Hammacher Schlemmer
Guaranteeing the Best, the Only, and the Unexpected for 171 years.GOING PLACES
Order at hammacher.com/cycle
The 21st Century
Ultralight ElectricycleOrder at hammacher.com/cycle
or call 1-866-409-5548Use code #601082 by 10/31/19.
OFF
$
25
On Orders of $125 or more.In a way, we all lived toward that
pain. It wasn’t just about suffering; it was
about knowledge. It was impossible to
understand the pain until you’d under-
gone it. That opacity compelled me. In
sorrow thou shalt bring forth children. The
pain had been punishment for eating the
apple, for wanting to know. Now the pain
itself had become the knowledge. Soon I
would become someone who had a birth
story. I just didn’t know what that story
would be. It was understood, of course,
that there were no guarantees. Anyone
could have a C-section. It cast its shadow
across everything. It was what you tried to
avoid. The pushing—the labor—was what
made the delivery real. That’s the implicit
equation I’d absorbed.
In writing my birth plan, I saved my
strongest language for the golden hour.
That was what they called the first hour
after birth, when your new body would
rest against mine. The phrase itself
sounded like a chiming bell. If I wanted
this golden hour, I was told, I needed to
insist on it: I would like immediate uninter-
rupted skin-to-skin contact with her until
the first feeding is accomplished, I wrote inmy plan. It was like casting a spell. I would
bring you into the world. You would live
against my skin. You would eat.WHEN YOU WERE larger than a honey-
dew but smaller than a watermelon, the
new year brought a blizzard. It was three
weeks before my due date. My doctor was
worried you were too small, so she had
scheduled another growth scan. I trudged
through piles of snow to get to her office
in Manhattan, wrapping my arms around
the swaddled globe of my belly, around a
coat that would not zip, and saying, Mine,
mine, mine. My sense of ownership was
sharpened by the icy flurry all around me.
It was primal.
At her office, my doctor said it was a
funny thing about storms—some people
believed they made a woman’s water
more likely to break. It had to do with
the drop in barometric pressure. This
seemed like something one midwife
might whisper to another in the barn,
while the sky filled with clouds, and like
a fairy tale it came true that night. I woke
at three in the morning, stepped out of
bed, and the hot warmth gushed out.My mother’s first birth, with my oldest
brother, had also begun this way. It was
almost biblical, I told myself: As it was for
the mother, so it shall be for the daughter.
There was a pleasing symmetry.
My birth-class teacher had recom-
mended going back to sleep if my water
broke in the middle of the night, because
I would need the rest. I did not go back
to sleep. I could not even imagine the
version of myself that might go back
to sleep. Plus, I still seemed to be leak-
ing. I sat on the toilet with my laptop on
my legs and felt the amniotic fluid leave
my body while I edited an essay about
female rage. When I sent it to my editor, I
added at the bottom: “PS: I am in labor.”
By the time we took a cab to the hospital
the following afternoon, my body was
knotting with pain every few minutes as
we headed up that glorious stretch of the
highway beside the East River, lined by
docks and basketball courts and gleam-
ing sky scrapers looming across the water.
The pain meant my body knew what
it needed to do to bring you here. And I
was grateful that my body knew, because
my mind did not. It was now the body’s