(Original text published on 11.06.2022)
I developed a stubborn skepticism a while ago about prayer’s concrete impact. Praying with my daughters helps me keep practicing, but for years I’ve lost the intense connection I used to feel with the divine while praying. So what does that have to do with the birth of our third child?
Reliving, from the inside, the anguished hours of Davi’s labour still gives me chills, but sharing it has a therapeutic role for me.
It all began at 11:48pm on June 10th, when I started timing the regular contractions that had begun a few hours earlier, signaling that Davi would arrive that night. By around 1:20am, with contractions every two minutes, we headed to the birth house where our son was meant to be born. Once there, my wife’s pain kept increasing, and alongside it, my own anguish at only being able to be there: offering words of encouragement, a glass of water.
Here I need to add something about a part of my personality that causes me a lot of suffering: the need to be in control. Control has always been a survival mechanism for me, it’s helped me deal with difficulties, overcome challenges, make plans, find solutions. But the lack of control causes me to freeze up, to suffer, and above all, to feel anguish.
That was the anguish I felt from 1:40 to 5:10am, a stretch in which I had to witness Flavia’s pain alongside my own helplessness. Of course, my psychological suffering is almost irrelevant compared to the expulsive waves inside my wife, which kept trying, without success, to bring Davi to us. Put simply: Davi’s head was “stuck,” and labour couldn’t progress.
I’ve never had serious problems with the languages I’ve had to learn, or the ones I only understand, like German. But this situation demanded head and heart in sync, and for the people around us not to keep slipping into Swiss German. Through moans of pain, my wife was clear: we needed to go to the hospital.
As we made our way down the white corridors of the “Frauenklinik” (Women’s Clinic), I looked up and realised it was already 5:10am. Heart and legs were exhausted. We went into a room, where five healthcare professionals were waiting to help with the birth. Attempt after attempt, with Flavia now sedated, it became clear to everyone that Davi wasn’t going to come out naturally.
And this is where the prayers escalated inside me. Faced with my own helplessness, and the inner despair of understanding little or almost nothing of what the doctors and nurses were saying, I felt like the Christ I’ve always believed in: abandoned. There, “alone,” I asked for Light in that long, terrifying tunnel. Paradoxically, I found strength by thinking of everyone who had always been with us, who, in that moment, turned my solitude into a crowd.
Finally, a young nurse came over with the consent forms for the imminent C-section. Flavia and I looked at each other, exhausted, unable to think through alternatives. I only remember Flavia saying she wanted the baby to come straight into our arms the moment he was born, that it mattered enormously to us.
It seems one of the doctors understood, right then, that a C-section would be our last resort. So she told us she’d try one final manoeuvre before we went to the operating theatre. Hope was renewed. I understood I needed to encourage Flavia even more. There was still a chance.
Manoeuvres, a vacuum extractor, and at 6:11am on June 11th, after three long contractions and a heroic effort from my wife, we finally met our Davi.
Seeing him in Flavia’s arms seemed to flip a switch inside me. Tears of despair, relief, exhaustion, gratitude. The miracle we needed happened, unexpectedly. Absolutely nothing went the way we’d imagined, but in the end, through brave decisions and actions: the doctors trying, Flavia pushing, and me praying, Davi was there, in our arms.
A lot happened after the birth, here at the hospital in Switzerland, including the feeling of invisibility as I accompanied my son alone in the neonatal unit, watching procedures done on him without anyone feeling the need for my consent.
It was a magical day and a painful one at the same time. A day when the tears came and went. They’re still flowing inside me.
But, despite everything, I really want this to be a record of the power of prayer, of “putting it in God’s hands,” and of believing that He is, as He always has been, with our family.