Come to find out, big pregnant bellies didn’t do well with a lot of things that required mobility, including building a crib with eighty thousand modular pieces. It was official. I had popped. Cass was a volleyball-sized impediment to productivity. I could no longer pity Erika from my Saturday group without looking down at my own midsection and RIPing my feet. The backaches were real; so was the need to pee. Dr. Cardiff hadn’t been kidding. The flutterbye baby in my middle, kicking to her heart’s content, meant I was in the bathroom a ton, and that number was only going to climb. “So strap in,” Dr. Cardiff said at my check-in.

That appointment, she also introduced me to two other OB/GYNs in her practice. I wasn’t sure why until she dropped the anvil on my head of, “In case I can’t be there to deliver Cassiopeia for whatever reason.”

I must have gone pale at the possibility of having another doctor looking at my baby-distended wahoo, because Dr. Cardiff rushed to reassure me. “I plan to be there, Sara. It’s in case of emergency. I make a wide majority of my patient’s births. But if it happens that I can’t make it, small if, but if, I thought you’d like to know my backups?”

I didn’t particularly want to meet either doctor, considering they represented my delivery plans swirling down a giant baby-sized crapper, but I sat through short introductions and hollow reassurances that Dr. Cone and Dr. Laghari were so happy to be on my birthing team. Pointing out that they were both men and I really didn’t want a man doctor gazing at my spew parts would have been worthwhile to mention, but I was so desperate to get out of there, I stayed quiet, nodding a lot and miraculously not crying. Well, for a while, anyway.

I kept it together until the car, and then I exploded. The snot and tears flew, Mom offering me piles of drive-through-window napkins to sop up the flood before we both drowned. She stroked my hair, her fingers getting tangled in my black curls, her words quiet and loving. It was exactly what I needed when I was feeling vulnerable. My mommy comforting me. I was really lucky to have her, and that she was so supportive, and had been throughout my pregnancy.

In fact, I was so grateful to her, I...cried all the harder. Look, there’s been a lot of crying, I know, but you have to understand your hormones are frantic and weird and unreliable. My brain was a writhing sack of cats far more often than not. I was lucky I could get up in the morning and put on pants without breaking down that everything was awful forever.

“Thanks,” I warbled, cramming a wad of McDonald’s napkins up my nose.