Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Amy
The condo is so quiet and I don't know what to do with myself.
Fiona and Fergus are in their rented condo down the street, presumably reorganizing its spice rack. I have approximately forty-eight hours of unsupervised freedom before Hamish returns and Fiona resumes her campaign to annex our living space.
I stare at the plush. It stares back with its mismatched marble eyes.
"I'm going to disinfect you," I tell it. "I don't know how. You look like Hasbro set up a plush toy factory over a Superfund site. But you're not infecting my kid."
Maybe I could give Fiona that task. Ship the plush to her rental with a bottle of Lysol and instructions to return it sanitized, deodorized, and ideally, exorcised.
That would keep her occupied for at least two days, which is exactly how long I need her to not be inspecting my cervix via a doorbell cam.
In the meantime, I clean.
The books call it nesting, the primal urge to prepare your space for the arrival of your offspring.
What the books fail to mention is that nesting, for a woman who has already alphabetized her vitamin shelf and arranged her sock drawer by thread count, looks less like instinct and more like organizational psychosis with a Target registry.
I wash every onesie we own. Twice. Fold them into thirds, decide thirds is wrong, refold into quarters.
I reorganize the diaper caddy by function: wipes left, creams center, diapers right, with a secondary sort by brand.
I clean the inside of the microwave with a brand new toothbrush.
I rearrange the changing pad covers by color gradient, darkest to lightest, as if the baby will notice.
I'm debating whether to re-sort by fabric weight when my back seizes.
Not the dull ache I've been nursing for days. This is a grinding pressure low in my sacrum that blows through me and steals my breath for three full seconds. I grip the dresser edge and wait. It passes fast, almost as if it never happened.
"That's new," I say to the plush. "I must be dehydrated."
I make a rehydration drink, then debate: heat or cold?
Ice pack first. The cold helps for four minutes, then makes the muscle clamp harder.
I switch to the rice pillow—the one Mom bought at a craft fair that smells like patchouli and flax—and microwave it until it's almost too hot to touch. I press it against my sacrum.
Better. Then not better.
Then worse.
Nobody warned me about this. Shannon told me about hemorrhoids, swollen feet, and the sensation that your pelvis is being pried apart by a very patient sadistic locksmith.
Carol told me about lightning crotch, which is exactly as horrifying as it sounds, which she described with the clinical enthusiasm of an older sister tormenting a younger one.
Mom told me about back labor, but in that vague, glazed way mothers describe pain they survived decades ago—like veterans who say "it wasn't that bad" while their eyes tell a completely different story.
But this constant, breath-stealing, grinding pressure?
Nobody mentioned this. It wasn't in the books.
It wasn't in the four out of ten childbirth classes Hamish and I actually attended before his Str1kecast schedule cannibalized the other six.
It's not in any of the thirty-seven pregnancy apps I downloaded and organized into a folder called Operation Uterus.
I know it's not contractions. Contractions are rhythmic. They come and go in waves with a beginning and a peak and an end. This is just... constant. A pulled muscle. A compressed nerve. The cost of four plates on the leg press at thirty-four weeks, which Vince warned me about.
Or—and I like this theory much better—perhaps I pulled something when Hamish went down on me yesterday morning and I came so hard, my climax had a climax.
Orgasm-induced lumbar strain is a thing, right?
I'm going with that. It's the most flattering explanation and the one least likely to require medical intervention.
I text my sisters.
Me: Is it normal for your lower back to feel like it's being slowly crushed by a hydraulic press at 36 weeks?
Shannon: Normal? Amy, by 36 weeks my back felt like it owed money to the wrong people. I slept on a bag of frozen peas for the last month. Dec thought I was meal prepping in bed
Shannon: Try lying on your left side with a pillow between your knees and another one under your belly and a third one behind your back and at that point you're just building a pillow fort and calling it medicine
Carol: I had sciatica so bad I couldn't walk. I hip-checked the bathroom doorframe every morning like I was checking in for a contact sport
Me: My back is killing me. Low and deep. Constant
Carol: Constant or rhythmic?
Me: Constant
Carol: Not contractions then. Hot bath, gentle stretching, call Dr. Biswas if it gets worse
Shannon: Or lie down and make Hamish rub it
Me: He's in London
Shannon: Then lie down and resent him from a distance
I decide not to call Biswas. It's muscular. I overdid the workout. Or I strained something during an orgasm. Either way, it requires chocolate and denial. I lower myself onto the couch, build my pillow fortress, and turn on the television.
Str1kecast Sports. Pre-game coverage. The studio glows with LED walls, the curved pod desk sleek under the lights, and there, in the background of a wide shot, is Hamish.
He's adjusting his lapel mic, and even through a television screen three thousand miles away, I can see the focus settling over him.
The suit. The ease. The jawline that launched a thousand Gillette ads.
He belongs in that chair the way he used to belong on the pitch—totally, completely, like the furniture was built around him.
God, he's so handsome. That's my husband? How did I get him?
"See your dad up there?" I rub my belly. "He's on the telly. He's brilliant. And you and I are going to sit here and watch him and eat crackers and unclench my back until he gets home."
The baby doesn't respond.
My back seizes again. Hard enough that I gasp, curl forward, and grip the arm of the couch until it passes. I breathe through it and tell myself: muscle spasm. No way will I be one of those panicked pregnant people who call the doctor about every twinge.
I'm fine. Everything is fine.
The doorbell buzzes.
My heart drops. If Fiona has installed the Ring camera despite my explicit prohibition—
"Amy! Sweetheart? Open up, I have diapers!"
Mom. Thank God.
"I got the most amazing deal, you won't believe it, I used seven coupons and a gift card I found in my wallet from 2019 that apparently had $32.47 on it—"
I buzz her in and hear the commotion before she rounds the corner. Here comes my mother, arms stacked with packages of diapers so high, she can barely see over them, a rolling cart behind her piled even higher. She looks like a woman who won a shopping game show.
"Mom, that's a lot of diapers."
"Eleven cents a diaper, Amy. Eleven cents. Do you know what diapers normally cost? I'm a diaper genius."
She starts stacking packages on the counter. I pick one up and read the label.
"Mom? These are size 4."
"I know!"
"Size 4 is for toddlers. The baby won't wear these for over a year."
"But at eleven cents a diaper, Amy—well, actually, seven if you factor in the loyalty card and the two percent cash back on the credit card, on top of the store sale and the manufacturer's rebate postcard—we'd be insane not to stockpile.
And look at all your storage space!" She points at the nursery corner. "That corner is begging for inventory."
"Mom, that's the baby's area."
"And what does a baby need? Diapers! It's synergistic, Amy."
"We don't have the space for all this."
"Be innovative! Store some under the crib mattress. It's like free padding."
She keeps chattering. The accident on the road.
How she had to park four blocks away. How a man in a BMW honked at her while she was parallel parking and she gave him a look that, in her words, "flayed him alive.
" How the paramedics and fire trucks were everywhere, the road completely blocked off, three detours required.
I'm standing in the doorway, half-listening, smiling at my mother's ability to turn a diaper run into a Ken Burns documentary, when I feel it.
A tiny, almost not there, pop.
Low. Deep. Internal. Like a water balloon I didn't know I was carrying just let go, not from a pin, but from a weak spot that finally gave.
And then warmth. A rush of it, soaking through my leggings, running down my inner thighs, pooling on the hardwood between my feet in a spreading circle of clear fluid that is definitely, absolutely, without question, not urine.
I know this even as I prepare to tell myself otherwise for the next sixty seconds.
"Mom."
She's still narrating the detour.
"Mom."
She turns. Sees my face. Looks down. The color leaves her cheeks so fast, I can practically hear it draining.
"Oh, my God," she whispers.
"Okay," I say, and my voice is steady. It's the voice of someone who has managed countless corporate crises, numerous hostile media cycles, several sex scandals (including her own husband's before he was a husband), and most recently, an in-law who tried to fire her.
My voice is the Senior Director of Crisis Communications, and the crisis is running down my legs.
"Okay. That happened. But it could be—I've been drinking a lot of water, my bladder's been compressed for months, it could be urinary incontinence, which is extremely common in the third trimester—"
"Amelia Langstrom Jacoby McCormick, that is not pee."
"You can't know that from looking."
"I have had three children. I know what amniotic fluid looks like, I certainly know what pee looks and smells like, and that"—she points at the floor like she's identifying a suspect in a lineup—"is amniotic fluid, and YOUR WATER brOKE. YOUR BABY IS COMING NOW!"