My mom’s labor time

It was Monday, June 2nd, and I was wide awake at 6 a.m. Maybe to some of
you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first
day in a lifetime of six in the mornings, and I made the three-hour leap all in
one go.

By this point, it was 10 days past my due date, and I had a very specific and
recurring fantasy of being moved around town in a hammock flown by a
helicopter. I wanted to be airlifted between boroughs.

When I told my fiancé, Nolio, this wish, he was quiet for a second. He had
learned to reply to me with caution, but I imagine in this case he just
couldn’t help himself.

“Like a whale?” he asked.

I laughed, standing on the curb somewhere. Actually yes, come to think of it:
Like a whale.

On the morning of June 2nd I had been waking up “still pregnant” for quite
some time—41 weeks and two days to be exact; 289 days. My mom was in
town already ( I am talking about my grandma) , at an Airbnb rental a block
away. Nolio was done with work. I was chugging raspberry red leaf tea,
bouncing on a purple exercise ball whenever I could, shoving evening
primrose oil pills up my vagina, paying $40 a pop at community acupuncture
sessions I didn’t believe in, and doing something called “The Labor Dance.”
The Dance (preferred shorthand) involves rubbing your belly in a clockwise
direction—vigorously—and then getting as close to twerking as one can at
41 weeks pregnant.
I never did get far enough into adulthood where I was waking up at 6 a.m.
for self-betterment, which is one among many things I thought I would
master before having children. Add to that: novel writing, working out,
makeup, clothing, getting up early. As I got closer and closer to childbirth I
still held out hope for a few of them. I went to Sephora; I opened Google
Docs; downloaded the Couch to 5k app for the tenth time; waddled around
the track at my local park, my baby bump a-bouncing. Nope, nope, nope,
nope, nope.

Anyway, it was 6 a.m. and I was wide awake and staring at the wall. Then
ow. It was like the crest of a wave of a period cramp; the worst moment, if
you have forgotten to take Tylenol and then are cursing yourself that you
forgot to take Tylenol. I lay there with my mind racing for awhile, then got
up and ate Frosted Mini Wheats the way I had done for much of my
pregnancy. Nolio was sleeping. I had another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I
was kind of smiling at them at this point. Whoa, no way. Could it be? I got in
the shower, jittery with this new development. Ow-ow-ow. I grabbed the
towel rack and wondered how many more showers I’d take that day. In all of
my natural childbirth classes everyone was raving about the magic of hot
showers. I suspected, or feared, that their analgesic powers were not as
good as advertised. Ow.

I got back into bed and lay there naked and huge, staring at Nolio sleeping,
waiting for him to wake up. I didn’t want to look at the time, but I looked at
the time and the ows were 15 minutes or so apart. Ow, ow, ow I whispered
into my arm. I grimaced; I cringed. So far the pain was about as bad as a
stubbed toe. It was a “Damn!” pain, but it was still amusing. I was kind of
proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

I was also a little excited because I didn’t feel like working that day, or going
to another one of my doctor’s appointments at the hospital, a 40-minute
commute away. The appointments are for overdue women. You sit in a
room full of hospital-style armchairs (comfy but upholstered in cornflower
blue, and with the kind of material you could wipe down with a washcloth)
and you pull up your shirt to reveal your belly, while the nurse lubes you up
and straps monitors to you and you sit with the other women whose bodies
have not kicked into gear, and a chorus of fetal heart tones sing out in the
room like horses galloping. The first time I sat there I cried with some kind of
joy at this.

Today though, I was done with all of it.

Whether I woke Nolio up or he woke up on his own I don’t know, but when
he did I lay there for awhile without saying anything. I must have waited for
the next ow-ow-ow.

“Is this it?” he asked me.

I don’t know, I think I told him. I had suddenly felt very shy, like I was getting
my first period and didn’t want anyone to know. “It could be nothing,” I said
and we smiled. He got excited, I tried not to. “I don’t know!” I shouted,
laughing at the truth of it. Then ow-ow-ow.

My mom came over and our plan was to grab breakfast at a coffee shop
where I would stay and do work. She’d leave me be, then pick me up for my
appointment a few hours later. She rang our bell and came and sat with me
in the living room. I wondered if I could pretend to do work and then go into
labor secretly, on my own. I waited and waited and squeezed a couch pillow
in silence while she drank coffee and I pretended nothing was out of the
ordinary, then finally I shrugged and tried to hide a smile and announced,
matter-of-fact, that I didn’t think I was going to be doing any work that day.

“Stuff’s…happening,” I told her. She got excited, I told her not to. She
ignored me. I covered my face in my hands. I flashed back to me walking in
on her in the bathroom in 1995 and asking her for a maxi pad. She had tried
to give me a tampon. I shook my head and ran out.

We all went for a walk to get things moving. I should be walking, was all that
I could think. I did not want to fail at birth. In practice, this meant I drank
half of an iced coffee and bent all the way over on street corners, burying
my head in Nolio’s chest approximately every 10 minutes. We made it to a
park that was just filling up with small children and their mothers who eyed
me suspiciously; I was soon to be one of them. I side-eyed them back, and
then muffled my shouts into Nolio’s shirt sleeve. I kneaded the flesh of his
arms, pulled on his belt loops, yanked at all of his pockets, grabbed him by
the hips, sipped iced coffee, trudged forward in the sun. I laughed at myself,
shaking my head between contractions. It was, it seemed, really happening.
The pain was getting much worse. It was now a much more painful,
sustained toe stubbing. Like your body being twisted and wrung out from
the inside. But temporary! You just had to ride it out. It was almost fun at
this point—a personal challenge. “You’re going to stub your toe very, very
hard every 10 minutes for the next few hours, but then you’ll have a baby!”
It seemed okay.

“Annnnd here we go!” I’d say, then shove my iced coffee into my mom’s
hands and slam my head into Nolio. I did my breathing, dutifully, skillfully,
and I moved around rhythmically, alternating between belly dancer and
mentally disturbed person slamming her head against the bus seat in front
of her.

I did my breathing, dutifully, skillfully, and I moved around rhythmically,

alternating between belly dancer and mentally disturbed person slamming
her head against the bus seat in front of her.

My contractions moved to seven minutes apart, and we walked home.

Going through labor surrounded by my closest loved ones, who were not
themselves going through labor was, well, it was embarrassing, but not in a
way I really felt. There was the me of polite company who felt ashamed,
angry and slighted by the whole affair. Then there was the bodily me, who
was very busy having her organs tightened with a belt made of barbed wire.

I would float out above my body and smile in wonder and awe, and then I
would be yanked back in, like a gust of wind through a subway tunnel.
Knowing it was supposed to be happening was the only thing that kept me
from screaming, from calling an ambulance, from being sure I would die.
Also the temporary-ness. It was like doing battle, or having battle be done
unto you, every seven minutes.

Time wore on. We moved from room to room, I ate piece after piece of
watermelon. We never listened to any music. I don’t know, really, what we
did in those minutes between contractions. Read our phones? Talked to
each other? I know at a certain point I Googled “average length of labor first
time mom.” I remember debating typing in “length” vs. “duration,” my eye
on the clock. Do most people know the word “duration”? I wondered.

We finished packing the bag. I ate a yogurt popsicle, buried my face in

pillows, and leaned over tables and countertops. I thought about how it was
almost pornographic: my ass in the air, me moaning. Pornography of one.

I carried my big purple yoga ball around the house and was rolling all over it.
I wore my blue and white cotton striped maternity dress, crew socks, and
purple Crocs.

I labored in a dress? I labored in a dress.

We went for more walks and I was fine with having contractions around the
neighborhood as long as no one from my building saw me. I tried to time our
trips out the hallway with my contractions. Still, on our way out, I heard our
neighbor say to Nolio, “Baby?”

“Not yet, we’re workin’ on it,” he responded.

I stood frozen in the doorway, and crawled back to my purple ball.

***

At some point, the contractions were three minutes apart. Then five. Then
three. This happened for a while, and we were gathering our stuff, readying
ourselves. It was was now 6 p.m. Nolio called the on-call OB and then hung
up to call a car. That’s when the contractions stopped.

I stood up from being bent over the butcher block and looked at my phone,
bereft. Ten minutes. Then 7. Then 10. Then 12. Then 15. They stalled out. I
panicked. We walked. Ten minutes. Twelve minutes. Twenty minutes! Soon
it was late. I argued with Nolio over how long a “normal” labor was. I
thought about friends whose labors were six hours, or eight hours. That was
normal. I tried crawling into the other room and looking in The Birth Partner
when he was in the bathroom. I tried to visualize a worksheet my yoga
teacher gave us in a workshop about average early labor durations and
couldn’t find it on my desk. I spent whole hours wishing my mom would go
home and go to sleep, but unable to communicate this. She did finally, and I
felt such gratitude. Like maybe now it would work. Maybe she was a psychic
block.

When that didn’t happen we tried to sleep, too. We slept in 12-minute

intervals, then 15, then 20, then seven. All along the worst pain, rocking,
cringing, shouting, kneading pain, waking me up every 12 minutes. I was so
weak.

At midnight, I was exhausted and in tears and mad at Nolio for not calling
again. I was cursing the piece of paper we had hanging on the fridge: 3-1-1.
Three minutes apart, lasting a minute, for an hour.

“Maybe,” I whimpered, “this is just how labor is for me. Maybe I’m close.
Maybe my contractions will never get closer together.” I sobbed, hopeless.
“That happened to someone on Babycenter!” I said. I wanted to be
monitored, to make sure the baby was okay. I was still feeling him kick but
who knew? If he stopped, then what? It could be too late. We couldn’t see
in there; couldn’t access it. This was what I hated most about pregnancy and
what I wanted over with more than anything: the opacity of it all. I wanted
him out where I could see him. But before that I had to be made to suffer.
Before that: this.
When Nolio called the doctor again, seeming so grown-up in the next room,
I got a contraction and made sure to moan extra loud for effect. Everyone
told us the doctors gauge your labor sounds for signs of progress, so I hoped
she’d overhear me and grant us access. Nolio paced and reasoned with her
and then hung up and came back to me. She told him that normally she has
patients wait until they’ve gone 24-36 hours and then at that point you can
come in and get monitored for a bit. He put this to me gently, but without
the despair I thought it required. He became, too, then, the enemy.

“No,” I said, crumbling. I was crying out of desperation. I needed a fix. I felt
unheard; misunderstood. This was much different than physical pain. This
could not be, I thought. It just cannot be. I wouldn’t make it that long. I’d
never make it.

I don’t know how I endured the next eight hours, but it mostly involved
making deals with myself. Keep going until 2 a.m. 3 a.m. Six. My mom came
back over at 7 or 8 and I was feeling stubborn again. I didn’t want to go in, to
ride in a horrible car during rush hour, only to be turned back. Everyone said
the car ride was the worst part. I was scared of it, I cried at the thought. I
wanted to set up shop, to have the baby, I wanted to be flown there by
helicopter in a hammock, goddammit.

And all along: pain, pain, pain. The grooves of it were beginning to feel
familiar, well-worn. Tired. Sore.

Gathering our stuff to get in the car gave me a second wind. I felt like a kid
about to go on a big trip. I tried not to grin, feeling the bigness of the
situation as I lived it; I was setting off to a terrible fate. I was screaming on
the bed as Nolio would pop his head in holding something or other up in the
air and asking if he should bring it. He picked up the yoga ball and looked at
me and I looked at him and shook my head no. I was decisive, certain. No,
no, no. I wanted to show up unarmed. I wanted to be taken care of. There
would be no more bouncing.
We loaded into the car with me on the far left, Nolio in the middle, my mom
on the right. I hadn’t imagined my mom with us, for any of this actually, but
there she was and I wasn’t going to ask her to leave. She was quiet, like a
ghost—a nice ghost—hovering, but unobtrusive. When she came over in the
morning she said she had a dream we went to the hospital without her,
implying she was worried about that. I took that to mean I shouldn’t ask her
to meet us later. I said nothing; she climbed in.

It’s not that my mom bothered me by being there so much as I was

constantly evaluating whether she was bothering me by being there.

We opened the door and I felt like Miss America, walking out onto the dais
of my front stoop. The driver didn’t flinch when he saw me. I watched for it.
The three of us slid into the back seat, Nolio in the middle. He patted my
knee and leaned forward toward the cabbie. “She’s in labor,” he said with
comic disregard. “You might hear some noises,” (driver roll up the partition,
please) “but she’s not going to have the baby in the car or anything.”

I gripped the handle above the car window, the one that must have been
invented for women in labor. I got three contractions during our 40-minute
commute to the hospital, through rush-hour traffic. I handled them silently,
like a professional. We careened across Houston St., up the West Side
Highway. The wind blew onto my face through the open window, saving me.
I closed my eyes and breathed it in. It was as if I was on my way to the first
day of school.