Now that my son is a year and a half I’ve been in a reflecting mood.
If you are from the East Coast and you gave birth on August 24, 2011, than our stories start off very similar. My son S Dot was born the day after the East Coast’s first major earthquake and the day before Hurricane Irene.
On, August 24th, I woke-up in the middle of the night and felt stomach cramps but couldn’t 
distinguish whether these were the usual braxton hicks I had been experiencing for a few weeks or real contractions. Here I was, one o’clock in the morning actually Googling “What do contractions feel like”? Keep in mind, I took Child Birth Classes and read ever book known to man—but yet, here I was at the Mac alter praying to the Google God’s to diagnose me.
The cramps were getting worse, and my stomach felt as hard as a boulder, but where before it would subside and become soft again, that momentary relief was becoming far and in between. I tried to lie back down, because if I was having contractions my goal was to stay at home as long as possible. Personally, I’m not a big fan of hospitals, and considering I had never been admitted a day in my life, I really wanted to stay in the comfort of my own home. So, instead of calling the doctor, I waddled back to bed and tried to sleep it off. Yes, you heard me, I tried to sleep off the fact that a human being was trying to explode from my body.
“…here I was at the Mac alter praying to the ,Google God’s to diagnose me.”
After a half an hour of tossing and turning, which for some reason did not alarm or awake my husband— let me be fair, after I hit my fifth month of pregnancy, sleeping on my back or stomach went out the window, and trailing behind it went any chance of a comfortable night sleep, so my husband was PRETTY use to sleeping next to a break dancing baby walrus (I’m playing the baby walrus in this scene). I couldn’t lay in the bed any longer but I remembered that warm showers help to soothe contractions, so I went into the bathroom. But, before I could turn on the shower head a series of disgusting things happened. First, let me premise this by saying that when I learned that the body tries to purge itself before the delivery of your baby, I didn’t take it to mean in the literal sense. At 2am, as I stood in my bathroom, it felt as if I was going to explode.
“EUREKA!–shout out to the Backyardigan’s, it’s one of my favorite songs. You lover’s of Nick Jr. know the deal.”z
I was confused, my senses were telling me I had to have a bowel movement and throw-up at the same time, my body was acting as if the police had just shown up at the door and my body had 10-seconds to flush the drugs and hide the money. It was ever man for himself. I was deliriously dizzy, but get this; I was still determined to ride it out. Yes, I told myself, when the bathroom stops spinning, I going to hop into the shower and then get back into the bed. Luckily, God knows I’m a hard headed idiot, so he showed me the one thing I would respond too, my mucus plug broke and I started bleeding. EUREKA! (Shout out to the Backyardigan’s, it’s one of my favorite songs. You lover’s of Nick Jr. know the deal.)
As I turned to get my husband out of my bed, my knees buckled under the weight of a massive contraction and I fell to the bathroom floor. The last thought that ran through my head as my husband floored his little Hyundai Sonata was, “I hope I didn’t get blood on the bathroom rug, we just brought them.”
My diary entry is this, “Contractions are a beast.”
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As Seen on BlogHer