My Missed Opportunity to be a Hollywood Cliché

I have been waiting to go into labor for six days now. My doctor was surprised that she didn’t need to send me directly down to labor and delivery when I went in for my regular appointment last Thursday. I was 5 cm dilated at the time. For those of you who don’t know what that means – I’ve only recently learned myself – when the baby comes out, you’re 10 cm dilated. Many women, when they are rushed to the hospital because they’ve begun feeling the pain of regular contractions, are around 2 cm. When they reach 3-4 cm they are in active labor. Monday morning, I had grown to 6 cm with nary a contraction. So basically, this child is ready to fall out. My doctor has scheduled me to be induced Wednesday morning if she doesn’t decide to come out on her own.

Well at 3:30 this morning – my 31^st birthday – we were awoken by the sound of a tornado siren. The lightening flickered like a strobe light. David, my mom and I – each holding on to a pet – hunkered down on the floor of our hallway, the only area in the house with no windows, moments before the barometric pressure dropped. Just then, the front hit – it was the worst storm I can remember since moving to Alabama. This was the storm I had read about a few days ago that was to wreak havoc across the entire country. It started out in my old stomping grounds of northern California. On the Doppler it looked like a hurricane was about to hit the west coast, like a scene that might have been in the movie, Day After Tomorrow.

As the storm picked up strength, we heard a loud crash toward the back of the house, and knew it had to have been caused by the huge, dead hickory tree that stands five feet from the house and has been dropping branches the size of fruit trees for the past few weeks. I was envisioning a collapsed roof or broken window.

If this were a movie, this is the moment that my water would break or my contractions would start. But they didn’t.

Finally, the storm passed, and we looked out back to examine the damage. A branch had fallen, right on my Adirondack chairs in the back yard. It smashed one that my mother-in-law had given me for Christmas, but the one I had built last summer with my father-in-law was still in tact. And the cable line had been knocked down. This was fabulous news. We have half a dozen cables running across our lawn, and I have wanted to get rid of them ever since we moved in. The phone company had come out just the day before and taken down our phone line – which ran parallel to the cable line – and run a temporary line along the ground, to be buried later. It inevitably would have been torn down as well and we would have been without phone service for a few days, I'm sure. The cable line was next on my list to have removed, since we don’t use cable (even if we did subscribe to a television service, we’re dish people). So that was a nice birthday present.

What I really wanted for my bday, though, was my baby. Wishful thinking led to a false alarm late in the afternoon. Called my doc, and she told me to come in. After a brief exam, however, she said I might as well go home and come back tomorrow at 6:30 a.m. to be induced as planned. She said Allison wants her own birthday. But her mercy of not coming during a tornado will definitely be part of her birth story.