One Good Egg: An Illustrated Memoir (33 page)

We went over the course outline. In six classes we would learn the stages of labor and birth, and how to prepare for them using relaxation exercises, yoga, mindful breathing, guided imagery, and birth art.

“Birth art?” I had to ask.

She explained we would be drawing our feelings with crayons on paper. Lorene gave a sideways glance to see how I was doing so far. Fine. I had made up my mind to take what I could and leave the rest. Besides, we had already written our names in ink in the birth journal she gave us.

My prenatal exercise class started a few nights later, the same night Lorene worked late. It had been months—ten?—since I’d had any exercise other than walking. I couldn’t wait to begin. I ate an early dinner and packed up the suggested water, snack, yoga mat (Lorene’s), and a pillow.

The class was held in a meeting room at the local hospital. We set up our mats in a circle. All but two of us were returning students. The returning students (who were a few months further along) readily included us in their camaraderie. They swapped tales of hospital tours and breast-pump rentals, and the two of us newbies listened as though they were the big kids on the bus. I had to remind myself I was the oldest kid on the bus.

After a lengthy series of stretches and warm-up exercises, the instructor asked us to place our pillows on our mats. The real exercise was about to begin:
BUMP PUMP, bring it on!
Then she had us lie down and she led a guided visualization. When we opened our eyes, the class was over.

I kept going to the class and did the so-called exercises religiously in between, but I had to permanently resign myself to getting back in shape after the baby was born.
How long does it take a forty-two-year-old body to get back in shape?

At our second birthing class, our instructor cautioned us to be careful about our nesting. Rest is very important. At that stage, our bedroom ceiling was being repaired. Lorene and I had moved into the guest/baby room (next on the project list), which was crammed full of our bedroom’s belongings, the overflow lining the hallway.

I was reading when Lorene crawled up next to me from the foot of the bed. “That was my cousin on the phone; her daughter had her baby!”

“Everybody healthy?”

“Amazing. She gave birth at home in front of the four kids.”

“Wow.”

“You know, I think I’m going to take a doula class.”

“You should, you’d be great at it.” And we both said, “And then we wouldn’t need a midwife. Jinx!”

Doula

A woman who provides emotional and informational (not medical) support to a woman during labor

“Would you do it to make money?” We tried not to worry about money, sticking with the belief there always had been and always would be enough—but the brain book wasn’t selling as well as anybody had hoped, and Lorene’s shop still hadn’t fully recovered from 9/11, almost three years earlier.

“I don’t think I’d make a lot of money.” She opened her book. “I don’t know what to do about the shop. I can’t work for somebody else and be a stay-at-home mom half the time. I should have—”

“I’M HAVING ONE!” That was birth-education speak for “Contraction, breathe!”

She laughed. “Never mind. I don’t like to talk about money before we go to bed.” She rolled on her side and put her left hand on my belly. “Remember when you could barely feel the kicks? Oh, those are hiccups.”

Lorene enrolled in a weekend doula workshop in the western part of the state. She had twenty-four hours of training over the two and a half days and came back exhilarated, not exhausted. I was glad she was the keeper of the information and all I had to do was follow orders.

I know, it’s only
like
a muscle, and there aren’t any ligaments, but my brain definitely felt as if it was being stretched a lot of the time, too.

It wasn’t the simple preoccupation with being pregnant: I actually felt like a dolt. I had also developed empathy for large-fronted folk who I may have generalized, in my less enlightened past, were sloppier than the rest of us.

On days when I had someplace to go, I was in my second shirt by ten. Otherwise I was sporting a complete meal history, including the lunch I packed for Lorene, by bedtime.

J
ane flew in for a visit in late August so she could see me really pregnant. The afternoon we’d spent looking for her cat was life changing. (He came back after sixteen days.) Jane had been volunteering at the Berkeley Animal Rescue every Friday ever since. And whether it was related or not, she’d made up her mind to stay in my life.

I was heading for the door of Terminal B at the same time, on the opposite trajectory, as another pregnant woman. “When are you due?” I asked.

“End of November,” she answered, standing there, waiting for me to open the door. The fact that I was also pregnant was clearly lost on her.

I hugged Jane hello, then the first thing I said was, “Do I look pregnant? At all?”

“Definitely.” But she hadn’t seen the other woman for comparison. I told Lorene about the door incident when I got home. We had asked Dr. Bunnell about my size at our last appointment after I’d noted that the guys working in the cemetery down the road had bigger bellies than I did. Dr. Bunnell had assured us I was “all baby.”

“I don’t feel comfortable parking in the expectant-mother spots in the supermarket. And just once,” I complained to Lorene, “I want someone, not you, to hold a door for me.”