My bags have been packed for a week. Toiletries, change of clothes, coffee, and several home birthing books. The balloons I tied to my gifts are already deflated, but at least I’m ready.
“Every woman goes through it.”
“They have to put you in restraints, you won’t be yourself, you might kick the nurses.”
He seems refreshingly humble.
“I just can’t sleep. Feel like walking around.”
“When my friend Mary had her first baby,” I say, “they stayed up and played rummy.”
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I take the borrowed books out of my bag and place them on the coffee table. Greta adds several more to the stack. With open books between us we review relaxation techniques and phases of labor. We run our fingers over diagrams of babies sliding down the birth canal. I feel like I’m at a pajama party cramming for a high school biology test.
