The Story of Greatland
November 23, 2021
The personal discovery that led to a storytelling collective, designed to empower fearless creators
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When movies and television are your only reference for childbirth, you come into it expecting some very specific things. You imagine screeching into the hospital parking lot in a cloud of burnt rubber, for starters. There’s then a soundtrack of anguished screams. A surly on-call doctor freshly torn from a cocktail party is soon barking orders from between your wife’s knees. Tension grows when a marginal family member gets too close to the “action” and must be removed from the delivery room. But then a baby suddenly emerges so you lace up your New Balances and sprint like mad into the waiting room to make the official birth proclamation. The entire thing is over in less than four minutes.
In some cases, the baby goes on to sarcastically voice-over narrate the rest of its life.
Armed with this research, I wasn’t surprised when Victoria and I arrived to the delivery room for a scheduled induction and immediately heard a woman wailing loudly next door.
“Every now and then we get a screamer,” our nurse Lori told us in a way that suggested she could spot the type from a mile away. Lori’s mask covered the lower half of her face, but her eyes expressed a smile when she introduced herself. It grew larger when she mentioned her five kids, and larger still when we told her we were having a girl. Lori spoke with a syrupy-sweet lilt, a high-pitched jingle that was warm and full. This was the voice of a mom who knew everything there was to know about having babies—these wrinkled creatures, almost complete mysteries to us.
“I had one dad the other day,” Lori said, “who passed out on top of the mom during labor. I looked over and he was laying on her!”
Lori had no doubt sized us up quickly: first-time parents redlining on anxiety, terrified by the thought of labor, unconvinced about parenting and, here in May of 2020, a smidge worked up about this whole global pandemic thing.
She knew enough about us to keep it light.
“I had to lift him up and lay him down on the floor!” Lori giggled. We were starting to envy those five kids of hers, getting to bask in her joy each day. Had she asked, we would’ve joined her family on the spot.
“Well, I guess my bar for success is pretty low then,” I chuckled, making a mental note to bend my knees every 30-seconds.
Victoria and I had arrived at the hospital with enough luggage to accommodate a spring break trip—a suitcase full of clothes, two backpacks, enough snacks for a week, a baby bag, and a car seat we’d ordered online. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, we were told we wouldn’t be allowed to leave the hospital once we checked in. At least not without a baby, that is. The woman at the front desk peppered us with COVID-19 screening questions and raced through the hospital rules. “A quick trip to the cafeteria is fine as long as you wear a mask and tell the nurses where you’re going,” she said. “But that could change at any time.”
Inside the delivery room, nurse Lori placed a baby heart monitor on Victoria’s swollen belly. “Your girl is a sassy one, I can tell!” Lori said. “She can’t wait to meet you!”
“How long do inductions usually take,” I asked, wondering if I should even bother unpacking.
“It just depends. Everyone is different,” nurse Lori replied dryly, as if to say, you know better now. Here I was, one of her children, and I’m already shouting Are we there yet!?
Our doctor showed up and began the first steps of the induction process. A cervical balloon was inserted, and a medicine was to be administered hourly. This, she explained, could take up to twelve hours. If things weren’t moving by then, they would go on to the next phase of induction treatment.
“Oh,” we said. “Okay.”
Lori then translated this to me as it’s a marathon not a sprint. I reminded myself to bend my knees.
We had no way of knowing what was in store for us, but we assumed it would be long and grueling, followed by the sudden arrival of a baby. We quickly found out there are a lot of things about having a baby that no one bothers to tell you. So, in the spirit of generosity, let me share a few important lessons learned (in no particular order):
Just about everyone you talk to while expecting will tell you the same lie: You’re going to be such GREAT parents! This came to us from family, co-workers, social media friends, old acquaintances we randomly bumped into, greeting cards, and even people we barely knew. Each person had the same story: You’re going to be AMAZING!
And every time, I wondered: But how do you really know?
It’s not that I was planning on being a bad parent, but I had reason for concern. Good, I might be able to commit to—but AMAZING!? This was a steam-engine of pressure.
On any given day, I might exhibit traits, if only fleeting, that read like the tail end of a pharmaceutical commercial: irritability, loneliness, anxiety, depression, compulsive behaviors, coffee-induced paranoia, fidgetiness, mild addictions, mood swings, unexplained fatigue, extreme impatience, clammy hands, excessive sweating, oily skin, dry eyes, bloating, flatulence, unruly body hair, self-loathing, body shaming, apathy, fear of public speaking, frequent urination, confrontation-avoidance, fear of early death, fear of early death by bear mauling or moose stomping (#Alaskaproblems), hangriness, greed, and a general contempt for others who seem to not be living this way.
And this was prior to being responsible for an infant.
Most people are quite good at masking the crushing frailties that make us the imperfect little critters that we clearly are. When examined closely we all seem to be churning cauldrons of self-doubting WANT and NEED wrapped in frighteningly high-maintenance bodies. Up close we are all five-alarm fires, just waiting for an adult to arrive with a hose.
Right? Or is it just me?
Amazing parenting may very well exist beyond the gloss of self-congratulatory social media posts, but I suspect it occurs only in passing bursts. From what I can gather, parenting is a life of micro-failures and micro-victories that, if successful, somehow avoids real danger and gives you a chance to try better tomorrow. If you can hang on long enough, you might just emerge with a winner. But what do I know?
There in the hospital, awaiting the arrival of our daughter, my immediate strategic plan for amazing parenting was singular: Smile, hug and kiss our baby, while repeating aloud, “it’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay. Everything’s fine. I love you.”
It seemed like a good start.
Lesson: No matter what, you have a lot to learn.
Attention fellas: Prepare to sleep on a couch made for inmates. Next to your wife’s hospital bed there will be a small pleather-covered fixture in the shape of a couch that is hard, cold, and made for hobbits. This will be your home base for the birth of your child. You will eat there, attempt to sleep there, and scurry back to it when your wife curses at you or when a nurse politely suggests you’re not needed. You will do all of this with a smile, simply because that pinched nerve in your neck pales in comparison to childbirth.
Lesson: Consider bringing a sheet of plywood or something to improve your comfort level.
A few hours into our hospital visit we turned on the television and found the movie Titanic. Victoria and I agreed we would not, could not watch this movie. First off, it’s a three-hour film. With commercials, it becomes something like four-and-a-half hours. Surely the baby would be here by then, we thought. Right?
“I don’t wanna see the ship go down,” Victoria warned.
“I don’t want this to be the first movie the baby sees,” I countered.
We fell silent and before we knew it sweet little old Rose was starting in on her story about the ship of dreams and neither of us dared move for the remote.
That morning Victoria began receiving induction medication hourly and the doctor had inserted something called a Cook catheter to manually open her cervix and prepare it for delivery. The result was a brief but very intense period of crampy discomfort for Victoria—upon which my panicked brain defaulted to canned statements of the-it’s-okay-breathe-you-can-do-it-variety.
This was then followed by a lot of waiting.
By the time Jack and Rose were practicing their loogie-spitting from the aristocrat’s deck of the ship, we were beginning to accept that this was a war of attrition. Victoria’s contractions were mild. Nurse Lori came and went, depositing induction medication and a dose of her signature sweetness. “Oh, you’re looking good! You’re rocking this!” I donned my mask and gained permission from the nursing staff to take a walk to the cafeteria for coffee and shrink-wrapped rice crispy treats. I hoped I would return to a beehive of activity, but instead only found Jack drawing Rose like one of his French girls.
We’d brought a week’s worth of clothing, but little in the form of entertainment.
Around the time a fruit and cracker plate arrived for Victoria, our distaste for Billy Zane’s devilishly-coiffured Cal reached it’s zenith. We boiled at his shameless lies, yet our baby girl remained blissful and silent, biding her time inside the womb. Somehow, not even Leonardo DiCaprio’s deep heart-of-the-ocean eyes could ratchet Victoria’s contractions upward. It was clear we were going to watch this ship sink once again, so we settled in, Victoria on the multitudinous hospital bed and me at full stretch on the small blue pleather couch. In the sub-zero temperatures of the hospital room it was like laying on a glacier.
By now, sheer boredom lured us into a scientific analysis of whether or not Jack had room to climb aboard the floating door with Rose. The door seemed to have adequate buoyancy, we concluded, and plenty of room for the two of them. There would even be body-warmth advantages on that cold, cloudless night. Yet there is Rose just floating all alone, croaking mournfully as Jack slips into the ocean for eternity. Could it really be that Rose was truly just a selfish upper-class socialite after all?
This timeless debate became a hot topic on the private Facebook group we’d created for family and friends unable to travel due to the pandemic. From her home on San Juan Island, my sister shared an article in which Titanic director James Cameron claimed Jack needed to die for artistic reasons. This, somehow, did not soften the blow in Suite #4 of Labor and Delivery.
By the time the credits rolled, we’d reached the eight-hour mark of our induced labor. There was little action still. It would be some 24 more hours before our little girl would make her way into the world—a sleepless stretch of time that morphed into a slow-motion fever dream, a delirious concoction of pure anxiety mixed with raw exhaustion. Here, a lesser writer might be tempted to draw parallels between Jack and Rose clinging to a door in the ocean, and the two of us, caught in the purgatory of Labor and Delivery, holding our breath, waiting for something to happen. But let’s not go there, not yet anyway.
Lesson: Expect a long haul, bring your own entertainment.
Let’s not spend a lot of time here but, given our experience, I can humbly attest that a mysterious virus spreading rapidly across the globe creates less than ideal circumstances to, you know, have a baby in a hospital. But it’s your call. Just in case it matters, let’s review a few of the pros and cons:
Cons:
Pros:
Lesson: Maybe just consider celibacy until the pandemic is over.
With visitors limited by COVID protocols, the Labor and Delivery ward was ghostly quiet. Our only connection to the hospital while mostly sequestered in our room was the nursing staff. With painstakingly slow progress inside our room we made subtle inquisitions with our nurses, attempting to see if anything new or entertaining was going on out there. Occasionally we heard muffled voices or saw people hustling up and down the hallway past our door. Every now and then there was a distant cry of a newborn. In our minds, out there was full of urgency and excitement, everything not happening in our room. “Anything new going on out there,” we might ask. “Oh, it’s so busy this weekend,” our nurse might reply, surely realizing what a tantalizing little breadcrumb she’d just dropped.
“You mean, babies?” I would probe further.
“Uh-huh.”
By day two of labor, we’d gathered the following information: Approximately nine babies had been born since we’d checked into the hospital. One woman, we were told, barely even knew the baby had begun to present itself by the time she settled into her labor room. Minutes later she had a baby hoisted into her arms. We imagined the glowing family back home with their bundle of joy as if they’d just swung by the drive-thru for a bite to eat.
Our competitive nature began to boil. Here we were watching television while others were producing children like widgets on an assembly line. In they came, and off they went, while we channel-surfed for a suitable rom-com.
We grew envious at how simple it seemed for everyone else out there.
“Everybody’s different,” the nurses seemed to repeat every fifteen minutes as our wait continued.
Lesson: Just remember, childbirth is not a competitive sport. Stay focused and soak it all in.
Dads, if you follow NFL football, you know that in its heyday the famed Patriots dynasty lived by the simple creed of “do your job.” I’m here to tell you that the hospital delivery room is the time to treat your wife as if she was your personal Bill Belichick. Whatever she says, do your job and do it as fast and cheerfully as humanly possible. If she wants Apple juice, then you better have that Apple juice hookup ready to go. If she needs a massage, you play her strained muscles like a concert pianist. If she calls an audible and wants to change labor positions, then you’d better have the entire playbook memorized.
Lesson: Being a man doesn’t mean being a 300-pound lineman who was born to block other men from tackling a taller more handsome man holding a football. It means serving the mother of your child as if your life depends on it. Because it might.
“It’s time to push,” the nurse informed us some 33-hours after checking into Labor & Delivery. As the self-appointed director of media for this event, I reflexively went for my camera and began snapping photos, as if the baby were to shoot out of a water slide at any moment. There would be, I would learn, several more very eventful hours to go.
Nurse Lori, who’d since gone off shift to live her life with her five lucky children, had now returned to our room for a second day of work. She coached Victoria on precisely how and when to push, and gave me the gentleman’s task of keeping count—the hospital equivalent of my own easy-bake oven while Mommy is busy cooking. I approached my work with great enthusiasm, despite warnings from Victoria regarding my decibel level. For three blurry hours, Victoria pushed to a steady count. It was nothing short of heroic, the single greatest physical feat I’ve ever witnessed. Occasionally, I would look up to see that more nurses had arrived. The room was being modified. Medical devices were prepped. The scene was being set. Something was clearly happening.
At one point, our doctor quietly entered the room and sat down in a chair along the wall facing Victoria. Her approach was practically covert, as if she was a shadowy detective, clutching the crucial piece of evidence, about to step in and crack the case.
Before I knew it, she’d taken a position between Victoria’s knees and gone to work, calmly instructing nurses, and encouraging Victoria with gentle commands. Just like the movies, I thought. I maintained my spot next to Victoria, awaiting further instructions, until the doctor invited me south to see the top of our daughter’s head. I mustered an enthusiastic response and quickly returned to my panic attack. Soon after, a 7-pound, 10-ounce human being was thrust onto Victoria’s chest—after 36 long hours Annabella Genevieve Hillwig had made her entrance. The baby, flecked with a white waxy substance known as vernix, had big puffy cheeks, a round belly, and a slightly recessed chin, her skin turning more pink with each new breath. My first thought was not one of pure celebratory joy, but equal parts relief and disbelief—a form of joy that is perhaps less cinematic. This is nothing like the movies, I concluded. Annabella lay stunned on Victoria’s chest, wailing and whimpering while I simply stared and repeated, “oh my goodness.”
Victoria was silent, breathless, and exhausted. She was also, it turns out, losing blood. So much, in fact, that she would soon turn ghostly white, muttering to us all how tired and cold she was. A nurse turned to me, attempting to maintain a charade of joy (“would you like to put on baby’s first diaper!?”), as I listened to the concern level in the room ratchet up. With Victoria preoccupied, I tucked Annabella inside my hooded sweatshirt and held her to my bare chest to give her skin-to-skin contact. The residue of vernix made her feel vaguely like a warm glue stick. Annabella, so light and fragile, curled herself tightly in my arms as if still inside the womb, her dark eyes blankly scanning the room. Here we were. It struck me then that this sticky little creature was my daughter, and the promise of our life together as a family finally seemed inevitable and real. From the blue pleather couch, I cradled Annabella and watched as the doctor attempted to retrieve the placenta from Victoria’s body while she slowly lost color. “Are you okay,” I asked meekly every few minutes. As I clutched our newborn daughter to my chest, a crushing thought crossed my mind: could we actually lose her mother?
I sat with that thought for far too long.
The doctor soon came over to explain that they were preparing for a blood transfusion. Someone, it turns out, had to physically drive over to the blood bank to retrieve the much-needed supply. Later, within minutes of the transfusion, Victoria was flush with color and snuggling her newborn. I happily returned to my role as event photographer and again began capturing the joy.
Lesson: There’s no Hollywood script here. It won’t be what you expect. Embrace the uncertainty and be open to it all.
Annabella was born at 8:06pm. After taking time to briefly get acquainted with her delirious parents, she promptly fell asleep for the entire night, apart from one feeding. Victoria and I slept intermittently, unable to keep ourselves from peeking in on our actual human baby sleeping in a hospital bassinet just a few feet away. This was, by all accounts, the first miracle we’d ever been party to. Annabella lay wrapped tightly into a cocoon, blissfully asleep, as content as a baby could be.
Maybe we are amazing parents after all, we wondered.
On night two, Annabella was inconsolable, awake and wailing every half-hour. It’s possible there’s no evolutionary urge stronger than the one that makes a parent want to stop their newborn child’s cry. This high-pitched scream might be nature’s most effective tool, a spell that casts immediate and untold amounts of fear and anxiety on its target. Nurses told us she was cluster feeding, a common newborn phase in which a baby wishes to eat constantly, and threatens violence if you don’t comply.
We’d never heard the term cluster feeding before, and this began a long list of new vocabulary words or concepts that we would soon be googling at all hours. Nipple confusion, swaddle technique, bilirubin, and so many more. A lactation consultant visited our hospital room on the second day and she spoke so fast the only thing we learned was that we didn’t, in fact, know very much at all. Head position, latch, flow, feeding schedule—a dictionary of uncertainty. It was like attempting to diffuse a bomb while someone shouts instructions to you in Latin.
Lesson: Sleep when the baby sleeps. Eat when the baby eats. Prepare for night as if you’re heading into battle.
On the morning of our fourth day in the hospital, we were discharged. Bleary-eyed, stunned, and more or less wearing the same clothes that we’d arrived in, we thanked our nurses and trekked our luggage toward the door. Inside a covered car seat, our daughter slept quietly—no doubt resting up for an anxious night with her fragile parents. Just as we reached the exit, a nurse offered to take our photo. We turned and faced the camera, both Victoria and I firmly clutching Annabella’s car seat with two hands, masks covering our faces, our eyes expressing whatever it is you call an equal mixture of joy and fear. Behind us, two disinterested nurses sat unaware at a screening station, where their sole job was to scan people entering the hospital for fever and signs of COVID-19.
We were released into the wild, just the three of us—perfect Annabella and her two imperfect parents. If there’s a word to describe the process of creating human life, it has to be surreal. It doesn’t seem like it should happen so frequently, but it does. The experience is like pulling back the curtain on life to reveal its bustling inner workings—only to find out that it’s not a control room full of people running the show, but an amusement park with rides, and food, and crying children. We all have to find our way, and none of the noise really matters—especially that little voice of doubt inside your head. The only problem seems to be that the deck is stacked against the new parent, who begins this journey in a zombie state, deprived of sleep and, therefore, any kind of rational thought. This, readers, is where a weary and tired writer might elect to forego high artistic ambitions and simply close with this: The only real lesson in life is to climb aboard that door floating in the ocean, grab hold of the ones you love, and hang on tight.
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