Whatever Held

My son took nineteen hours. Both of my girls took two. Two hours, start to finish, both times. These days when someone says “two-hour delivery” they mean something turning up from Amazon, a phone charger or a bag of dog food left on the porch. I delivered two entire human beings in that window. I like to think about that whenever I’m tracking a package, tapping refresh, waiting on some little box to arrive in the same amount of time it once took me to produce a whole daughter. I’ve thought about that speed a lot, actually, how my body seemed to learn the route.

The first time was a nineteen-hour marathon and I was so exhausted I was having panic attacks, genuinely frightened, with no idea what to expect. My family was there. For some reason my sister brought her mother-in-law, a woman I wasn’t close to, and having a near-stranger in the room somehow made the panic worse. But underneath all of it was a feeling I still remember with unusual clarity, a thought that arrived the very day he was born: I am responsible for another human being, and I am going to be responsible by myself. On day one, in the middle of the hardest thing my body had ever done, I already knew his father wasn’t going to be the one who showed up. I just knew. That turned out to be the truth of all three of their births, actually. Not because anything dramatic happened. Just because, one way or another, in each one, he wasn’t really there.

When my second was on her way, he got angry at me for going to Target of all things, and he left. Drove back to the Central Valley and left me in San Jose, where I was going to deliver. So the contractions started that night, and I called the doctor, and then I had to call the doctor right back, because they were already coming so fast. Get to the hospital, they said.
My dad drove. My mom was in the back seat. And my poor father, who I don’t think had ever heard me like that, said afterward that he didn’t know I knew such words. He kept asking, at every intersection, whether he should run the red lights, and my mother and I were both yelling at him, in stereo, do not run the red lights. We made it. My mom told him to run in and get a wheelchair, and I started waddling toward the entrance on my
own, and there was one of those revolving doors, and as I pushed my way into it I looked over and saw my dad, in the same revolving door, going the other way, out, with a wheelchair. The two of us passing in the glass. He circled back around eventually and got me into the chair. She came a week late, that one, and I’d caught some kind of bug beforehand, so I already felt terrible going in, and by the time they checked me I was too far along for any pain medication. So it was natural, whether I liked it or not. It was rough. Her dad did finally turn up. But the people who got me there, the people in the car, in the glass door, in the room, were my parents.

The youngest, my mom insisted I deliver back in the Central Valley, probably she was a bit traumatized from the earlier experience. I went in for a checkup the day after my son’s birthday, thinking I still had a couple of weeks, and the doctor decided, right there, that I could be induced that day. So I drove myself to the little hospital. I called my parents from a pay phone to tell them it was happening. When I waddled in this time the nurse walked me to a room and asked why I’m by myself. When I told her it was the third child she just said “Oh okay”. And then I sat up in the hospital bed by myself, watching soap operas, for an hour or so, waiting, like a woman with an afternoon to kill instead of a woman about to have a baby. Then the contractions hit, hard and fast, and I pushed the call button. The nurse came in a little skeptical, said she’d just checked me and I was fine, I had a while yet. And I said, no. She’s coming. Now. Another nurse checked, and her eyes went wide, and she said something I have carried ever since: you always believe the mother. They got the doctor. The baby came. I think my parents and her father just barely made it in the door.

You always believe the mother. I think about that line more than almost anything a stranger has ever said to me, because it’s the whole thing. By the third time, I knew my own body completely. I didn’t need to be checked. I didn’t need to be told. I knew she was coming because I knew, the way you know things in your own body when you’ve stopped being able to afford not to. Nineteen hours the first time, panicking, sure of nothing. Two hours the third time, correcting the nurse, sure of everything.
Three kids. Three arrivals. A father who was, in his various ways, never quite in the room. And my parents, every single time, in the car, in the door, in the hall, making it just in time.

I used to tell that story about the revolving door as a funny one, and it is funny. My dad and I passing in the glass, both of us going the wrong way. But I think the reason I keep it isn’t the comedy. It’s that when I close my eyes and picture the day each of my children came into the world, the person I see is not the man who was supposed to be beside me. It’s my dad, circling back around with the wheelchair. It’s my mom in the back seat, yelling at him about the red lights. It’s the two of them, again and again, being the ones who came. My mother and father were there for every single arrival. You always believe the mother. And behind this mother, for a while, there were two people making sure she and her babies got where they were going