“Like I was going to quit and go home,” Jill fumed. “I’ve decided to keep it inside actually. Thanks. Maybe I’ll try again in a few weeks.” She was getting cranky. Understandable. Katie and I, meanwhile, were getting bored and tired and cramped in the small hospital room. I was having fantasies about my very own bed, about going home and closing the windows, dumping the food, cleaning up a little, and getting a decent night’s sleep. I hadn’t had one in weeks because of the studying. I figured once this baby was born, I wouldn’t sleep ever again. So this seemed like a good night for it. Jill was not at the moment in need of hand-holding anyway. She was dozing. The whole thing had gone from holy shit to feeling as mundane as waiting for your life to change forever possibly can. Katie and I flipped a coin to see who got to go home and who got to stay. I won.
I put my hand on Jill’s forehead. She opened her eyes sleepily. “I’m thinking of going home and getting some sleep for a couple hours, get some things ready. I’m ten minutes away if things change.”
“You’re leaving?” Jill, panicked, propped herself up on her elbows. Looked desperate, positively desperate, to come home with me.
“Nothing’s happening,” I said. “I thought I’d go home, clean up, come back in a little bit.”
“Don’t leave me here,” she whispered. “Please? I don’t want to stay here waiting either, but you don’t see me leaving.” Katie rolled her eyes at me, but we both stayed. Katie climbed in bed beside Jill. I curled up across two folding chairs. None of us really slept. It was good practice I guess. By about four A.M., the contractions were three minutes apart, and Jill wasn’t sleeping through or even around them anymore. She was eight centimeters dilated when the nurse came in to check at 4:45. By quarter to six, they had decided it was time to start pushing.
You have seen this part. Maybe you’ve given birth yourself or witnessed someone you love doing so. But even if not, you’ve seen this part like I had, on TV, in movies. Usually, real life is nothing like TV, but in this case, it was exactly like what they show there. Jill grunted and screamed and sweat and cried a lot, squeezed my hand and Katie’s, complained of thirst, pain, and exhaustion. She was very brave. She was beautiful and also, you know, not. The baby crowned slowly, emerged sticky and red and covered in white, clumpy wet. It was just as you imagine.
The story they don’t tell on TV is the one of the hand-holder, and it’s because it’s almost as scary but far less gallant. I was terrified. I was worried all that predawn morning and all the night before, but when they finally started, when we braced against her and pushed her knees back by her shoulders and the doctors and nurses came with all the lights and tools and just-in-case equipment, it was fear like I had never known. I was not excited. I was not in awe. I was simply terrified. My heart was beating so fast, so hard, it was difficult to think, hard to keep standing. I was afraid without words, and I am never without words. Jill squeezed my hand, and I squeezed back, just as hard. The baby came out and cried; Jill lay back and cried; I stood there still holding on to her and sobbed, not from miracle, not from relief, but because the fear still did not abate. I can’t explain it, or maybe it’s just that I won’t. I won’t look at what so terrified me or why. I have a family to take care of after all.
Far, far away, there were smiles all around.
“It’s a boy,” the doctor said.
“A little cliché,” I sniffed with my racing heart.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” Katie was shouting and shouting, dancing almost, yelling at me as if I couldn’t hear her. I nearly couldn’t. Jill was steadying him against her chest with both hands, not so much holding him as pressing him there, face up, as if to keep him from sliding off.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” shouted Katie.
“It’s a boy, it’s a boy,” whispered Jill, otherworldly, and as I swam up up up from someplace very far away and back into the room, my first coherent thought was: holy shit. Followed by: what are we going to do with a boy?
We had called Jill’s mom, Diane, just before her daughter started pushing. Jill did not think it would be fun for her mom to be sitting and waiting through hours and hours and maybe days of early labor. Jill and her mother were very close but in that way where they sometimes wanted to kill each other. Jill’s father left for good before Jill learned to walk; she has no memories of him whatsoever and only the dimmest of impressions. Diane had nothing nice to say to her baby girl about her father, so she said nothing at all. And so until she went away to college, for Jill, it was always just the two of them. She admired her mother when she thought about it, was glad her mom was home for dinner many nights. But also it was something she grew up with and so considered normal. As a kid, she thought her friends’ families were strange, overly large and overly present, crammed into crowded houses with too many rooms and too many people. Then she went to college and took gender studies and learned with academic remove the struggles of single parents, the rigging of the system, and it was a familiar revelation. She recognized her mom and herself but as if in a clouded mirror or through something gauzy. Statistics never quite fit. Someone else’s story is always worse. Still, Jill felt guilty about how hard her mom had worked and struggled, how much she’d given up, while Jill, her nascent-feminist only daughter, had failed to notice. When she called her mother from school in tears near the end of her first year to apologize, insofar as that was even possible, for taking all her mother’s efforts so for granted, her mother, silent and incredulous, finally squeaked out, “You mean you didn’t notice? All those years?”
“No,” Jill whispered, mortified, sorry to the tips of her toes.
“Everything we did without? Everything we did alone? How much I had to work? How close we came to not making it? You weren’t thinking about that all the time?” Diane asked.
“I wasn’t, Mom. I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Jill sobbed.
And there was silence on the other end until her mother finally burst out, “Oh thank God!” Jill was speechless. Later, when she’d recovered, Diane added, “I wasn’t so sad about what I had to do without. Who needs new clothes when you come home to such a beautiful daughter? But I was so worried about you feeling hungry or alone or sad about what other girls had that you didn’t. When you said you didn’t notice? Shit, that was the best news I ever heard.”
Jill knew that there was more to this story, that her mother must have given up her own dreams, that with the money Diane saved so her daughter could go to college, she could have gone to college herself. So Jill made sure to make it worth it—two majors, two minors, and no plans to be done with academia anytime soon. When she finished school, she decided she wasn’t going to graduation. She thought the cap and gown ugly and extravagant, the ceremony beside the point. She told her mother she’d hang out with friends until the end of graduation weekend then pack up and come home. They could celebrate quietly, just the two of them. It took Diane a while to understand. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t think you’re going to your graduation?” she finally asked.
“Exactly,” said Jill. “It’s stupid. It’s not important to me.”