The Day I Gave Birth To My Son

Submitted By carolina_rios95
Words: 2233
Pages: 9

I’ll never forget the day I gave birth to my son. It was an early Sunday morning and just two hours before I had dozed off into what was probably the most sleep I could get given the pain I was to experience over the course of my entire body. One of three nurses that attended to my care had been assigned the graveyard shift. She was quite young and expecting a baby herself. Her name was Sarah and I decided to concentrate on that to help ease the pain. “Sara. S-A-R-A… S-A-R-A-H… S-A-…” before I could continue, yet another contraction was brought on, induced by the gentle means of mother nature and the cool dose of Pitocin I felt flow hastily through my veins. When it came time to push, Sara’s nursing assistant wrapped an oxygen mask around my face, the dense air leaving me woozy and disoriented. I remember feeling as if I could dig through every crevice of my being without any chance of recovering the last bit of energy left in me. It was then and almost instantaneously that my body entered a sort of rhythmic response appropriate only for it’s purpose on this day; and as I fell into a pattern of gentle inhale, followed by a fervent exhale downward, I quickly became run-down and exhausted. An hour passed wherein a teeming city slowly began to fill scorching city sidewalks in a dash to evade daily commuter hassles, and in a way, I myself hurried to meet the counterpart my body had protected and nourished for the past nine months, all the while depleting reserves of iron and whole love, and with that thought, I found my heart grew ten times warmer the very moment I heard a cry I knew could only belong to my first-born son. When I first found out I was pregnant I was a high school senior having just returned from what I still consider to have been the best summer vacation of my life. I set my alarm for 4am on a cool Monday night and awoke Tuesday morning to a saccharine sun-kissed curtain shade my parents had bought me just months before as a sort of “room-warming” present for my jovial attitude in regards to our most recent move. I wasn’t yet used to being up so early in the day, as my school day started at 11am only the previous year. My boyfriend and I agreed we’d meet at our usual spot, the brick stairs under the two maple trees we sat under when we first met. When I got there, I noticed he had one hand ready to greet mine and the other behind his back. A few minutes and a short kiss later we both walked into school, my arms wrapped around his waist and a beautiful bouquet of a single red rose and a beady-eyed, sky-blue teddy bear inscribed with the words, “I love you.” It was the perfect start to a new school year, and as our first English, Physics, Psychology test passed, so did our time and our adolescence. As a few months passed and nightfall began earlier and earlier on in the day, Hurricane Sandy had just hit and we found ourselves in the midst of our biggest argument. Having not been the exultant week we hoped for, Mohammed and I found ourselves hot-tempered and barricaded in a room of our closest friends on a cold Halloween night, candy and ignorance having been just a few of the things we’d collected, we sat and talked until our inhibitions lowered and our masks fell. By the night’s end, we had decided on breaking up and never speaking to each other again, our faces noticeably heavy with wear, and mine with tears. I remember feeling so helpless that night, and that that only made the walk home so much harder to bear. The constant bickering between us having proved too much on me those past weeks, my schoolwork had begun to suffer and I felt more alone than ever on my way back to what should’ve felt like a warm bed, but was instead an enormous pillow I would use to scream into through many sleepless nights. Halfway through the next day at school, I had an aching pain on the right side of my lower abdomen, a sensation like that of a needle being jabbed into my hip bone. I didn’t know what to