Asia's sobbed against my neck completely done in with this whole process of bringing new life into the world. Desperately I searched my mind for a way to distract her.
She'd quieted down some and I asked, "You know there's something I've been wanting to ask you."
"What?" She responded, her tone decidedly ill-natured.
"Now that the Codes dead and gone, perhaps you could tell me what was the language that you used to scramble the Code with?"
"Cherokee."
"Cherokee?" I repeated blankly.
After Asia was through another round of sharp contractions she responded, "Cherokee is still a spoken language today, but many don't know that at one time there was a written language, with its own alphabet. The world has long since thought that the Cherokee alphabet had been lost, but I love learning new languages and I discovered a remnant of the alphabet on the black market. After this is all over I want to release that alphabet back to the Cherokee people."
I shook my head in admiration of this amazing vibrantly intelligent woman that I had the privilege of calling my wife. She seized up again, "Ohhhhhh!"
She grabbed at my hands desperately and then met my eyes with a frantic need, "I need to push!"
I lifted her forward onto her hands and knees in the warm water, as she began to push in earnest. Throughout this whole ordeal the hardest thing for me had been to hide how scared I was, but now as I saw my baby's head crowning everything changed.
This process had been happening for thousands of years and it was about to happen again tonight.
I got Asia's attention after a push was over, "Do you want to stand?"
She nodded jerkily and I held her up securely from behind, as I let her hang limply in a squatting position in front of me. It was a back killing position for me to maintain, but any amount of discomfort was doable, if it helped her out in any way.
It really didn't take long then. One moment she was intensely pushing and then she was catching our baby with her own hands. The baby, as soon, as it left the warm water began to scream bloody murder, as we both stared in slack-jawed wonder at the flawless creation in Asia's hands.
"Oh John she's a girl! She's so beautiful! She's absolutely perfect!" Asia exclaimed over and over, as all the pain she'd just been experiencing moments before was completely forgotten. All I could do was nod in rote answer, as I was beyond words. Asia brought our screaming little girl up to her chest, as I eased all of us back down into the water to sit on a bench.