“Looks perfect to me!” said the jolly nurse.

John was crying with joy. “Another girl!” he said. “Oh, honey, I’m so happy.”

“Nine pounds, nine ounces! She’s a bruiser! Apgars are all nines, too. Guess we know what your lucky number is, guys!”

Another daughter. I’d been so sure it was a boy. I closed my eyes, so wrung out that I started to fall asleep.

“Barb, look! Our little girl! Isn’t she beautiful?”

I forced my eyes open.

She wasn’t very pretty, her head tubular from all that time stuck in the birth canal. She seemed giant compared to how I remembered Juliet, who’d been seven pounds even. The baby’s eyelids were bruised and her face looked swollen. Her little rosebud mouth moved, and she opened her eyes.

I loved her. Oh, thank God, I loved her.

“Hello, little one,” I whispered. John kissed her forehead, and put her face against mine, and the softness of her cheek was so beautiful. “Hello, sweetheart.”

Then she started to cry. She started to scream. I had to turn my head away, because she was right against my ear.

“Sounds perfect!” said the irritatingly cheerful nurse.

It was startling that a newborn could make that much noise. “There, there, little one,” John said, holding her close, and just like that, the baby stopped crying.

“Aw. She loves her daddy,” said Dr. Haines. “Barb, I’m stitching you up, but you can snuggle her in a few minutes, okay?”

John was crooning to the baby, telling her she was beautiful, Daddy’s little angel, and I fell into a deep, black sleep, unable to wake up for her first two feedings.

Having a C-section is much worse than giving birth the other way. With every move, it felt as if my insides were going to spill out onto the floor. Flashes of white-hot pain seared through my abdomen. When they made me get out of bed, I fainted. They made me pedal my feet to avoid blood clots, but I got one anyway, which they said was because I didn’t get out of bed soon enough (ignoring the fact that unconscious people do have trouble on that front). My leg throbbed and burned. I couldn’t hold the baby by myself for the first two days, because I was too weak. All I wanted to do was sleep, but they kept waking me up to feed her. I had to have a pillow over my stomach to protect my incision.

She didn’t want to nurse. She screamed and screamed, her body shaking with rage as I tried to offer my breast again and again. They brought in a special nurse who was an expert, and she wrestled the baby close to me. When she latched on, I gasped in pain. My entire body was drenched in sweat as my sutured uterus contracted.