'Code Stork'

Entering a surprising chapter of life

One thing you learn as a reporter visiting hospitals is about the coded language that comes over their loudspeakers. 

Although thanks to friendly staff, or just something called “Google,” those codes aren’t hard to decipher.

Code Blue — someone’s having an emergency, maybe a heart attack. Code Red? That’s smoke or a fire.

There’s one code I only learned a few months ago: “Code Stork.”

That’s when a pregnant woman can’t make it to the delivery room and gives birth early — in the parking lot, a hospital hallway, even the elevator — according to a pair of excited nurses, who were swaddling our brand-new baby.

Yes, that’s right. We had a baby. Not to bury the lede.

But I should be clear. We weren’t the “Code Stork.” My wife and I were a few floors away from the pregnant woman who, according to our nurses, had just given birth in the lobby. And while we marveled at the nurses’ story, grateful that we weren’t the ones with the emergency lobby birth, we were mostly, deliriously, staring at our hour-old son.

He was our own code stork, of sorts. For years, we had tried to summon him. The old-fashioned way. The way when the old-fashioned way fails. The ways that neurotic Washington professionals hope might work. You know, the usual — one of us flying halfway across the country to meet the other on a business trip, when the baby-making window was maximally open, so to speak.

None of it took.

So we’d resolved to take a break from babies — to put them out of our mind, for a bit — when suddenly, the first hint of one showed up two weeks later.

And after eight more months, that hint became a him, hugging his mom in the hospital.

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A few months into this gig, I’ve been thinking a lot about surprises. They keep coming — the sound of laughter, out of nowhere, for the first time yesterday. A baby that looks so different, with each passing week.

And feelings that are indescribably joyous. The warmth when your baby smiles at you, or coos at you, or smiles and coos at your wife, or just holds a balloon by the string and you can watch in real time how his little brain is figuring out how to make it bounce around…

Who knew that your heart could crawl out of your chest and curl up in a blanket on your lap?

People who are already parents, I guess.

So I can also confirm: the parenting clichés are all true. You’re not going to sleep. You’re going to talk a lot about poop. You’re gonna be real grateful that someone invented the iPhone and other stuff that needs only one hand to work.

And perhaps the biggest cliché: There’s nothing that can really prepare you to be a parent.

I had sorta scoffed at this. I thought that being a reporter could prepare you in some ways.

I knew how to drop everything at a moment’s notice, because that moment was the only time a key source could talk. Or to move fast and focus, like when your plane is about to take off, your WiFi is about to disappear and you have seconds to file a scoop. To shrug off tantrums from unhappy officials. And to pull long hours, thanks to years of writing late-night stories and early-morning Politico newsletters.

Compared to all that, how hard could parenting be, really?

Of course, this was completely naive. Parenting is the hardest thing I’ve ever done!

There actually is nothing that can prepare you for:

• The monotony of changing diapers and making formula.

• The terror that propels you down a flight of stairs when you hear your child cry out in pain — only to discover that it was a bad case of gas.

• The dumb mistakes you make and furniture you bonk into, because you’re half-asleep even when awake. The cracked skin and rash on your knuckles from washing, and washing, and washing bottles. The constant muscle-strains, from trying to pick up and put down and pick up and put down a writhing baby and all his accessories. The indignities that chip away at you, as your old life becomes a memory.

And then remembering that your wife — who actually carried the child for nine months before you ever set eyes on him — is dealing with all the same and more, with greater grace and few complaints.

(And she would never, ever think of writing a Substack to vent about it.)

So forgive a doofus dad a few minutes of foolishness.

Because I want to stress: this new life is far from bad. In fact, it’s extremely good.

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My son and I spend most evenings together, as he sleeps on my chest or in his bassinet. He’s a few feet away from me right now, wriggling a bit under his blanket, as I type this at 2:24 a.m.

He doesn’t know it, but we’ve watched a lot of great Sacramento Kings games and a few mediocre movies on mute. We ripped through the first season of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” — and with all due respect to the creators of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” that is the perfect show for a new dad to half-watch at 2:24 a.m., glancing at the subtitles between feedings and fresh diapers.

But my baby continues to surprise me, and since he can’t talk, I’m just guessing at his intent.

He seems to have strong feelings about the novel “Cloud Cuckoo Land,” which I had left near his changing table, and repeatedly became a source of, um, target practice mid-diaper change.

After the first two direct hits, I moved the book — and he somehow got it again.¹

I’m choosing to be pleasantly surprised that my child is drawn to literature so soon.

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Hospitals don’t want to surprise you. One reason they hide their urgent messages in overhead codes — Code Blue, Code Red, Code Stork — is to avoid startling visitors, who might not be thrilled to hear “patient having a heart attack” in plain English.

But inevitably, a hospital can feel like a shocking, scary place. Especially when your wife’s pregnancy is a little risky, and the doctor makes the call: the baby should come early.

So on D-Day, delivery day, two different hospital teams came together to bring our baby into the world.

The show of force should have comforted me. My wife was in good spirits. But as the teams huddled in front of her bed, meeting each other for the first time and trying to game out the upcoming surgery … well, it felt like an uncomfortable surprise.

I think one nurse noticed. A guy named Zane, who had already been up all night, but apparently had stayed past his shift to help with my wife’s surgery. He spent a few minutes pulling me back together with his gentle questions and Zen-like calm, and then helped shepherd us through the morning.

I’ll always be grateful to Zane. When he left our recovery room to finally head home, a piece of me was worried to face the next surprise without him.

But life keeps moving. And thankfully, Zane did too.

A few days later, I heard that a colleague also had a son at our hospital. The same morning as ours. And it had been a close call — his baby arrived just a few minutes after an epic drive through D.C.

In fact, a nurse in the hospital parking lot had helped save the day … but it couldn’t have been … right?

I asked my colleague. And it turns out our children share more than a birthday.

Zane, after staying on to help our baby into the world, happened to be unlocking his bike as a car pulled up and a second baby was threatening to pop out.

Of course, that means the hospital rumor mill was probably overheated. Zane got my colleague's family where they needed to go for a normal birth.² Barring yet another emergency baby, there was no official “Code Stork” that morning.

But one thing I’ve learned as a new parent who also is a reporter who once upon a time covered hospitals: every day with a baby is filled with a surprise, large or small. And in your child’s eyes, in his smiles, he’s communicating in his own mystical code.

I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life trying to crack it.

1. Author Anthony Doerr, if you’re reading this, please take it as a badge of honor; based on our family’s experience, the baby only pees on his favorite people.

2. And Zane, if you see this, you’re a hero of two families’ stories.