The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 6

In which she actually goes into labor

This is the sixth and penultimate chapter of a 7 chapter story. Missed a chapter? Find them here, here, here, here, and here.

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I know now from Andy’s blurry iPhone pictures that I went from standing in the kitchen eating nachos at 8:46pm to hands and knees on the bathroom floor, trilling through horsey lips, by 9. The transition was sudden, immediate, and without warning: I felt a contraction start to build and felt a glimmer of panic rise in my throat because I knew it was a different kind of contraction, with a different kind of intensity, and that I did not want my kids to see or hear me have it. I abruptly turned away from the table – in my memory, I was mid-sentence, but was I really? The kids were on screens, after all, so who would I have been talking to? – and rushed to the bathroom. Compared to the warm haze of the kitchen, the bathroom felt crisp, with distinct contours and sharp lines. My senses suddenly felt heightened. I was no longer on a different planet.  I was on this one, every cell of me. 

Andy opened the door. 

“Shut the door,” I hissed, too aware that my kids were just a few feet away. “We should put the music on again,” I instructed, again thinking of the kids. 

He nodded, started fiddling with the phone, then with the speaker. This combination had worked easily an hour and a half earlier, but now would not; over and over again the beginning of the same song – some song I immediately recognized as the Magnetic Fields that was not even on my fucking playlist, what the actual fuck, I thought – played, tinny and mosquito like, from my phone.

“Just shut it off,” I kept saying, irritated.  But he kept fiddling, with his phone, with my phone, with the speaker; he left the bathroom for a moment, managed to connect his phone instead, returned, then left again. Eventually he would settle into sitting behind me, but not before he would communicate with Kat, our photographer, unlock the door for her, tell the kids I was in labor, and settle them in their rooms (still with screens and headphones).  Knowing Andy, he probably cleaned a thing or two in that 15 or 20 minutes, but who knows.

I sure as hell didn’t. I couldn’t totally understand what was going on, in my body or outside of it. My skepticism and frustration about being in a false labor wavered. These contractions were distinctly difficult to get through, longer than the ones I had had in the shower. They certainly seemed more labor like, but the whole scenario also did not seem anything like labor as I had experienced it before. There had just been the forty minutes in the shower, then about an hour of nearly nothing, and then suddenly I was on the floor feeling – could it be? – occasionally pushy. I did not actually feel ready to push, had not noticed any of the signs that would indicate that it was time, and yet I was unmistakably gently bearing down occasionally. Am I really only going to be in labor for less than an hour before the baby is here? Is Kat going to miss it? Certainly, I knew it could be possible: I already had a history of a 2 hour labor in my past. And yet I didn’t feel like I was on that precipice yet, the precipice of meeting one’s baby.  Nothing made sense.