Juliet, true to form, was happy, though she admitted that my pregnancy was “kind of gross and embarrassing.” I couldn’t disagree. To know your parents were having sex when you’re in junior high school (even if it had been practically an immaculate conception) was gross and embarrassing.

I hoped the baby would be a boy, because then I wouldn’t have to compare him to Juliet. His name would be Nathaniel, I thought, after one of his ancestors who’d fought for the Union and died in the Civil War. A fine New England name. Nathaniel Robert Frost. Though the pregnancy was a shock, I loved the baby as it wriggled and writhed in me. It was the unknown that had me worried.

And God, I was tired. I wasn’t quite forty, but I felt eighty. I’d nod off as I tried to read the paper, yawned constantly. My back hurt as if someone had hit me with a baseball bat, and my ankles were swollen. I had pregnancy-induced hypertension, and my cheeks were flushed and hot all the time. I couldn’t sleep, and I had heartburn so horrible I had to keep a huge vat of antacids with me at all times. Even at night.

I went into labor early on a Tuesday morning. It was brutal. Maybe because I was older, but I felt like I actually might die. Hours and hours of contractions, fiery knives of pain shooting down my legs, my back clenching and spasming. I vomited and had diarrhea, and my throat burned with bile. How could I survive this? All through that day into the night, into the next morning, I suffered and labored and endured. With every contraction, I felt desperate, trying to claw my way away from the wrenching, twisting pain. Was this how my own mother had felt with cancer? How could she have endured it?

After fifty-four hours of labor and no progress, only five centimeters dilated, they finally decided to take the baby via C-section because “mother failed to progress.”

As always, my fault.

“The worst of both worlds,” the nurse chuckled. I was too exhausted to answer. They took me to the operating room and stabbed my back with a needle that felt as big as a chopstick and then, when the epidural had taken effect, sliced me open.

It hurt. They say you’ll feel nothing, and they lie. As the doctors yanked and pulled, elbows-deep in my body, tears slipped into my hair. Those were my insides they were jerking around! How would the baby be healthy after such a battle? How could I love the little thing when all I felt was failure and exhaustion, literally torn apart by the savagery of childbirth?

“It’s a girl!” Dr. Haines said, holding her up for a glimpse. I saw a huge, whitish baby with dark hair before they whisked her off.

“Is she all right?” I asked.