One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (32 page)

T
he second trimester is supposedly a wonderful time to travel, which was a good thing, because back at Christmas, when we were planning our Other Life, we’d promised my mother a trip to Wimbledon. It was, in all likelihood, my mother’s last big trip, given her increasingly limited mobility. Her wheelchair was our ticket to the front of every airport security line. She was seated on an aisle in the row ahead of us; a British midwife was sharing our row.

“She’s pregnant,” Lorene volunteered.

“She?” The midwife was looking at me. “You’re pregnant? Don’t look it. Don’t look it at all.” That was the extent of our conversation, but I felt reassured by her proximity—in the unlikely event I started having contractions, or any other unlikely events.

We put my mother back on a plane after Wimbledon and spent a rainy week on a sheep farm at the tip of a peninsula in southern Scotland. Lorene read
Active Birth
in bed with her coffee. She fell in love with the flavored “crisps”—lamb-and-mint or barbecued-chicken potato chips. I fell in love with British candy. And I advanced to the finals of the peninsula-wide Ping-Pong championships, the only woman entered in the annual summer tournament. Sparing my opponents further humiliation, we never mentioned I was with child.

Later in the week, as we were on a bus barreling down a winding coastal road, I had a thought (over the shrieks of the school-age girls): We could be those foreigners who lose their lives in an obscure crash. Followed by another thought: I don’t want to die. But this time it wasn’t for the projects and places I wouldn’t get to—it was for the baby.

We made our way back to London in our rental car, stopping for an overnight an hour or two from the airport. We’d continued past Stratford-on-Avon—too many tourists carrying too many plastic shopping bags—and found a small inn above a small bar-restaurant in a small village. The two of us watched an old couple take their seats at the table next to us. “Here you go, lovey,” he said as he pulled out her chair.

I toasted, “To our next vacation!”

“To true love,” Lorene said.

“And happiness,” I replied. Our standard.

The couple next to us raised their glasses, said, “Cheers, ole thing,” and clinked.

We spent the last of our pounds in the airport buying a T-shirt for Lorene’s son, a double-decker bus for Henry. “You should get her something,” Lorene said. “A souvenir of her trip in your belly.”

M’eternity

The last-trimester clock ticked
a lot louder than my biological clock ever had. It could’ve had to do with the fact that it was set to go off like an alarm and not peter out into nothingness.
Nesting
seemed far too cozy a word for my panicked motivation: if it didn’t get done
now,
we might be looking at
never.

I was intrigued by, but ultimately didn’t buy, the notion of “giving birth joyfully” while hypnotized. We chose a natural-birthing class that made a more modest promise to cover all forms of birth experience. I was up for Lorene’s natural birth plan as long as the baby and I were healthy, but I didn’t want to get too invested. If something happened and we needed a medical intervention, I didn’t want to feel like a failure on day one.

HypnoBirthing® Class

This method of childbirth is as much as a philosophy of birth as it is a technique for achieving a relaxing, comfortable, joyful birth. 6 sessions $225

The birth educator at the maternity center affiliated with our hospital was a registered nurse and part-time yoga instructor with ten years of birth-education experience. Having become a better, stronger person as a result of giving birth naturally, she entered the profession to help others prepare for the transformational experience. In her introduction, she intimated that she was on the tail end of another transformational experience, and she and her naturally born child were estranged, but this didn’t tarnish the birth experience. It just made me feel a little protective of her.

She put a lot of emphasis on the spiritual element of pregnancy and birthing in the first class. “Birthing opens your heart, it has to—your baby’s life depends on your heart, your ability to love.”