05-21-02 - 9:00 a.m.
happy birthday berries. with her shaved head and swollen mouth and perpetual frown, she doesn't look much different than she did sixteen years ago today. she was a medi-cal baby; i produced her at l.a. county general in front of an audience of young residents who had never witnessed a birth, much less a lamaze-trained birth with huffing and puffing and focal points and ice chips. the nurses fussed over her blond fuzz and blue eyes. an hour after she was born, i was moved into a ward with six other new mothers and ordered to eat an enchilada dinner. john ate it. i couldn't sleep; down the hall, women screamed through their contractions. compared to the private, pampered luxury of my first childbirth experience, it was sweetly surreal. thank you, berries, for that moment, and this memory.