Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
Amy
I am on my hands and knees on a shower curtain in my living room, bare ass facing my mother and my mother-in-law. My husband is on television in front of me, smiling and jocular with a face so punchable I'd do it through the screen, but I need my fist for balance.
This was not in the plan.
The plan—the beautiful, organized, color-coded, Brigham-and-Women's-approved plan—included a labor and delivery room, a birth playlist, an epidural, a medical team, and a husband who would hold my hand and say encouraging things while wearing a visitor lanyard and a wristband, not a slim-fit suit on international television, three thousand miles away.
The plan included dignity. Privacy. Apple juice in those little cups, and those hospital socks with grippies on the bottom. The plan did not include a Dollar Store shower curtain, two grandmothers, and a video call propped against a stack of parenting books I'll never trust again.
And yet.
Two versions of Hamish are in front of me.
On the TV across the room, the broadcast version—smooth, confident, talking about a football match I could not care less about.
On my phone on the floor, the video call version—the camera angled steeply up from under his desk, showing his tie and chin and the underside of the studio lights while his voice comes through the speaker, threaded with words meant only for me, coded into the commentary like a secret language.
"Ye have ta commit," he's saying. "Halfway doesna work. Either ye're all in or ye're not."
A contraction rips through me. Not the early ones, which came in waves with merciful gaps.
These are walls. They start in my back and roll forward through my pelvis and squeeze everything—uterus, spine, lungs, pride, all sense of who I thought I was five hours ago—into a single, white-hot fist of pressure that leaves no room for thought, argument, or denial.
"Breathe, Amy," Fiona says from behind me. Her hands are on my shoulders, thumbs pressing into the knots along my spine. "In through the nose. Slow. Good girl."
I breathe. Or I try. What comes out is a sound somewhere between a moan and a battle cry, a noise I've never made and never imagined making, especially not in front of my mother-in-law, who is positioned at the business end of my body with the steady focus of a mother who has done this eight times and views hospitals as a nice suggestion.
"I am naked," I gasp between contractions. "You can see everything. Oh, God, my mother-in-law can see my—"
"I've seen worse," Fiona says calmly. "Darren came out sideways and Fergus got a mirror out—"
"I don't know how that's supposed to help me!"
"It's supposed ta tell ye that whatever yer body does, I've seen it, survived it, and cleaned it up after wi'out complaint."
A contraction seizes me so hard, my arms buckle.
I drop to my elbows, forehead on the shower curtain, and the sound I make is animal.
It's a sound that should be confined to a delivery room with soundproofed walls, not broadcast through a phone to a television studio in London where my husband is pretending to analyze a football match.
"Steady," I hear him say through the phone. "Dinna rush it. Hold. Let it come ta ye."
"Easy for you to say," I pant. "You're sitting in an air-conditioned studio and have a better manicure than I do."
Mom is behind me, pressing the tennis balls into my sacrum with a force I didn't know she possessed. She's been rotating between the hip squeeze, the tennis balls, and holding my hand, and she hasn't stopped talking in forty-five minutes, which is either a coping mechanism or just Marie Jacoby.
Who are we kidding? It's the latter.
"Shannon was in labor for twenty-two hours," she's saying. "Twenty-two hours! First babies don't come this fast—"
"Mom, if you say 'first babies take forever' one more time, I will choke you to death with Moonbeam's mushroom dress."
"I'm just saying, the statistics—"
"The statistics are not helping! My uterus is disproving your fucking stupid statistics!"
From the phone, Hamish: "And... brEATHE. Look at that, timed it perfectly. Textbook."
"NOTHING about this is textbook, Hamish!" I scream at him. "Shove the textbook up your ass!"
He's live. He's talking to a massive audience and also to me, and the two conversations are overlapping in a way that would be poetic if I weren't currently experiencing what can only be described as my entire skeleton attempting to leave my body through my butthole.
Shannon had Ellie in an elevator. Declan delivered her. I remember Shannon telling me, years before I got pregnant, laughing about it over wine while I sat there childless and horrified, thinking: That will never be me. I will have a plan. I will have a hospital. I will retain my dignity.
And now here I am, pushing a baby out on a shower curtain, being stared at by a cursed plush in the corner with beady eyes, sitting next to forty-two packages of size 4 diapers, while my husband commentates on football from another continent and my mother-in-law examines my anatomy with the detached professionalism of a Scottish livestock vet.
Shannon's elevator story just got dethroned. My birth story is going to destroy hers at every family gathering for the rest of time, and I don't even get an epidural as a consolation prize.
"Fiona," I say between contractions, because the gaps are getting shorter. "Why are you being so nice?"
She pauses. Her hands don't stop moving—rubbing warmth into my lower back, adjusting the towel beneath me—but something changes in her voice.
"Because I'm half-terrified out of ma mind, hen."
I look back at her. Fiona McCormick, who has never met an opinion she wouldn't share or a boundary she wouldn't cross, is scared.
"Ye want ta know a terrible secret about me? When I'm afraid, I get nicer. Fergus noticed it decades ago. The man takes me ta horror films just ta enjoy the peace after. He jump-scares me in the kitchen because he kens I'll do the washing-up without arguing."
I choke on something between a laugh and a sob.
"Your husband terrifies you on purpose to make you pleasant?"
"Aye. Last time he lost too much money at the races, he put a clown wi' glow-up red eyes in ma secret chocolate-stash drawer, and after I wet ma pants from terror, I made him his favorite German chocolate-cherry cake and told him as long as he sold some extra ice cream for a few months, all would be well. "
A contraction hits and I grab Fiona's hand and crush it.
She lets me, breathing with me, her face inches from mine, and for the first time since I've known this woman—through every conflict and competition and argument about baby names and vacation schedules and who gets to organize Christmas—I see her clearly.
She's afraid, and doing this anyway. She's calm only because love turns her fear into presence.
For me. For her grandchild. For her son.
I love her for this. I'll deny it later, but right now, on this shower curtain, I love Fiona McCormick with all my heart.
Not just for making the most incredible human being I've ever known and got lucky enough to marry and have this baby with, but because she's one hundred percent all in, and feeling that kind of loyalty makes this all bearable.
Behind me, Mom is pressing the tennis balls into my sacrum with hands that haven't wavered in an hour.
Marie Jacoby, who once invited a widowed mailman to Carol's birthday party, considers crystal grids a viable medical intervention, and has never met a boundary she couldn't steamroll—this same woman has been my rock.
Her hands are iron. Her voice trembles, but her grip doesn't.
These two women have spent years circling each other, competing over holidays and wedding venues and baby showers. Grandmonsters, I've called them, and they've earned it.
But not tonight. Tonight they are simply... grand.
"Can someone call 911 again?" I gasp when the contraction releases. "I need someone with a medical degree in this room."
"I called again," Mom says. "They said fifteen more minutes. The accident is still blocking the route."
"FIFTEEN MINUTES?"
From the phone on the floor, Hamish's voice:
"The support is making all the difference. When ye feel that behind ye—people who believe in ye, who've got yer back—ye can push harder. The pain doesna disappear but it stops mattering."
"The pain ABSOLUTELY FUCKING still matters, Hamish!"
He keeps going. "Sometimes the best results come from the ugliest, messiest, most chaotic work ye've ever done. And then suddenly, clarity."
"He has no idea how accurate that is," I pant.
Fiona's hand is on my belly, pressing gently, her face tipped in concentration.
"The head's low," she says to Mom. "Very low. She's in transition."
Transition.
The word from the childbirth class we actually attended.
The part where the contractions come with no break and your body decides it's going to push whether you've agreed to it or not.
The part the instructor described as "intense," and every mother in the room exchanged looks that said "intense" was a bullshit word invented by people who con you into a beautiful lovemaking session and multiple orgasms but then bam!
You find yourself nine months later with your puckered starfish getting an airing in front of the grandmothers.
"I can't do this," I say, and I mean it.
My arms are shaking. My thighs are trembling.
Sweat pools in the hollow of my collarbone.
Nothing my body does is of my own volition.
I am on the floor of my living room about to push a human being out of my body without a single medical professional in the room and I can't, I can't, I can't—
"Ye can," Fiona declares.
"I can't. I'm not—I didn't plan for this! I planned for everything and I didn't plan for this and I don't know how to do something I haven't prepared for—" Pain rockets through me, a wall, all nerves and tightness and keening.