Kade #3
Everything had been moving exactly the way the doula expected until she leaned forward and her expression sharpened ever so slightly. She never panicked, never rushed, never changed the calmness in her voice, but years of experience settled across her face as she glanced toward Mama Sina.
“Ysis, whatever you do, don’t push. Masina, come here for a moment please.” Every muscle in my body locked.
“What?”
“The umbilical cord is wrapped around his neck,” the doula answered, already working with calm, practiced hands. “He’s tolerating it well. I just need everybody to stay calm and let me work.”
Stay calm? How the hell was I supposed to stay calm?
Every nightmare I’d spent months refusing to think about came rushing back all at once.
My chest tightened so hard I could barely breathe.
I looked at Ysis, then at the doula, then back at my wife again, praying somebody would tell me this wasn’t as serious as it sounded.
Ysis searched my face, reading every emotion I was trying to hide.
“Kade...”
I leaned closer, wrapping both hands around hers.
“I’m right here, baby,” I whispered, forcing confidence into a voice that wanted to shake.
“You hear me? I’m right here. Just keep listening to her. We got this.” She nodded, trusting me even though I wasn’t sure I deserved it in that moment.
The doula continued working with remarkable precision, easing the cord free. Mama Sina stood beside her, praying so soft I could barely hear the words, and I found myself praying too. For one healthy little boy and the woman who’d already given everything she had to bring him into this world.
“Okay,” the doula said a few moments later, her smile returning. “There we go. He’s free. One more good push, Mama.”
“You hear that?” I whispered, kissing Ysis’s forehead again. “Our little man waiting on you.”
With one final cry, she bore down again, and seconds later another beautiful sound filled the room.
I watched as the doula lifted him into the air for the briefest moment before placing him beside his sister against Ysis’s chest. They looked impossibly small lying there together, one tucked against each side of the woman who’d just performed the greatest miracle I’d ever witness.
Tears streamed freely down Ysis’s face as she looked from our daughter to our son before lifting her eyes to meet mine.
“We did it,” she whispered.
I tried to answer her, but nothing came out. My throat closed beneath emotions too big for words. Every promise I’d ever made her, every battle we’d survived together, every sleepless night, every scar, every setback, every prayer, and every victory had led us to this exact moment.
I leaned down and kissed her forehead before looking back at the two tiny lives resting safely against her chest. They were healthy.
They were beautiful. They were ours. Standing there beside the woman I loved with our son and daughter finally in our arms, I realized that every version of success I’d spent my life chasing had been incomplete until now.
Companies could be rebuilt. Money could always be made again.
Titles came and went. None of it compared to this.
Against every odd we’d ever faced, against every chapter that should’ve broken us, and against every reason the world had given us to believe we wouldn’t make it, we had. We hadn’t just become parents. We had finally become the family we’d both spent our entire lives praying for.
After getting the babies cleaned up and cutting the umbilical cords, Mama Sina waited until the doula stepped out of the room to wash her hands, before taking the seat beside the bed. She reached over and tucked another loose curl behind Ysis’s ear.
“I wanna ask you something,” Mama Sina said gently.
“Hm?” Ysis opened her eyes.
“Why a home birth?”
Ysis smiled, though the expression never quite reached her eyes. “I know why you told everybody.” She looked down at their joined hands before lifting her gaze again.
“I wanna know why you chose it.” I watched Ysis stare toward the ceiling for several seconds, as if she was searching for the right place to begin.
“I spent so much of my life feeling like I didn’t have a choice. Everywhere I lived...somebody else decided where I slept. Somebody else decided whether I stayed or left. Somebody else decided if I was wanted that day.” She swallowed, her thumb absentmindedly brushing across the back of my hand.
“Even when I got older, it still felt like life kept happening to me instead of with me.”
Ysis looked around our bedroom, her eyes slowly moving from the windows to the pictures hanging on the walls, to the rocking chair we’d picked out together, to the crib waiting just beyond the open door of the nursery.
“I’ve spent enough time inside hospitals to last me a lifetime,” she continued.
“Every memory I have of one is attached to losing something...or somebody. Every hallway smelled the same. Every room felt cold. Every time I walked through those doors, I left carrying a different kind of pain than the one I walked in with, and I didn’t want that to be the first thing our babies knew. ”
Fresh tears gathered in my mother eyes.
Ysis looked down at the curve of her stomach before resting both hands over it, her smile returning.
“I wanted them to open their eyes somewhere love already lived. Somewhere they didn’t have to wonder if they belonged. Somewhere the first voices they heard weren’t strangers calling out medical terms, but the people who prayed for them before they were ever conceived.”
She glanced over at me, and my throat tightened from everything she wasn’t saying. “I wanted the first place they ever knew to be home.”
A tear slipped down Masina's cheek before she reached over and cupped Ysis’s face. “You already broke the cycle, baby.”
Ysis frowned. “What do you mean?”
“You spent your whole life wondering where you belonged, and now your babies ain’t never gone have to ask that question. They gone know from the second they take their first breath who they are, whose they are, and how deep they were loved before they ever got here.”
The words washed over the room like a prayer.
I looked at my wife and realized she wasn’t just giving birth to our children.
She was giving them something neither of us had ever truly known growing up.
A beginning that wasn’t rooted in fear, a home that would never have to be earned, a love that would never come with conditions.
Ysis reached for my hand, intertwining her fingers with mine. She squeezed before looking back at Mama Sina, a smile finding its way across her face.
“I guess...I just wanted the first chapter of their lives to feel different than mine.”
Mama Sina leaned forward and kissed her forehead.
“It already does.”
For the longest time, I couldn’t bring myself to move. I stood there looking down at the two tiny lives resting peacefully against Ysis chest, completely overwhelmed by the reality that every dream we’d whispered to one another in the middle of sleepless nights had become flesh and blood.
Our daughter slept with one tiny fist curled beneath her chin while her brother rested beside her, his little chest rising and falling with every peaceful breath.
The room had fallen almost completely silent, save for the occasional sniffle and the sounds of two newborns adjusting to the world, and I realized I never wanted this moment to end.
“You wanna hold them?” the doula asked. I looked up at her before glancing back at Ysis.
“You sure?”
“They’re your babies too.” My wife smiled with tears still clinging to her lashes. I laughed through the lump in my throat before reaching for our daughter first. The doula guided her into my arms with practiced hands, reminding me to support her head, but I barely heard a word she said.
The second she settled against my chest, every muscle in my body went completely still. She was so impossibly small that she fit almost entirely inside my forearm, yet somehow the weight of her felt greater than anything I’d ever carried in my life.
“Hey, Princess,” I whispered, brushing my finger gently across her tiny cheek. “I’m your daddy.” She stretched ever so slightly before wrapping her entire hand around the tip of my finger.