Frontier Follies Read online

  Hyacinth, a loyal pal and devout Catholic, took this new responsibility to heart. She gave me, a non-Catholic, a crash course on the Rosary, which, she explained, had been a crucial tool during her births. About two weeks before my due date, after I invited my younger sister, Betsy, to join us in the room as well (I figured the more the merrier at that point!), Hyacinth briefed her, too. My Rosary maidens and I were so excited to bring our child (I mean Ladd’s and my child) into the world.

  When I went into labor, Ladd and I headed to the hospital with my packed bag and our printed-from-the-internet list of Scottish baby names for both boys and girls. I called Hyacinth and Betsy on the way over and told them Operation No Epidural was officially underway, and before long the four of us were one happy family in the labor and delivery room. Ladd turned on the wall-mounted TV at my request, and we all settled in to watch both the contraction monitor and One Million Years B.C., a prehistoric action-adventure film starring Raquel Welch. It was strangely soothing, and so very odd.

  Labor progressed more quickly than expected, and after an hour or two, things started to get uncomfortable. Hyacinth laid her hand on my shoulder and began praying the Rosary, reminding me that this was what we’d been working toward all along and gently reassuring me that I could absolutely do this. The contractions got more intense and started coming more quickly. Oh, no. Oh, help. This was stronger than I’d ever felt before. This was getting real. Within minutes, I was writhing and gripping the rails of the hospital bed, trying to do Lamaze breathing like I’d seen it on TV shows. It wasn’t working.

  I looked up at Ladd, who was standing on the other side of my bed; his jaw muscles were tightly clenched from the stress of seeing his normally mild-mannered wife squiggling around, right on the verge of losing it. I was past the point that either of my previous labors had gone before I buckled, and Ladd was in new territory as well. I glanced over at my sister. She was in the corner of the room, watching through squinted eyes, trying to shield herself from the drama she was witnessing. I looked at Hyacinth in a panic and started making groaning noises that made her so uncomfortable, she yanked the call panel from its holder and slammed her palm on the red button. “We need an epidural in here!!” Hyacinth commanded over the microphone. “Please hurry!!!!”

  Now that’s a good friend right there.

  Turns out, I was fully dilated and it was way too late for an epidural. After a few more minutes of hell, I felt an urge to bear down like I’d never experienced in my previous two, anesthetized births. After a few pushes, I let out a primal, piercing, preposterous scream . . . and Bryce (not Hamish or Argyle) was born. I crumpled backward in the bed and draped my arm over my face to shield the uncontrolled tears, which were not from happiness, but sheer relief and exhaustion.

  “Hey, it’s a boy!” I heard Ladd exclaim. Oh, that’s right—it hadn’t even dawned on me to ask.

  “You did it!” Hyacinth cheered. I’m converting to Catholicism tomorrow.

  “Are . . . you okay?” my little sister whimpered, still backed against the corner of the room. No way she’s having kids after this.

  To this day, while I love all my children equally, I consider Bryce’s birth to be my favorite. It made me feel alive, that primal, preposterous scream—I never knew my vocal cords could even produce that sound. And those contractions—I never imagined my body could endure that level of agony. That Raquel Welch film—I got to add an interesting new movie to my repertoire! And the fellowship—I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with three of my favorite people on earth (four, if you count my obstetrician). I did it—I gave birth naturally.

  And I didn’t have to dye my hair to do it!

  Ten More Interesting Things About Redheads

  Redheads make up 2 percent of the world’s population.

  Redheads make up 13 percent of Scotland’s population!

  I am the only redhead in my house.

  Redheads don’t go gray. They very gradually go straight to white.

  Red hair is a genetic mutation that likely occurred twenty thousand years ago.

  Redheads are more sensitive to hot and cold pain. (Not just labor pain!)

  While redheads are more sensitive to some kinds of pain, they are less sensitive to capsaicin and can therefore tolerate very spicy food. (That explains a lot.)

  Mark Twain was a redhead.

  Redheads are said to have a more “robust” love life than other hair colors. I’m just the messenger here . . .

  Bees are said to be more attracted to redheads because they mistake us for bright flowers. Run!!

  Placenta Fail

  I didn’t mean to get pregnant with Todd. I mean, I guess I know how it technically happened . . . but it was an accident. Well . . . a miscommunication. I won’t go into detail. Anyway, when I found out I was expecting him, my fourth baby, I already had two young girls and a nine-month-old baby boy, and because I am a crazy person, I had just started homeschooling. In the wake of the positive pregnancy test, I spent some time on the couch, curled up in a ball, pillow over my face, in both disbelief and dread. How in the world could this have happened?! Oh, that’s right . . . I guess I already knew.

  Of course, once I got over the shock, it didn’t take long for me to fall in love with the burgeoning baby in my womb, and I wound up having a great pregnancy. I was so full of energy, I couldn’t see straight! I scrubbed baseboards and the top of my refrigerator, which I would highly recommend, though it’s not for the faint of heart. I sorted drawers and gardened as if an apocalypse was nigh. I helped my sister open a ballet studio in our small town. I homeschooled like a champ and felt on top of my game twenty-four hours a day. Four kids? Pfft, no problem. I could do this!

  Then one night, five weeks before my due date, I started having contractions.

  They started mid-evening and presented themselves as Braxton-Hicks contractions, which happen in the final weeks of pregnancy and are not to be confused with labor itself. But these contractions were a little different, as they never really let up. I tried to ignore them and didn’t even say anything to Ladd, and around 10:00 p.m. we headed to bed. By midnight I was still awake, though, and wondering when this bunched-up belly of mine was going to un-bunch.

  I finally decided I probably needed to get it checked out. I quietly got dressed, then tapped Ladd on his shoulder to wake him. “Hey, honey,” I whispered. “I’m just gonna drive over to the hospital. I’m having some weird contractions and I know it’s fine, but I just want to make sure.”

  Ladd shot up in bed. “I’m sorry, what?” he asked, rubbing his eyes to get them to open.

  “I’m gonna drive over to the hospital,” I repeated. Mind you, the hospital is an hour from our house. “I’ll be back in a little bit; you get some sleep.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” he asked, grabbing for his jeans. “I’ll be ready in two minutes,” he said.

  “No,” I insisted, and reminded him that we had three children under the age of six who were asleep upstairs and that any babysitter or family member wouldn’t make it to our house for at least thirty minutes, and I needed to just get over there so I could make sure everything was okay and be back home before morning. “I’m totally fine!” I said. “You stay here and I’ll call you when I get there.”

  He wasn’t going to let me drive all the way to the hospital by myself, but he conceded that he couldn’t leave the kids at home alone. So here’s the harebrained plan we came up with: I would immediately drive to our small town and pick up Brandi, the kids’ babysitter. She would then drive me (in my vehicle) halfway to Bartlesville, where the hospital is. At the halfway point on the way to Bartlesville, my dad (who lives there) would meet us. I’d get in his car and he would drive me to the hospital. Meantime, Brandi would turn around and drive my vehicle out to our house on the ranch to stay with the kids so Ladd could then drive to the hospital in Bartlesville to be with me. It seemed a little bit like a relay race I participated in when I was on the junior high track team
, only this time I was the baton. And the baton had a really huge belly.

  I drove to town and met Brandi as planned, we met my dad at the halfway point as planned, and my dad took me to the hospital, where I checked myself in. I told the OB nurses that I was just having some weird contractions, that my due date was still five weeks away and I was sure it was nothing, and that I’d love to head home soon so my husband didn’t have to make the drive over. The nurses rolled their eyes, hooked me up to a monitor, and confirmed that I was, in fact, having contractions. But more concerning: my blood pressure was really high, which hadn’t been a concern for me in previous pregnancies (or in this one, up until now). Because I was five weeks from my due date, they wanted to try to stop the labor since the baby’s lungs wouldn’t be quite matured yet, so they gave me a mild medication to try to calm them down. I called Ladd, who had just left the ranch, and gave him an update. It looked like I wouldn’t be able to head home anytime soon.

  The labor-halting medication didn’t work, and the contractions kept on coming. So the medical team tried a second medication, which also didn’t work. I really wanted a burger by this point, but apparently burgers aren’t permitted when aggressive medications to stop labor are being administered. Finally, at the doctor’s orders, the nurses broke out what they called “the big guns,” which they said would surely stop the contractions in their tracks. But with this one, they did have a warning for me: “It might make you throw up, sweetie,” one nurse said gently, a look of compassion on her face. And boy oh boy, did it ever, just as my handsome husband walked into the hospital room after his hour-long drive. I absolutely did throw up, Linda Blair style, all over the hospital bed, the hospital room, the floor, the monitors, and the world . . . all right in front of Ladd. He tried to act brave, nonchalant, and supportive, but I could tell from the look on his face that he was waiting for my head to spin around. Immediately I noticed that the force of the vomiting had caused my water to break—but instead of clear amniotic fluid all over the bed, it was bright red blood.

  I’m sorry to get so graphic, but the point is: I had a placental abruption, which can be extremely dangerous for the baby, so the doctor rushed me to the OR to perform an emergency C-section. The whole thing was all a blur, and I believe they gave me general anesthesia, because I had a lucid dream that my high school boyfriend’s cousin (whom I hadn’t seen since high school) was touching my belly and telling me how lucky I was that I didn’t have any stretch marks after four pregnancies. When I woke up, I discovered that, in fact, my high school boyfriend’s cousin was one of the nurses. She really looked great! And how nice of her to notice my stretch-mark-free belly after she had helped pull a child out of a seven-inch incision in my abdomen. This was definitely one of the weirdest nights of my life.

  We (somewhat inexplicably) named our baby Daniel, then a few days later changed his name to Todd, after Ladd’s late brother. Our Todd had to spend two weeks in the NICU, but everything turned out fine, except for two things. First, after poor Brandi handed me off to my dad earlier in the night and headed back to the ranch, she hit a very large deer on the highway. Ladd found this out when he saw only one headlight working on my Suburban, and a very mangled hood, as Brandi pulled into our homestead. Poor deer! And poor Brandi! (She was fine, thank God . . . albeit slightly freaked out for many weeks.)

  Second, the day after the C-section, when the craziness of the previous twenty-four hours had settled down a bit, Ladd was in the hospital room with me as I tried to dig out of my grogginess. “How crazy that I’ve given birth three times without any issues,” I muttered. “And now, on the fourth, I had to have a C-section.”

  “I’m glad you’re okay, honey,” Ladd said, looking relieved. I guess it had been a harrowing experience for him, too.

  “I don’t even really remember the operation,” I said. “I just remember you saying that it was a boy.” I decided not to go into the whole thing about my high school boyfriend’s cousin. Things were already confusing enough.

  We talked for a bit about how it had all gone down, and after a few minutes, Ladd smiled and said, “Oh, and guess what?” He grabbed ahold of my toes and wiggled them playfully.

  “What?” I asked. I figured he was going to tell me something sweet and romantic to cheer me up and make me feel like a normal wife again.

  “Well . . . I saw your guts,” he said, an impish grin on his face.

  I pushed the nurse button and asked for a strong sedative.

  In the years since, I have begged Ladd to tell me that he was kidding, that he stayed north of my shoulders (as I had ordered him to do in all previous births) and on my side of the drape during the whole procedure and had not, in fact, seen the inside of my body. But my beloved husband has never changed his story, and he feels it’s important to always tell me the truth. He saw my guts, and no amount of vanity on my part can ever change that.

  He does point out that they were the cutest guts he’d ever seen, though. So there’s that!

  Sword!

  I’d never been happier than I was that morning. My two young girls had stayed with Ladd’s parents the night before and were spending the whole day at their house. Ladd had taken our two boys (ages four and two at the time) to work cattle on the ranch with him. I had the whole blessed house to myself for the first time in what felt like seven centuries, and I couldn’t wait to settle in, get caught up, and not wipe a single nose (or bottom) for the rest of the day. Free time, for a mother of young children, is the most insanely wonderful delicacy, and I was so hungry for it. The immense glee I experienced when Ladd pulled away from the house with Bryce and Todd was palpable. You know the feeling, maybe it happens a handful of times a year if you’re lucky, when you find yourself suddenly awash with extreme happiness and joy—and it feels like everything is 100 percent okay and lovely and wonderful? That was me. I saw nothing but good things ahead. There was hope for my future.

  Less than two hours later, however, my phone rang. I saw that it was Ladd, and when I first picked it up, I heard the familiar sounds of ranch work in the background: cows mooing, cowboys hollering, spurs jangling. But there was chaos, too—an unsettling one. I felt it even before Ladd uttered a word. “Todd’s burned!!!” he shouted into the phone. I could hear my baby crying—screaming bloody murder, actually. This sounded bad.

  My knees instantly turned to spaghetti. My heart not only fell to my stomach, it exited my body and rolled out the door. I felt sick. But then the adrenaline rushed and I kicked into gear. “I’m coming now!!” I shouted, as I started toward the door, wearing whatever I was wearing and shoving my feet into whatever two shoes were most directly in my path. Ladd replied (frantically, for him) that he’d meet me at the highway near the place where they were working so I could scoop up Todd and rush him to the hospital. Every nightmare scenario pummeled my thoughts as I drove ninety miles per hour to our meeting spot.

  I was only able to continue breathing during the drive because Ladd had finally explained on the phone that “Todd’s burned!!” meant that Todd had burned his hand. One of the cowboys had set a red-hot branding iron on the ground for a few seconds and Todd spotted it, marveled “Sword!,” and picked it up by the hot end. I decided that I would wait until later that evening, after we were all home and bandaged and safe (and bathed), before educating Ladd on the merits of being extremely precise when calling me to inform me that one of our children is sick or injured. “Todd burned his hand,” for example, is distressing for a mother to hear, but hundreds of light-years less distressing than “Todd’s burned!!!” I couldn’t understand how my husband, a man of few words, couldn’t have added just two more (“his hand”) in order to keep those five years from falling off my life expectancy. I’ll never, ever get them back.

  Indeed, when I picked up Todd at the highway and quickly inspected his branded palm, I saw that while it probably wasn’t a third-degree burn, it most definitely needed medical attention, so we headed to the hospital, which was an hour away. As I bega
n the drive and caught my breath some more, I glanced down and realized that not only had I neglected to change into regular clothes before I bolted out the door, I happened to be wearing the worst possible pajamas in my repertoire: nine-year-old faded pajama pants with pink flowers, a skimpy orange tank (pink and orange together do not work well on a redhead; trust me), and a moss-green hooded sweatshirt, which belonged to Ladd. The orange tank had been stained with coffee earlier in the morning and since I didn’t think I’d see another human being all day long, I hadn’t changed it. The pajama pants had a hole in the crotch (I repeat: a hole in the crotch, and a large one), and to make matters worse, I wasn’t wearing underwear. Please remember that I’d been home alone. Dressing for success just wasn’t on my radar when I woke up that morning.

  It was about this time that the burn pain really started to hit Todd and the bloodcurdling (and heart-wrenching) screaming began. It was absolutely awful, and we still had a good forty-five-minute drive ahead. I felt absolutely terrible for him until I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror as I was checking on Todd—and then I felt absolutely terrible for me as well. No makeup, puffy eyes with yesterday’s smudged mascara under them, greasy bangs, mid-thirties pimple. When I say I almost ran off the road because of how unfortunate a sight I was, I am not exaggerating. For a split second I started calculating the time it would take for me to dart by my mother-in-law’s house in town in order to change and splash water on my face. But then Todd let out a real doozy of a wail . . . and I knew I had to put the pedal to the metal and get to the hospital.