A Delivery Room

Noriko Shiroma, OCU

On January 3rd this year, I was at a hospital with my family to visit my newborn niece. Every time I visit a hospital to celebrate the birth of a friend’s or family member’s new baby, I’m flooded with my own delivery room memories. I gave birth to my three children in the delivery room of that same hospital. That room is a sacred place for me, because it was the place my children started their lives, and the place I became their mother.

The delivery room is a battlefield. Doctors and nurses dedicate their best efforts to ensure safe births, not only medically, but also emotionally, by offering succor to mothers during delivery by guiding them on how to breathe in the clutches of excruciating pain, and by telling them when she should push with all her might during childbirth.

Mothers also devote all of their energy to giving birth to their children. Their screams of pain and joy prove this. Most of them are in labor for several hours in a room next to the delivery room. Actually, I was in labor for 36 hours when I gave birth to my first child.

Then when the time comes, they move the woman into the delivery room. I vividly recall the scene when I was moved into that room for the first time. It was a bit chilly there, and looked clean, although it oddly did not smell like antiseptic. However the steps of delivery bed I needed to climb up into were extremely icy.

Every day, many brand new babies are born in that room. The baby that was born just now is bawling for the first time. His skin is clammy. Her hair is wet. How adorable! Their bawling voices express their strong determination to begin their journey, to begin this new, great life.

On the other hand, mothers are filled with a sense of relief after finally giving birth to their child. After all the chaos, she finally gets to see her baby, and hold him in her arms for the first time, with a feeling of almost fear, because the infant seems so fragile. Handle with caution! As I held my first child in my arms in the delivery room, I almost cried with a sense of euphoria. I also felt a little anxiety. One moment I wasn’t a mother, and then, I was. One might say that mothers are also born in delivery rooms.

The delivery room is a sacred place. Many new lives are born there, and mothers begin their new lives with their babies there. By the way, I was not only figuratively, but also literally born in that same delivery room. Only later would I also become a mother there. Although I do not remember the day I was born in one as a baby, I will always cherish my memories of the room that, in every sense of the word, delivered me.