Page 184 of Tell Me What You Want, Or Leave Me

I have a potty mouth...

I’m the worst...

Eric tries to distract me with a thousand words of love. He makes me breathe like they taught us in the prenatal classes, but I can’t. The pain makes me clench, and I don’t know if I’m breathing, if I’ll scream, or if I’ll end up wanting to shit on the relatives of everyone in the hospital.

I’m sweating up a storm.

I’m shaking...

I feel a new contraction coming...

I squeeze Eric’s hand, and he encourages me to breathe again. I breathe...breathe...breathe.

Once again, the pain stops. But it’s increasingly more frequent, more intense, and more devastating.

“I shit on everyone!”

Eric hands me a fresh washcloth for my face.

“Fix your eyes on one point and breathe, sweetheart.”

I do as he says, and the pain stops.

But then I foresee that it’s going to start again, and he’s going to tell me for the umpteenth time to fix my gaze...So, I grab him tightly by his tie and bring his face close to mine.

“If you tell me one more time to fix my sight on a single point, I swear by my father that I’m going to gouge your eyes out and nail them on that fucking point,” I say.

He doesn’t say anything. He just holds my hand while I squirm in bed, dying from pain.

God...God...It hurts!

Surely if men gave birth, they would’ve already invented having babies in a test tube.

The door opens, and I look at the doctor like the girl inThe Exorcist. I’m feeling murderous...I swear I could kill her. Without flinching, she removes the sheet and puts a hand on me again.

“For a first-timer, you’re dilating very quickly, Judith.” She looks over at the nurse. “You’re almost six centimeters. Let Ralf come and give you the epidural. I think this baby’s in a hurry to get out.”

Oh yes...the epidural!

Hearing this is better than an orgasm. Or two...Or twenty.

I want tons of epidural. Long live the epidural!

Eric dries the sweat on my brow.

I writhe with a new contraction.

“Eric?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“I don’t want to get pregnant ever again. Can you promise that?”

The poor man agrees. No one would dare take the opposite position at a time like this.

I dry my sweat and say something when the door opens, and a man comes in, introducing himself as Ralf, the anesthesiologist. When I see the needle he’s carrying, I get dizzy.

Where are they going to stick that?

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