where i'm calling from

Or, having a baby in France, part 1.

The night before we actually had B, I thought I was going into labor, and so we called the hospital. It’s is a surprisingly inexact science, this going-into-labor business, and I’m ashamed to say I was just as in the dark the second time around as the first. I even dithered around with S about whether we should actually call the hospital – I’m not sure how to say “I just have a feeling” in French, and I was certain that even if I did manage a translation it would earn me nothing more than a routine dismissal, probably from the hospital telephone operator (oh, these Americans, how they have lost touch with themselves. They do not even know when they are in labor). It would seem awfully disorganized of me not to know.

In the event, when we finally decided to call the hospital, there was no signal at all on the telephone. Not when we called the maternity wing, not for the main switchboard number, not for the emergency unit. No ring, no dial tone, nothing. At first we thought it was a problem with our own telephone, but the phone rang and the line dutifully connected when we tried a friend. None of my imagined contingencies for childbirth had involved not actually being able to contact the hospital. We panicked a little – well, actually, I panicked a little, and insisted S call the police to get to the bottom of the problem, or at least determine if the American Hospital of Paris (which is a private French hospital located, in point of fact, in the close-in suburb of Neuilly) was now a giant, smoking hole in the ground and therefore unable to deliver me of a child within the next twenty-four hours. S said, “They are just going to ask me why on earth I thought they would have access to that information and make me feel stupid.” But he called both the Paris and Neuilly police anyway, sweet soul. The result? They wondered why on earth he thought they would have access to that information. The Paris police added that it was not in their jurisdiction, either.

After a couple of hours, we finally got through to a receptionist at the hospital on a patched in cell phone, who sounded harried but apologetically admitted that the whole switchboard at the hospital was down. No, she didn’t know why. She was able to call the maternity department internally while I was on the phone, but not to transfer me. The result of that conversation was “If you think you are in labor, come in. If you don’t, stay home. It’s up to you.” I could feel the gentle exasperation even by proxy, and I felt guilty, even though I wasn’t the one with a broken switchboard. It just works that way here – there is always a protocol, even for the unpredictable, and not to know it and react accordingly is just bad manners. I decided to stay home, partly because I didn’t really think I was in labor, partly to avoid facing the midwife on duty, and finally because I wasn’t sure my hole-in-the-ground theory was completely off base, yet. The induction we had scheduled for the next day with my doctor, in the event that the baby didn’t come, was starting to look better and better. I had worried that it was a little like cheating; now it seemed like not tempting fate.

And so we went, and they gave the baby a little nudge – what they call un coup de pousse here, a tap of the thumb – and after an extraordinarily civilized amount of time, B was here, and everything and everyone was wonderful. The doctors clapped each other on the shoulders in congratulation, and possibly also because, since B had outstripped his predicted arrival time by two hours, they could easily be home in time for an apéro. The sweet midwife stayed a few minutes past her shift to come visit the baby in our room. I thanked her, and she said, “Every time it is a gift to be part of such a sweet moment.” And then we stayed on for several days in a beautiful sunlit room – B, his linens, a lot of dairy products, and 24-hour BBC coverage of the Davos economic forum in Switzerland. Only one strange thing – everyone to whom we mentioned the phone debacle of the night before our arrival was completely mystified, to the point of denying that it ever happened. “I didn’t hear anything about it,” said the incredibly polite administrator who checked us in. “Perhaps it was just a very busy night in the urgence.” The ward nurse said, “Oh, no. Things like that don’t happen in Paris.” Good enough.

On the day of our departure, however, I called home to the apartment to let the grandparents, and Gus, know that we were on our way, but I couldn’t get through. Our line was out of service.