. Or a pigsty.
Once in a while I felt something—not exactly a pain; more of a small pressure—in my pelvis, but as I had been walking around the whole morning, carrying boxes back and forth between the library and the storage room, and I was eight-and-a-half months pregnant with what looked to be a huge baby, I assumed it was just from the activity and nothing with which to concern myself. I was also very tired, to the point where I wanted to take a nap, but that was not uncommon considering work, the one-year-old, and the pregnancy. It did cross my mind that I hoped the baby would not come that day because I didn’t feel like I had enough energy for labor, but the thought was fleeting as I went about my business.
The three of us had lunch at home and then I grabbed my Bible and journal to do devotions. Since Christian was busy with something in the living room, I sat down on our bed to read. I read one page, and then rested my head on my arm… and closed my eyes…
I woke up about half an hour later with a dull pain in my abdomen. It lasted about thirty seconds and then subsided. That’s a bit strange, I thought, sitting up again and closing my Bible and journal. I surrendered to fatigue, lying down properly on my pillow and actually giving myself permission to close my eyes. Twenty minutes later, I woke up again with the same pain. And again twenty minutes later. And then once more.
I was not yet convinced this was real labor, but since the pains had been at regular intervals I got out of bed and told Christian the baby might be on the way. We agreed to time the possible-contractions for the next hour and then call the midwife if they stayed consistent.
They did not stay consistent.
By the end of the hour, contractions—and by then we knew they were contractions, whether it was real labor or not—were five minutes apart and lasted a minute. Christian went to get the midwife while I got Patricia, who had been napping, out of bed and into her high chair for a snack. I sat in front of her on the coffee table and breathed through the steadily-growing contractions. Once I closed my eyes to focus on my breathing. When the contraction ended and I opened my eyes to see Patricia again, she was also breathing loudly and slowly, her mouth in a perfect circle and eyes on me. That girl copies everything!
The midwife came and did an exam. “You are in labor,” she told us matter-of-factly. “You are dilated five centimeters. You can stay here and take care of Patricia for now. Call me when your water breaks or when you feel like pushing and I will come back.”
When she left I looked at Christian. “When I feel like pushing? Won’t that be too late to go to the clinic?” With Patricia we did a “home” birth in the Netherlands, but here that was impractical. Our bedroom is so small that the bed takes almost all the space. It would be difficult for anyone to get to different sides of the bed quickly. Not only that, but the foot board on our bed would make it impossible to deliver the baby in that direction because no one could stand there to catch it. The clinic is less than a minute’s walk from our house, and we knew if we delivered in the clinic we wouldn’t have to deal with the mess in the same way we would in our own home. So even though this delivery was in Uganda, it would end up being in more of a medical facility than what we had in the Netherlands.
We had arranged for Irene, a teenager from the family units, to be our on-call baby-sitter for Patricia when I went into labor. Since we needed something to do to pass the time and the contractions, the three of us put on our shoes and wandered down to the family units to let her know she should come to our house later in the evening.
Our hope was to put Patricia to bed at 8:00 and then let Irene take over while we went to the clinic for what would likely be the whole night. We tried not to make a big deal of it as we smiled and told her (with eight other girls from the family unit eavesdropping behind her) that the baby was on the way and Patricia would need her services in a few hours.
It was dark by the time we reached home again at 7:00. The contractions were no closer together and no worse, but it was still early in labor. I sat on the floor and finally got a hold of my mom, whom I had called multiple times on multiple numbers but had failed to find until then. Sitting on the floor was because my water had not yet broken and I was in no mood to figure out how to clean amniotic fluid off our couch. Turns out sitting on the floor was a wise move because a few minutes later I felt a warm bubbling between my legs and knew without a doubt (in contrast to labor with Patricia) that my water had just broken. Christian whisked Patricia into her high chair to keep her from skating on the slippery floor and called the midwife again.
The midwife returned and said I was now dilated six centimeters but that after water breaking labor tends to speed up, so it was time for me to come down with her to the clinic. I grabbed my phone, kissed Patricia good night, and left her screaming in her high chair when I closed the door behind me. Christian would join me in half an hour after giving her supper and getting her in bed.
One blessing, for which I had not thought to wish ahead of time, was that Little Peanut decided to make his entrance in the evening when the clinic was closed. That meant that I had the freedom to walk around the waiting area without weaving in and out of patients’ outstretched legs and without wearing a mask, and there was only the occasional person who walked by and was clued in as to what was going on.
For the next hour, I paced.
I like rhythm when I am in labor. With Patricia, I had a rhythm of breathing while I was waiting for the green light to push. This time, I made my own little track, always following the same route around the chairs, down the hall, and back. I did it backwards once or twice and it felt weird. For distraction, I held my phone in my hand and listened to a Friends episode on Netflix. I remember it was the one where Phoebe, Monica and Rachel all wear their wedding dresses and Rachel scares Joshua away and though I haven’t watched that one since then, I am sure for the rest of my life it will always remind me of that night.
“Are they increasing?” the midwife asked through the window of her office as I passed. I breathed out a “yes” and kept walking.
By the time Christian came with our things, I was having trouble staying composed while I moved. I tried sitting a couple of times, because on a normal day if I have pain while moving then sitting brings relief, but sitting only brought me the expectation of relief and no less pain, which turned out to be worse.
I followed him to what I guess would be called the labor suite, a room with two beds and a bucket we brought for a toilet since there are only pit latrines in the clinic and the midwife understandably did not want me to accidentally deliver my baby into a pit full of poop. (I did not actually have to use the bucket, which made me happy.) My tolerance for the pain did not increase at the same rate as the pain itself. I sat on the floor and rested my head on a chair, rocking back and forth until the midwife told me to sit on the bed because “they do come and clean the floor… but it’s the floor, so you never know.”
Back to pacing.
There is a short hallway with a seam down the middle of the flooring. Concentrating all my efforts on that seam, I walked the line like someone taking a DUI test. Over and over, back and forth, trying to think only of that line. (Friends was way behind me at that point.) When even that became too much, I succumbed to the bed. Christian brought me some juice and a granola bar and every contraction I put my head between my arms and rocked back and forth on my knees until the two-second pause before the next one.
I could hear the midwife preparing the delivery room next door. Finally, I whispered to Christian, “Tell her I want to push.”
Compared to our bed where I delivered Patricia in the Netherlands, the bed in the delivery room felt like plywood. A doctor told me later it is to encourage mothers to deliver quickly. The clock hung on the wall in front of me. I started pushing at 9:00 pm.
After the very first push, the midwife said, “There it is,” and pointed between my legs at the bed. I didn’t really think the baby had come out already, but what else could she be talking about? Then she picked up the IUD I had just delivered and put it on a table for safekeeping.
The delivery room is full of windows. It is full of windows with no curtains. Two of those windows directly face the main road on the compound, about ten feet away from the side of the building. It was dark outside, and we had the light on in the room. I would have felt entirely on display if it were not for the fact that I had on countless occasions walked that road and glanced at those windows and I know from experience that you can see absolutely nothing from the road. It doesn’t make sense to me, but it did make me feel better.
Our midwife here was the opposite of our midwife in the Netherlands. For Patricia’s birth, during push after push, the midwife was by my side almost shouting, “C’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon c’mon!” to encourage me. This time, she was calmly arranging things in the room while Christian stayed by my side, occasionally coming over to check progress and then going back to her other business.
Labor is like a trail full of switchbacks. When you walk switchbacks in the forest, you have no idea how many still lie ahead of you. You can only see a short section of trail in front of you and every time you switch back you wonder if you’re going to get the view that time… or the next time… or the next. Once in a while you think to yourself, This MUST be it!, only to see more trail. Do you need to save your energy for twenty more, or can you power through these last few to reach the top? Are you allowed to be tired yet, or would that be foolishly premature?
Pushing a baby out is like that.
“You need to give the next one more effort.”
I did. No baby.
A bit later: “If you push harder on the next one, it might be your last.”
I gently (at least it was intended to be gentle, but was likely not) clutched the front of Christian’s shirt and said with closed eyes, “Pray that this is the last one.”
“I already did,” he answered. What a guy.
Then—finally—I heard, “It’s out.” Not wanting to relax too soon, with my chin still to my chest I shouted in one breath, “Just-the-head-or-the-whole-baby!?”
“Just the head—one more push!”
The last switchback.
And there he was. Our bloody, big, screaming, gray, slimy treasure.
The midwife laid him on my chest for just a minute or two before taking him away to get cleaned up and warm. I just kept looking at his gross head and whispering in a mixture of joy and relief, “You’re here. You’re here.”
After a while, Christian wanted to send a message to our families. We had recently narrowed it down to two names, but each of us slightly preferred a different one. The good thing about being half naked and bloody and sweaty on a delivery bed that felt like a plank was that Christian said we could use the one I preferred. Then he asked how to spell it.
For all of you who see Elliot’s name and think it should be spelled with double t—yes, it should. But we were eager to tell people about him. So we guessed. And we stuck with it.
Elliot comes from the name Elijah and means “the Lord is my God.” Mukisa, his middle name, is the Luganda word for blessing. Elliot Mukisa Berkman was born at 9:30 pm on August 24, 2020, after a mere six hours of labor. (To sum up the difference between delivering a first and second child—the intensity of the pain is the same, but it doesn’t last as long.) It was a good thing he came two weeks early, because at 3.9 kilograms I would not have wanted to grow him any bigger on the inside!
We thank God he gave us this blessing even when we didn’t know we wanted it.
