Mothers And Daughters

Soap Opera Weekly
January 12, 1999

LAURA WRIGHT (CASSIE, Guiding Light) looked so phenomenal at the Procter & Gamble Christmas party, it was hard to believe she'd given birth less than four weeks before. And the hair-raising details of her delivery made her rapid recovery seem even more remarkable.

Laura said she'd gone to the doctor's office in intense pain, with closely timed contractions, but the doctor determined she wasn't dilated even 2 centimeters. "I said, 'Let me tell you something, buddy, if I have to wait with these contractions, I'm going to kill myself"' So he sent her to the hospital, where, in performing an ultrasound, he discovered a complication. Though the baby had been positioned head-down for the past four weeks, she was suddenly feet- first - a shift that Laura and her husband, John, now joke was occasioned by Laura's scarfing leftover curried chicken the night before. But at the time, no one was laughing.

"The doctor said: 'She's breech.' And I said, 'OK.' And he said, 'We have to take her by Caesarean.' And I was, like, 'No problem.' And he says, 'In five minutes.' And I said, 'Uh-uh. No way.' I started crying. He said, 'You'll have your daughter in half an hour.' And I'm, like, 'I didn't think I'd become a parent that fast."

'Another reason I was freaked out, I was wide awake through the whole thing. I was numb from the spinal, but I could kind of see it reflected in the light fixtures, and I had to keep turning my head, because it was gross. They really do take everything out and move it around. John watched the whole thing and he videotaped her little butt coming out of my stomach."

Little 7-pound-5-ounce Lauren Elizabeth came out perfect, with curly blond hair like her mom's. But Laura says it wasn't till after Thanksgiving when her mother and all the other doting relatives left, "and I started to have to take care of her myself - to watch and listen to her and see if anything was wrong, and figure out how to deal with it," that the real bonding began.

Now, "I think Heather Locklear (Amanda, Melrose Place) did a good job of describing it. She said that it's like someone took her heart out and put arms and legs on it and let it walk around; that's how you feel,"

Laura has hired a nanny so that she can have the baby at the studio with her when she goes back to work full time. Before that, she was due to go in for two day, to do the birth of her TV baby. "The funny thing is, I told Paul (Rauch. the executive producer), 'I don't want to do the birth scene till I come back so I know what I'm doing.' Well, I still have no idea what the hell l'm doing - I had a Caesarean." she laughs. The last time she played a birth scene was as Ally Rescott on Loving. "That time I was only 22 - I really had no clue."

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