Hey Ryan, have I ever told you the story of your birth?

I've heard women tell their stories when asked about the best day of their lives. It's such a romantic answer. "The day my son was born. It was perfect." Don't get me wrong, I'm so grateful for you and the story we've created. But that day? When I think of that day? Perfect isn't the first word that comes to mind.

The day you were born. Your birth day. It's a fun story (now). It is one of those stories that friends ask me to repeat (sometimes to strangers). It’s just one of those stories. And I couldn’t have made it up if I tried.

You were born in Huntsville, Texas, in a hospital that I now refer to as the “hillbilly hospital from hell.” Wynter drove me there. It was October 9th, 1995. Do you remember Wynter? She was one of my closest friends, and she loved you like her own. For years to come you called her Gunk Gunk. We don’t know why. You spoke fairly clearly…unless you were trying to say Wynter.

I was in labor for 28 hours, and boy were they an interesting 28 hours.

First, the nurse who did my initial exam said that upon arrival I was dilated to a 9. Apparently, you give birth at 10, so Wynter called Mamaw and Papaw and told them to get there as fast as they could. Now, you’ve been in the car when Papaw is driving. He’s not exactly a speed demon, but Mamaw swears he was driving like a bat out of hell and she was constantly telling him to slow down the whole time. To which he replied, “I’ve always wanted to get pulled over and yell, ‘We’re having a baby!’”

Turns out…there was no rush. I was not at a 9. I was actually barely dilated at all, and we had a long wait ahead of us. This was the first hillbilly hospital from hell “you have to be kidding me” moment. The first of many.

And then the real labor kicked in, and I was ready for my drugs. Which they kept not bringing me. Where are my drugs? I kept getting vague answers and nurses scurrying from the room each time I asked. Or yelled. Or aggressively demanded.

I feel like the poor, sweet nurse who finally came to deliver the news had drawn the short straw or lost the game of rock, paper, scissors that had clearly gone on in the hallway. The news? My drugs were not delayed. Because they were never on the way to begin with. They had lost my paperwork. When you pre-register, you fill out all kinds of paperwork that makes you aware of the possible side-effects of an epidural. And then you sign if you want it anyway. I signed. They lost it.

This short conversation I remember very clearly.
Sweet nurse: I’m so sorry, but we just don’t have the paperwork, and you can’t sign it at this point in your labor because legally, you aren’t in your right state of mind.
Not so sweet me: Bring me a piece of paper saying you are going to suck this kid out with a Hoover, and I'll sign it!
Sweet smartass nurse: See?
And she left. Just walked out. Hillbilly hopital from hell.

So no drugs. And the hours passed.

I’m not sure how many hours passed before the nurse known as the angel of mercy came into the room to inform me that there was a drug they could give me without the original consent form.

Yah, let’s do that. Hook me up. I’ll take extra in fact.

“Well, the thing is, it doesn’t always provide relief.”

I remember that line as well. All these years later, I remember that warning. “It doesn’t always provide relief.”

And it didn’t. None. None whatsoever.

But you know what it did do? It relaxed my upper torso muscles just enough that my head suddenly became too heavy for my neck and I couldn’t hold it up. At all. My head basically just fell over, chin to chest, and rested there no matter how hard I tried to lift it. Every once in a while, Aunt Judy would lift my head up to talk to me, but then she would grow bored of holding it and let it fall back down. I think she was doing it mostly for entertainment purposes.

At some point, many hours later, they broke the news to me that you were face up in the womb. Did you know that it is important for babies to enter the birth canal face down? I didn’t. It is.

The solution? “So Miss Piper, what we need you to do is just flip over from side to side every time you have a contraction. One contraction on your right side, one on your left side and so on.”

No problem.

No problem for someone with complete control of their neck. For me? Problem. Comical problem. Every time I rolled onto my side, my head flopped to the side as well. Which made your Aunt Judy laugh hysterically. Every time. Why I hadn’t already kicked her out of the room escapes me. Maybe it was because she was having such a grand time watching my head flop around.

After much flipping and flopping and yelling and laughter, you did indeed turn over and hours of pushing commenced. To no avail. No baby. You were stuck. Stuck enough for a c-section? No. Just stuck enough that things were about to get weird.

Picture me sitting up in my bed with my head down, resting on my chest when the nurse came in to set up what I like to call...the jungle gym.

I know no other way to describe it. It was a jungle gym. He removed two hole-covers from the floor, one on each side of my bed, and inserted a metal bar into each. I had a good view of this part of the process because remember, I could only look down. Then a separate bar was attached to each pole making a metal bridge over my bed, albeit all I could see were the two original poles. I had no idea that a jungle-gym bridge had been formed above me until the nurse delivered the news. “Alright Miss Piper, we need you to stand up on the bed, grab that bar, squat down, and push.”

Remember, I still can’t see the jungle gym. I’m still sitting there with my head dangling. “Ummmmmm, you want me to do what?”

That is exactly what I asked. And that is exactly what they wanted me to do.

And...I did. I stood up. I grabbed that bar. I squatted down. And I pushed. With my head still flopping uncontrollably.

And that, my dear boy, is how you entered the world. With your mother squatting on top of a bed, dangling from the world’s weirdest jungle gym in the hillbilly hospital from hell.

The Stories That Make Up Our Story

“The more that you read, the more things you will know.

The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”

~ Dr. Seuss

Reading has always been very important to me. I love words, and I love Ryan, so it

reading to him just seemed a natural fit. I loved reading to him. As long as he would

sit still and listen (and that got more difficult as he aged), I would read to him.

I read Goodnight Moon to my belly almost every night for five months. I don’t

remember why I read that particular book. Someone had given it to me as a gift,

I suppose, and I instantly loved it. It’s so simple, and simple is beautiful. It was

a board book. I wish I had kept that old worn copy, but Ryan enjoyed chewing

on it just a little too much for it to have stood the test of time.

Goodnight stars

Goodnight air

Goodnight noises everywhere

And then there was Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. This was not a

favorite of mine, but Ryan absolutely loved that book. He had me read it to him

over and over. And over. And over. He noticed if I tried to skip a page or dozed off

while reading. He loved the page at the end that shows Little Bear and his mother

going down one side of the mountain and Little Sal and his mother going down

the other. “There they go,” he would whisper. He loved that book.

When Ryan started to explore reading on his own, Danny and the Dinosaur by

Syd Hoff and The Diggingest Dog by Al Perkins were the clear winners. He had

so much fun reading those or making up his own story as he turned the pages

and pretended to read. He made me smile with both.

When he were in about 4th grade, we read the first Harry Potter book together.

Neither of us was very impressed. It was alright. We just didn’t jump onto the

bandwagon and never made it to the second book.

Enter Artemis Fowl.

That clever little criminal was the subject of our next read-aloud, and he won

Ryan's heart and imagination. We read the first one together, but Ryan tore through

the next few books on his own. I don’t remember if he read the entire series

(or even how many there are), but he sure enjoyed what he read.

Our next read aloud (and the last that I remember) was Kate DiCamillo’s

The Tale of Despereaux. Oh, what a beautiful book. I absolutely loved that

Ryan loved it as much as I did. I hope that he gets to enjoy reading it aloud with

a little one someday.

The first sentence in the book’s jacket says, “This is the story Despereaux Tilling,

a mouse in love with music, and stories, and a princess named Pea.” Even the

book jacket is well written. Maybe it was Despereaux’s love of music that

tugged at Ryan. Maybe even at that age, he knew he had music in his soul.

The Name Game

“In English my name means Christian. In Spanish it means the same. It means
potential; it means disappointment. It is like a breeze that gives you goosebumps.
And hand-me-down. It is a soap opera star with blonde hair and blue eyeshadow.

Alene is my godmother’s middle name and now it is mine. She is a caring woman,
raised like mein the small town of Danbury - which seems like a bad thing when
you’re young - but as an adult seems like a blessing.

My godmother. I am fortunate to know her as well as I do, a silent storm of a
woman who hides her intelligence and talent. Stifled by the hand she was dealt
and the life that she loves. Just like that, she refuses to fade. That’s the way she exists.

And her story goes and goes and goes. She has looked out the window her
whole life and smiled at the rural view. I wonder if she made the best with what
she got or was she sorry because she couldn’t be all the things she wanted to be?
Alene. I have inherited her name,
but I want to inherit her view.

People say my middle name funny as if asking me a question, as if I might have
mispronounced it. But when combined with my first and last, it seems to fit, to flow.
At home Kristi, to my family Kristi. At school Kristen out of necessity. But in my heart,
I am always Kristi.

I think my name fits me, the me that nobody sees. Kristen Alene Piper. Yes. I think
it fits me nicely.”

This is an imitation of Cynthia Cisneros’s vignette titled “My Name.” I wrote it in
2003 after reading her piece, and I love it to this day (albeit not as much as I love
her original).

But the bottom line is I don’t have a cool story to share about how my parents
picked my name. Because they didn’t. They let Aunt Joyce, my godmother, name me.
Kristen was an actress in her favorite soap opera, and Alene is her own middle name.
That’s the end of the story.

So let’s switch stories. Let’s move forward in time and talk about how I did choose your
name.

Ryan Anthony Piper

How did I choose it? Here’s the short answer. I have no idea.

I had spent months thinking about your name. I didn’t know your gender (and didn’t
want to know), so I was doing mental double duty. I would wrap my hands around my
mouth like a megaphone and call out names as if I were a sports announcer. “Second
baseman David Andrew Piper!” Naaahhh. That’s no good. “Ladies and gentlemen,
Senator Angela Kay Piper.” Oh, I like that one.

And so it went. On and on until I landed on two that I liked. And both were troublesome.

If you were a girl, your name would be Sam Kay Piper. Mamaw was furious. She
insisted that I would not name her granddaughter Sam. Why? Because she said so.
I could, with her blessing, name you Samantha and call you Sam. But your name would
not be Sam. I insisted. If I can call her Sam, why can’t I name her Sam. It all came
down to the age old argument because she said so. Not on her watch. I would tell you
our compromise, but there wasn’t one. Secretly, Sam was still the game plan.  

Fortunately, Jesus took the wheel and helped us avert a family meltdown. You were
never meant to be a Sam or a Samantha.

You were meant to be a Danny. Yes, you read that correctly. If you were a boy, your
name was to be Danny Kyle Piper. Why would this be troublesome? Well, you probably
don’t know this, but your Aunt Judy was once married to a man named Danny.
“Ummmmm...Judy, would it be OK if I named your first nephew after your ex-husband?
That’s not a problem, is it?” See? Troublesome.

So, in summation, at this point in my pregnancy I have a girl’s name that my mother
says is banned, and a boy’s name that my sister can’t stand.  But why do things the
easy way? I’m stubborn, and I loved both names.

And then you were born...more of that story later.

And as I held you in my arms, admiring your squishy, squirmy handsome beauty,
the nurse asked, “What’s his name?”

Ryan Anthony Piper

That’s what I said. Ryan Anthony Piper. I didn’t remember saying it, but I did
remember being asked. At some point, hours later and with a different nurse in the
room, I had to swallow my pride and ask, “Ma’am, what is his name?” She looked at
me blankly but didn’t answer. “His name. I can’t remember what I named him.”

“Ryan. His name is Ryan.” It wasn’t until much later that Papaw told me your
middle name.

Ryan Anthony Piper

Like I said before, I don’t know why I picked it. I have no idea where it came from,
but I love it. I can only assume it was divine intervention because it suits you
perfectly.