{"id":124,"date":"1960-04-02T21:20:48","date_gmt":"1960-04-03T02:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/?p=124"},"modified":"2019-04-26T14:48:56","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T18:48:56","slug":"april-2nd-1960","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/april-2nd-1960\/","title":{"rendered":"April 2nd, 1960"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><div class=\"h5p-iframe-wrapper\"><iframe id=\"h5p-iframe-7\" class=\"h5p-iframe\" data-content-id=\"7\" style=\"height:1px\" src=\"about:blank\" frameBorder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"April 2nd, 1960\"><\/iframe><\/div><div class=\"h5p-iframe-wrapper\"><iframe id=\"h5p-iframe-9\" class=\"h5p-iframe\" data-content-id=\"9\" style=\"height:1px\" src=\"about:blank\" frameBorder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" title=\"April 2nd, 1960\"><\/iframe><\/div><\/p>\n<h2>Transcript:<\/h2>\n<p>Saturday: April 2<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Dear Dr. Beuscher,<\/p>\n<p>Ted &amp; I are happy to announce the birth of Frieda Rebecca Hughes. She was born at 5:45 a.m. yesterday morning, April 1st, weighing 7 pounds 4 ounces, 21 inches long &amp; covered with white cream like a floured pastry. I am now sitting up in bed typing letters after the morning visit of the midwife (it turned out to be the little Indian one of the triumvirate who delivered me &amp; we have grown very fond of her) who bathes me &amp; the baby, eating yoghurt &amp; maple syrup &amp; hardly able to take my eyes off the baby who has enormous blue eyes, a fluff of dark hair &amp; seems to us extremely lovely: perfectly made.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, in spite of all my strict arrangements with doctor &amp; midwife about plenty of pethidine &amp; gas etc. for my labor, I had the baby completely without analgesia of any sort\u2026nothing but two bits of barley sugar the midwife happened to have in her pocket, &amp; this due to the record speed of Rebecca&#8217;s arrival. Ted had been hypnotizing me regularly with my daily bout of relaxing &amp; napping to have &#8220;an easy quick delivery\u201d, which may have had something to do with it. It wasn&#8217;t easy, but the whole thing lasted 4 \u00bd hours. I&#8217;d had a sinus cold for 2 weeks, not slept much &amp; was rather run down; wakened at 1:15 a.m. Friday April 1st after a bare hour\u2019s sleep to feel the waters break. Contractions started immediately &amp; were strong &amp; regular every 5 minutes by the time the Indian midwife arrived on her bicycle at 2 a.m. without anesthesia or anything, just to see me \u201cget established in the first stage of labor\u201d &amp; then return after breakfast. I felt unaccountably unwilling to have her leave: she rubbed my back, washed my face, tried to get me breathing deeply with the contractions, but I was groggy with a sleeping pill &amp; very surprised I had no time to rest between contractions. By 5 I was fully dilated, no question of the midwife&#8217;s leaving. She called my doctor, who had also thought to drop by after breakfast &amp; he came just in time to supervise the delivery of the baby at 5:45. The cord was around its neck once &#8220;but loosely&#8221; &amp; by following their directions of pushing &amp; not pushing I wasn&#8217;t torn at all, just nicked in the front, no stitches, nothing. The worst time for me psychologically was the series of consecutive intense contractions between the first &amp; second stage which I thought were merely a sample of beginning contractions: I&#8217;d read about these 10 or 12 bad ones &amp; if I&#8217;d recognised them, would have felt better. As it was, I didn&#8217;t see how I could stand 20 hours more of them. Almost immediately I wanted to push &amp; the midwife let me go ahead.<\/p>\n<p>Then things were fine: I felt purposeful &amp; controlled &amp; able to sit up enough to see the baby&#8217;s head-top in the mirror Ted held. We had expected nothing but a boy &amp; both of us are so delighted with a girl we can&#8217;t imagine now every having considered a boy as a possibility. The only really negative times were my vomiting a large dinner up as soon as the midwife came &amp; those violent contractions, the worst, which I thought were a sample of early easy ones. The midwife thought at first I was exaggerating the intensity of them, but as soon as she examined me &amp; saw where I was became nothing but praising &amp; encouraging. I felt marvelous as soon as the baby lay on my stomach wiggling, had tea &amp; slipped in to call mother as soon as doctor &amp; midwife left. Ted was wonderful the whole time &amp; delighted with his new daughter.<\/p>\n<p>I am absolutely delighted with home delivery &amp; wouldn&#8217;t ever have a baby in hospital now. The nightmare vision of that delivery I saw at the Boston Lying-In \u00ad\u2013 the mother too doped to know what was happening, not seeing or holding the baby, cut open &amp; stitched up as if birth were a surgical operation &amp; sent off on a stretcher in the opposite direction from her child \u2013 is completely dissipated. No doctor&#8217;s bills for us either. Every day I watch the midwife bathe the baby in my biggest pyrex dish &amp; I let it suck every 4 hours &amp; love having it right by me. She yelled for an hour off-and-on between 2 &amp; 3 a.m. last night for the sheer joy of it &amp; we were both very tired but she looked so amusing we sat up by candlelight &amp; played with her a bit. So we nap in the day if she wakes us much. I don&#8217;t know when I&#8217;ve been so happy. I am surrounded by flowers &amp; telegrams &amp; being tired, bloody &amp; without apparent stomach muscles is just a stage to be grown out of, no real bother.<\/p>\n<p>Other news seems pale beside this to both of us, but Ted&#8217;s 2nd book LUPERCAL is out here as of March 18th, getting fine reviews, &amp; he just received the Somerset Maugham award of over $1,000 for the \u201cpromise of his 1st book,\u201d the amount to be used for 3-months abroad in the next 2 years. So we&#8217;ll be &#8220;forced&#8221; to find a villa on the Riviera this winter or next: utter bliss to think of a winter of sun &amp; no sinus weather. My book of poems THE COLOSSUS is due out here early next fall &amp; you&#8217;ll receive one of the first copies. England is a marvelous country for babies &amp; books &amp; we are happy as we&#8217;ve never been anywhere else. Our dream is an eventual London house &amp; garden. \u00b7 With his 2 awards &amp; Guggenheim, Ted&#8217;s won over $7,000 in the last 2 years: No doubt there\u2019ll be lean years in plenty ahead, but these fat ones are a great encouragement.<\/p>\n<p>Lots of love to you + let me know when your next baby arrives + who it is ~Sylvia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Transcript: Saturday: April 2 &nbsp; Dear Dr. Beuscher, Ted &amp; I are happy to announce the birth of Frieda Rebecca Hughes. She was born at 5:45 a.m. yesterday morning, April 1st, weighing 7 pounds 4 ounces, 21 inches long &amp; covered with white cream like a floured pastry. I am now sitting up in bed&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/april-2nd-1960\/\">Read More <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">April 2nd, 1960<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2380,"featured_media":208,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-3"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2380"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":258,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/124\/revisions\/258"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/arx340-jbsmith\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}