Mugwump

She woke at about 5:30 a.m. with a twinge that started deep in her lower back and slowly made its way to the front until her belly suddenly felt hard as granite, and then, just as suddenly, went away.

She smiled. No doubt about it. Contraction! She tried to keep calm, to keep her breathing slow and even. It was a contraction, but unless another one followed fairly soon, she knew there was no point in getting excited.

But of course she was excited. She’d felt nothing so distinct up to that point, certainly nothing that could wake her from a deep sleep. Still, she tried to keep her breathing steady and her heart from racing while she kept an eye on the clock. Five minutes later, almost on the dot, she had another twinge. It lasted about 30 seconds. Wow! Five minutes apart!

For a moment she panicked. Had she been having contractions all night while she slept? Was she about to have this baby any minute?

Right. By the time she got to the hospital, around 7:30 a.m., the contractions had slowed from five minutes apart to 15 minutes apart. And they would slow down a good deal more than that by the time she was squared away in the small labor room at the hospital.

Listen up people: they call it a “labor” room for good reason. She knew women who’d given birth two hours after they’d started having contractions: that was not labor. Labor was when your contractions started at 5:30 a.m. and you didn’t deliver until 6:30 p.m. That was a long, hard day, and very little that she’d learned in childbirth classes prepared her for it.

They certainly didn’t tell her in the classes that she might get Nurse Ratchet for a labor room nurse. They didn’t prepare her for a woman who would call her a “crybaby” as she lay there, whimpering from a contraction that felt like she was being turned inside out. They didn’t prepare her for the overwhelming urge she had to kick her doctor in the nuts when he strolled in and out 5 or 6 times to see how far she’d dilated, then smilingly assured her that she still had a long way to go. Nor did anyone tell her that when the contractions really were coming hard and fast with almost no time in between and her husband leaned down to whisper encouragement in her ear, she would be likely to say to him “Get your fucking beard out of my face.”

But most of all, most of all, they didn’t prepare her for how utterly and completely and absolutely she would fall in love with the sweet baby girl they would place in her arms when it was all over.

Every second of that long day was so worth it.

Happy Birthday.