Birth and the Painful Fractions, or whatever you'd prefer to call them

Large, over-sized green eyes are staring at me from across the room. They don’t blink. They just stare on looking attractive with those long lashes, but intense. Maybe the pony belonging to the green eyes is trying to say it is unhappy about its missing tail.

Pin the tail on the pony will be happening in about sixteen hours. A three-year-old birthday party is a special thing. I just finished painting ten yellow tails. I wonder how pony will feel once she has all ten stuck all over her. Talk about extremes.

Tonight is a special night to sit idle with the pony, because I know exactly where I was three years ago. And I know exactly what I was doing. Around my house and my yard I was wondering, with a belly ready to burst. Erratic contractions were taking their time at stabilizing. I was living in a fog of hormones—emotions and fears. Drastic change was on the horizon, and that is hard to cope with. I would have been a wreck, but then my people showed up.

First, my mother arrived, having driven like a mad woman 70 miles to appear at my door with a car load of groceries, plans for a week’s worth of meals, and psychological comfort that no one other than a mother can provide.

There is a comfort in being with women that have all been through it before—my mother three times; my midwife six. When in the company of such women there is a ceremony to birth—a rite of passage—rather than a burden. In moments of worry I thought back to my origins. Grandmother Elizabeth gave birth within her small farmhouse in the middle of nowhere seven times. Great Grandmother Rosa gave birth as the dirt poor immigrant of a foreign city fourteen times.

And so, on this night three years ago, the ceremony began. The midwives were settled in one corner of my bedroom, speaking in hushed tones so as not to disrupt me, while I sat on my bedroom floor. Some of us have an instinct to be on the ground in times of pain, and so there I sat. Hours fluttered by while I sat on the floor with no desire to speak—it would have been a waste of energy.

“Just before dawn it was time,” I told my almost three-year-old this evening at bedtime. The house was quiet and dim. The bath water was warm around me, and the smiling face of my excited midwife was there before me. “There were lots of contractions, and the contractions pushed you out of me, and you were born in the tub in my bathroom,” I told her.

She had listened intently throughout, but at the end of the story she stared at me with wide blue eyes. Her little face looked so serene, similar to how I had first seen her. Then she spoke in her garbled up toddler voice, and she suddenly looked concerned.

“I don’t want to do the fractions. Let’s not do that again,” she said.

“No, baby,” I leaned in to kiss her as I laughed. “I don’t want to do the fractions again either.”

Birth is a sort of painful magic. A birthday is a sort of snag in time, when reminiscing on the painful magic is easy to do. I’m very glad to be sitting on the couch here tonight, looking at the big green eyes of a paper pony.

Just me and the pony, and none of those painful contractions, or fractions, or whatever you’d prefer to call them.