The Birth of a New Product / Child

Heading into the office on a Monday morning the last week of pregnancy is the worst kind of working-mom-torture. I was more than ready.

We had been preparing for a second child for years; paying off cars, refining budgets, stockpiling cash in our HSA. I had spent hours making a to-do list at work of everything that needed to be done while I was on leave. The previous few days, bouncing on an exercise ball to expedite my boy’s entrance into the world. That Monday morning, I threw my hospital bag in the back of my car hoping it would be the day.

I had been having sporadic, painless contractions all morning, but tried not to get my hopes up. By my 2:30 conference call, I had downloaded a contraction timing app on my phone and was tracking them while feigning interest in what the vendor was selling. Halfway through the call I muted the phone and told my team the time had come. Finally.

The difference between having one’s first child and having one’s second has been well documented, but you can’t fathom how different it truly is until you experience it firsthand. I had learned so much from my first pregnancy, delivery and months with a newborn.

I was prepared not to make the same mistakes. This time around I hadn’t worried about my weight, I drank up to two cups of coffee a day, I didn’t call the doctor with every minor ache or pain. This time around I knew what a delivery might look like. This time around I would just give the baby some damned formula if he couldn’t breastfeed, I wouldn’t lay awake monitoring his breathing all night long, I wouldn’t feel the need to Google what the color of his poop meant, and I would get help if I experienced the pain and loneliness of postpartum depression. The relief of those pressures made every step immeasurably easier.

As I drove from my office downtown to our home in the suburbs, it became painfully obvious I would instead need to head straight to the hospital. One epidural, a blood pressure scare and eight hours later, our son Harrison entered this world… silently. My wiggle worm was just as wiggly in person as he was in the womb. But he wasn’t making a sound.

He wasn’t breathing.

I don’t think I was either. For the first time in my life I actually wanted to hear a baby cry. No such luck.

They rushed my brand new boy to the NICU before I even had a chance to take in his sweet face. The next time my husband and I saw him, about four hours later, he had an oxygen tube in his nose and was being monitored by a lineup of beeping machines. This was something I hadn’t prepared for.

Thankfully, Harrison only spent about seven hours in the NICU. He had swallowed a lot of fluid during the delivery, which was sucked out of his lungs through a tube inserted down his tiny throat. Once his lungs were clear, he slowly started to breathe on his own and was taken off the oxygen machine.

He entered my hospital room the next morning to huge sighs of relief. We shared the happy baby news with family, friends and, of course, the wonderful world of social media—naturally sharing an Instagram-friendly, post-oxygen-tube photo of our boy, rather than showing the scarier side of our experience.

The day after Harrison was born, my in-laws brought our daughter, Nora, to the hospital for the highly anticipated meeting of her baby brother. It was pure magic.

We left the hospital in a hurry, anxious to get back to the comfort of home and our first born. Since then, we’ve had a pretty uneventful first couple months—thank goodness. Harrison is nursing like a champ and sleeping about as well as you’d expect a newborn to sleep. We are all in love with our new boy, especially Nora.

If parenting can be compared to marketing, then the birth of a child is a multimillion-dollar product launch. Selling the product in to your stakeholders—in this case my reluctant husband and unsure daughter. The months, or years, of preparation—and the unexpected complications that arise even when you thought you had prepared for nearly anything. The budgeting and re-budgeting. Branding your child with the name it will own for eternity. (See my previous post on baby-naming.) Publicizing your product, ensuring it is seen in the best light. The joy of the market embracing your creation with enthusiasm.

And, finally, the fact that shortly after its introduction you develop amnesia about all the blood, sweat and tears that went into its making.