One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (38 page)

I don’t think I could’ve felt any more bonded. We’d gone from being co-inhabitants to silent partners, especially since that last ultrasound. I know I said something if she had the hiccups or kicked me (her womb outreach), but I felt completely self-conscious when I decided to give her a pep talk the morning of the next ultrasound.

I stood in our bedroom and looked down at my belly, clasping it like a ball, and I said out loud (to distinguish it from some self-conscious silent praying I’d been doing earlier) in age-appropriate words (steering clear of threats like “Pitocin” or “cesarean”), “Be big. Be healthy.” Then I added, “Eight out of eight,” just in case she got my competitive genes.

It worked, or she did it anyway.

She gave us the eight again, and she’d gained thirteen ounces, moving us up to the 12th percentile.

However, I was still zero centimeters dilated the day before my due date. We asked Dr. Bunnell for some dilation advice. “Have you tried castor oil? It tastes really awful—that’s how it works. It nauseates you.” We hadn’t tried anything yet, but we were ready to.

Lorene asked, “What about nipple—”

“Nipple twiddling. That’s a serious time commitment. Twenty minutes an hour.”
Never mind.
Dr. Bunnell wanted to see us again in a few days; she could not, in good professional conscience, let the pregnancy go more than another week at my advanced maternal age.

We bought the castor oil on the way home. Maybe it’d work the way the baby-extractor did for our contractor’s wife in the delivery room. One glimpse of them rolling it in, and the baby came flying out. I saved my castor oil receipt, just in case.

We signed up for some needle twiddling. Our friend’s acupuncturist (the one who had righted one of the twins when she went breach a few days before delivery) could see us right after our next appointment with Dr. Bunnell. And we gave Indian food a try.

On the way home from our spicy dinner, I called my dad with the non-news. “Do you think I should get an absentee ballot?” he asked.

“Dad, I don’t know. I have no idea—I think you’ll be home in time for the election.” Although as I said it, it sounded implausible. It was hard to believe I’d have a baby by then. Or ever.

The night before our next appointment, we went to watch the fourth game of the World Series on the big screen at the old movie theater in the next town. The Sox had won the first three. Johnny Damon led off with a home run and we were all out of our seats. A twelve-year-old boy jumped up and ran across the stage, swishing a broom back and forth, as we all chanted, “SWEEP! SWEEP! SWEEP!”

“Maybe we should call her Jonetta or Ortizia,” I said to Lorene.

The Sox won the game. The curse was reversed. 2004 would make history, a very auspicious year!

I
was three centimeters dilated the next morning. I didn’t feel any different. “We could get things started, make sure you keep progressing,” Dr. Bunnell offered. It was her euphemism for Pitocin. We shook our heads no. “Then I want you back in here tomorrow, and I’m making an appointment for Saturday at the hospital—we’re closed here—in case we need to induce you.”

The acupuncturist’s office was in a fourth-floor walk-up in Jamaica Plain. It was a beautiful, Indian summer morning, the first sun we’d seen after a run of gray, November-type days. I was silent-talking to my core, not singling out my cervix, as we hiked up the stairs: “Let go, let gravity,” I repeated over and over; it ran counter to all the years of “suck it in, suck it in.”

The acupuncturist walked us through her kitchen to her office. I filled out a series of forms, and after she reviewed them, she asked us if we had any questions. Lorene specified our outcome: We were looking for labor within twenty-four hours. The acupuncturist smiled a noncommittal smile. I considered asking whether you had to believe in it for it to work, but I didn’t want to diminish her belief in me. She led us to a table in the middle of the room where she actually did the work and had me remove all but my undergarments and lie belly-down. Lorene and I admired the retro reflexology posters that hung on all four walls.

The needles were whisker thin. I didn’t feel a thing when she put them in, took them out, or during the forty minutes in between. There was one in each hand—the muscle between my thumb and my forefinger—and the rest were in my calves, ankles, feet, lower back, and right shoulder.

The only thing that stung slightly was the alcohol in the Sharpie when she marked the spots on my lower back that Lorene was supposed to massage during labor.

The acupuncturist did some acupressure massage on my shoulders and lower back; we gave her our $90 and a hug and were gone. “Rest!” she called after us on our way down the stairs.

I stopped and called back up, “Is it okay to take the dogs for a walk?”

“As long as it’s restful,” she said, and we heard her door shut.

“That means no stop at Babies‘R’Us,” I told Lorene. We had planned to eat macrobiotic on our way home, but we couldn’t resist our old fertility haunt, Matt Murphy’s Pub.

At 5:30, after we got back from our dog walk, we went upstairs to read and rest. “Feeling anything?” Lorene asked.

“I’d tell you,” I snapped. About fifteen minutes later, I felt something that felt something like a menstrual cramp, but on second thought, maybe I just
wanted
to feel it. And how would I know if
it,
being the first thing I felt, was anything or not? A while later, I felt a second. The third one lasted a minute, so I mentioned it to Lorene.

“Shit. I left the chart and my watch in the car.” She got up to get it.

“Don’t. It’s probably nothing.”

By 6:45, we were sure they were contractions and we were arguing over the length of time in between, since we still weren’t writing anything down.

“Let’s go downstairs and have some dinner, while you still have an appetite,” Lorene suggested. I added some spinach to Steve’s soup, and we each had a bowl. Then I put the finishing touches on the spaghetti sauce I’d left on the stove and packaged it up.

I called Meredith to let her know we’d be heading in to the hospital, stopping to pick her up in the middle of the night. Then I left a message for Bruce and Steve.

Lorene rolled the big exercise ball into the kitchen. “Want to bounce?”

“It’s really starting.”

The phone rang; my freshman-year roommate was calling. I explained about the contractions, and she was happy to distract me, reporting out on her first marathon. About ten minutes into the conversation, I was unable to finish a sentence.