Natural Born Keller by Amanda Keller

Author:Amanda Keller [Keller, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2015-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

14

With Arms Wide Open

M

y due date was still nine days away when Andrew and I interviewed David Spade, the comedian who was starring in the film Joe Dirt – which we’d seen the day before. It was a heart-warming story about an idiot janitor, sporting a dreadful mullet, who sets out on a quest to …

Oh who cares? It was a terrible film which culminated in Joe being covered in a geyser of raw sewerage. Did I say terrible film? We posed for photos with David in our mullet wigs.

On the way home after the show I bought some fish to cook for dinner that night (this sounds like a police report). Minutes after I walked through the front door I felt something warm seeping down my legs. I thought I’d wet my pants. My waters had broken.

Harley began documenting the ‘process’ immediately. He took a photo of my shoes and the floorboards splashed with amniotic fluid. If this had happened the day before I would have gone into labour during a screening of the aforementioned Joe Dirt. What a lovely story for the twenty-first birthday party.

We called the hospital and I was asked if I could feel the baby moving around. I couldn’t feel anything, so the person on the phone suggested I lie down and pop a packet of frozen peas on my stomach to wake the baby up.

That did the trick. The baby started popping around like popcorn.

So then we waited for the labour symptoms to begin!

I can’t believe I was excited. I was looking forward to experiencing labour. What a moron.

When I felt the first contractions I thought: This is going to be okay.

The naiveté of it is galling!

I called my parents. Mum was out so I told Dad what was happening and that I could see a foot poking out. I meant I could see it outlined against the flesh of my stomach, but he thought the baby was hanging out! Home birth imminent! It was more than he wanted to know.

When my contractions became longer, stronger and more regular, we headed to the hospital. There’s a hill on the way that I still call ‘contraction hill’. During both of my labours I was almost turned inside out with pain as we drove up it. It’s hard to writhe, kick out and flail when secured by a seatbelt. But the glove box took a beating.

When we finally arrived at the hospital we were taken to our room and things started to speed up. I had told Harley that when the time came and I was in the midst of a dreadful contraction I wanted him to say that my uterus was like a flower, opening up a little more each time, and that each contraction was bringing us closer to meeting our baby.

He tried it once, and before he even got to ‘like a flower’ I told him to shut up.

The pain of the contractions shocked me. In fact the entire process of giving birth

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