The Opposite of Certainty by Janine Urbaniak Reid

Author:Janine Urbaniak Reid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2020-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

twenty-one

The Next Right Thing

Annie and I sit at a table in a café across from the hospital. The place has seen better days. When I lived in Palo Alto after college, it was a high-end date destination. Now it smells like old carpet and spilled wine. I don’t complain. I’m wildly relieved to be sprung from hospital duty and to see my dear friend across the table. I’m eating in a restaurant like a regular person, a luxury.

“I’ll have the salmon special, please,” Annie tells a dark-haired waiter named Steve.

“Same for me,” I say as we both hand him our menus.

“We have a special chardonnay by the glass,” he says.

“Not tonight,” I answer, an inside joke for those of us who drank up our lifetime allotment at a young age.

“Lots of water, please,” Annie says.

Steve retreats to the kitchen. Annie and I exhale together.

“Are you getting any sleep?”

“Not much. When my brain finally shuts off, my dreams are crazy vivid. Not all bad, but still. A few times I’ve dreamt that I’m in a VW bug on Highway 17, with an old friend. We have a six-pack of beer and a Duraflame log in the back seat. We’re headed for Santa Cruz, and it feels like pure joy. Then I wake up.”

I decide not to mention the angelic appearance via lightshow on my hotel ceiling the week before.

“It’s about escape,” Annie says. “Outrunning the pain.”

This is probably true. I want a way out. The exhaustion and fear have become as much a part of me as my stick-straight, now gray-streaked hair.

“It’s unrelenting. No end in sight. Completely out of my control.”

“And there’s this new Mason being born,” she continues. “It’s almost like starting over.”

“Well, this labor is taking considerably longer then the first one, and there’s no pain relief. Not for me, at least.”

I think about Austin’s birth, a long, intervention-ridden twenty-three hours. The second time around, I was determined to find ways to make the birth easier on me and the baby. This included seeing a hypnotherapist, who taught me that for every contraction, however intense, I’d always get a break to relax and recover.

“I thought I could endure just about anything after giving birth to three babies, but then I always knew the pain wouldn’t last forever. With Mason I thought I’d be split in two, but in three hours there he was—nearly ten pounds of him.”

During labor with Mason, I felt cheated when I didn’t get the break in between contractions that the hypnotherapist promised. Then the midwife locked eyes with me and said, “You’re not getting a break because your baby is coming really fast.” I didn’t complain after that.

That’s how I met Mason.

Now it’s thirteen years later and I’ve spent six weeks in the hospital trying to find him again. The pain is compounded by not knowing when it will end. But I’ll labor as long as it takes.

I may not be good at letting go, but I’m skilled at stubborn, grippy, not giving up.

Steve delivers our dinner plates trimmed with tender broccoli stalks and lemon wedges.

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