FORTY-FIVE
COLT
Blair’s energy seems to come and go. Sometimes, she sleeps so long I feel like I need to put a mirror under her nose and watch for it to fog up. Others, I can’t get her to sit still. Or stay off a fucking ladder.
I come up behind her quietly as she slides a box of diapers up onto the top shelf of our daughter’s closet, not wanting to scare her until I’ve got my arms around her. She jolts when that happens, just like I knew she would.
“I thought I told you to leave ladder things for when I’m home,” I chastise her, holding her hand as she steps down off the stool.
Calling it a ladder is a bit excessive. It only has three steps, so it’s more of a stool than a ladder, really, but regardless she doesn’t need to be on it when no one’s home.
“Do you have the baby monitor turned on already or something?” she asks with a huff. “I literally just got up there.”
“No, but don’t tempt me.”
I pull her back against my chest, hands resting on her belly as we look over the nursery. It’s coming along pretty nicely. I think Blair’s really got an eye for design.
I’d made a mistake by showing her how handy I was at building things when I built her porch swing bed, because ever since then she’s just brought me pictures on her phone with her big doe eyes and asked me to make things happen.
A very small part of me fucking hated Pinterest, but a much larger part felt particularly manly every time I could build something for her that made her eyes light up.
She’d had me completely redo the walls with flowery wallpaper on the top half and a sage board-and-batten trim on the bottom half.
The Whittaker family crib—officially deemed safe by three different experts I’d had brought in to check it out—sat against one of the walls with a fancy baby monitor running up the wall and over the top of the crib.
What surprised me the most was that Blair had wanted to thrift most of the furniture so she could match the tone of the wood to the crib and rocking chair perfectly.
She’d made me drive three towns over to snatch up a dresser she found online, just for her to then ask me to change the hardware on it and re-polish the wood.
It was worth it. The whole time I worked on her projects in the front yard, she lay on her porch swing bed and read her smutty romance novels with the breeze blowing through her hair, giving me a hell of a view.
Blair brings me back to the moment by pushing my hand off the roundest part of her belly and toward the top. A second later, I feel our daughter kick me, and chuckle.
“She’s getting strong.”
“Her feet were in my ribs last night,” Blair deadpans, which makes me think comments of how strong our baby is are no longer welcome.
Fair. I can’t wrap my head around how it must feel for her and I think that might be why women are the ones who handle pregnancy and birth because if men did, the human race would’ve been gone thousands of years ago.
“Have you thought any more about the epidural?” I ask gently.
She’s convinced she doesn’t want one and I can’t really understand why. I don’t know much about giving birth, outside of the mechanics of it, but it’s common knowledge it’s not exactly a walk in the park. Some women even tear , which makes me squeamish to think about.
Blair sighs. “I still don’t think I want it,” she says, turning in my arms. “I want to be able to move around and change positions and just… listen to my body. An epidural cuts down the amount of position options available. The most common birthing position with the epidural is either on your back or on your side and I’ve heard laboring on your back is one of the most uncomfortable positions there is to give birth in. ”
“Then why is that the most common position?” I ask with furrowed brows. There have been approximately a thousand times during this pregnancy that Blair’s told me something about women’s health care that didn’t make a lick of sense.
“Funny you should ask that because I actually just looked this up,” Blair says, pulling out of my arms to go grab her phone.
I groan. I love the internet when she uses it to research kinky little things she wants to do together and projects I can help her with, but her incessant need to Google pregnancy symptoms and questions bothers me.
“Human beings are the only mammals that choose to give birth on their backs. Even gorillas and chimpanzees, our closest relative species, give birth in a squatting or crouching position,” she reads off her phone and I grin at how proper and scholarly she sounds.
“Up until the seventeenth century, women also primarily gave birth in an upright or crouching position, usually with the help of birthing stools or chairs. One of the reasons for this change was that King Louis XIV had a fetish for watching women give birth and got irritated when a birthing stool would impede his ability to watch it take place.”
My face twists, disgusted. I love Blair with all of my heart and then some, but I cannot imagine finding her giving birth sexually attractive .
“Seriously?”
She locks her phone and tosses it over on the changing pad she’s strapped to the top of the dresser and wrapped in a sage sheet she keeps referring to as gingham, even though it looks checker-print to me.
“There’s some other stuff about how it was deemed more convenient for male doctors if the woman was lying on her back, but?—”
“The fuck does male convenience have to do with giving birth?” I ask, still wildly upset about the history lesson regarding some old, dead king.
Blair smiles, patting my cheek and pressing a kiss to my lips. “Good boy. I shall keep you.”