There is nothing more lonely than a roomful of people who are all ignoring you. Especially when you can’t move. And want to scream.

After what was actually a very short time but what seemed an eternity to me, two nurses showed up, one on either side of me, each holding a tiny bundle tightly wrapped in cotton swaddling, each head topped with a tiny wool cap. They bent down and laid the babies on either side of me as the anesthesiologists unstrapped my arms so I could hold the bundles.

And at that moment a surprise thought came to me.

“This is forever.”

I felt light as air and completely without any consciousness of self. Just me with my babies. Finally I could see them, touch them, smell them, listen to them, feel their bodies, hold them.

They both had blue eyes. They gazed at me with what seemed like intense interest. They seemed to know me. Tightly wrapped in their swaddling blankets, they were quiet and still. But so alert.

I was delirious.

Until the staff dropped the blue draping. And, lying there on my back, staring straight up at the ceiling, I suddenly understood why this was called an operating theater. A circle of about twenty faces above me were looking down through a large circular window, all smiling broadly. For the first time in many months I could see beyond my own belly and what I saw was my own feet sticking up wearing my black nun’s stockings.

Talk about humiliated.

“You sons of bitches.” I yelled at everyone and no one. “You left my socks on.”

When they wheeled me out, still cuddling my babies, Strong With A Spear was standing there and I said,

“Look at this.”

I saw the same look on his face twenty years later in our boathouse.

A pair of wrens had built a nest in one end of a furled Hobie Cat sail that hung from the rafters in the off season. The rather loose furling had left a prefect cavity for their small nest. The baby wrens, each about the size of a ping-pong ball, chose the moment when my husband reached the center of the boathouse to fledge. A sudden fluttering and they landed all over him, about eight of them, clinging to his shoulders and arms and legs, chirping happily and flitting their wings to their parents who called back to them. The tiny fledglings clung to him as if he were a six foot three inch tree. There he stood, with an expression that said: “Look at how they trust me and depend on me.”

In that moment outside the delivery room, en route to recovery, bruised, half numb, full of legal drugs that had some of the same effects as the illegal ones I remembered from the sixties, not yet realizing I would have to deal with the incision pain, the reality of round-the-clock baby care and unaware that I would not sleep at all for the next five months or so, I felt at one with the universe. Totally satisfied.

Three years later I gave birth again. And you know what? It snowed even more the second time.

Coming Next: Strong With A Spear and I go traveling.