Sam launched into Ted: ‘Ifyouare having this baby,youcan do it without drugs, butIam having it,Iam trying to pass a bowling ball from an orifice that has never had a bowling ball emerge from it before, and I want everything! ALL the drugs! Everything in the hospital.’
There was nothing close for Sam to throw but Ted ducked just in case.
This was nothing like the Sam he knew and loved.
Two more hours elapsed with just pain and the anticipation of it in Sam’s landscape.
‘I love you,’ Ted kept saying.
‘I know,’ she said when she wasn’t in actual pain.
She was tearful and sweaty, and in her saner moments, wondered how people appeared in celebrity magazines at the hospital door a day after giving birth, all groomed and perfect.
She had seen herself in the bathroom mirror when she’d been trying the ‘keep walking and let gravity help’ method. She was puce in the face, sweating and her hair was a greaseball. A month left alone in Sephora with a crack team of beauticians would not make her look good ever again.
‘I keep thinking the baby’s going to come, but it doesn’t,’ she said weepily to Ted, who was half hugging her, half holding her up. ‘I know they say long first labours are normal, but this can’t be normal? They’re not telling us something.’
She began to cry again.
‘We don’t know what normal is here,’ Ted said manfully. He was being ultra-careful in case he upset the balance between possessed wife and crying wife, the latter being upsetting but easier to handle.
The young nurse arrived back in the room to check the foetal heart rate and Sam’s cervix.
‘You’re fully dilated!’ she said, peeping up from between Sam’s legs.
‘You see, nobody knows when a baby wants to make an entrance.’
‘My baby’s coming?’ said Sam, almost shocked.
‘Your baby is coming,’ smiled the nurse.
Within minutes, it was all action and still no anaesthetist.
Ted was, to his delight, up the head end of the bed because he wasn’t sure he could cope with the whole baby emerging from the birth canal end, no matter how much he and Sam had discussed how this was important for both of them.
Instead, he remembered his friend, Lorcan, who’d said: ‘It does something to you, mate, seeing her producing a baby out ofdown there. Can take a while to get over it, uh, sexually.’
Sam screamed, pushed, and nearly ripped a hole in Ted’s hand as she pushed their baby into the world.
‘Push,’ said the midwife at the right times.
Sam pushed, feeling every tendon straining, every bit of her body ripping.
Despite the noise of machines and other women giving birth, screaming too, there were moments when she felt suspended in time – lost between pain, joy and anxiety and, above all, that wild primal desire to birth her baby safely.
Women had been doing it since the beginning of time, she had to do this. Couldn’t fail.
Now, now, now, please let it be now ...
And then, the last push—
The baby let out a little bleat and Ted began to cry too.
‘A little girl,’ said the midwife with pride and Sam began to cry, tears of joy and exhaustion.
‘Good breath sounds, pinking up,’ said the paediatrician, swooping in.
When she was finally put in Sam’s arms, Baby Bean – seven pounds exactly and scoring a perfect Apgar score – was the most infinitely precious creature her parents had ever seen.
