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I will not dwell on the physical part of it.<\/p>\nI will not dwell on the physical part of it.<\/p>\n
Anyone who has been through a long labor knows the shape of it, and anyone who hasn\u2019t does not need me to draw the picture.<\/p>\n
It is enough to say that I was at the very end of it, wrung out and shaking and past the reach of the polite version of myself, when the midwife braced against my knees and told me it was time.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019re fully dilated, Adriana,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI need everything you have, right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
And that was the moment I heard the hard leather soles on the tile.<\/p>\n
Not the soft squeak of a nurse\u2019s shoe \u2014 the deliberate, unhurried tread of a man who has never once in his life walked into a room that did not belong to him.<\/p>\n
I knew that walk better than I knew my own heartbeat.<\/p>\n
Four years of marriage teaches you a man\u2019s footsteps the way it teaches you his silences, and Roderick\u2019s had always carried the same message: that wherever he was going, the space would rearrange itself to accommodate his arrival.<\/p>\n
He walked into restaurants that way, and boardrooms, and, once, a hospital where his own father was dying, checking his watch in the corridor.<\/p>\n
It had charmed me, at the beginning, that confidence \u2014 I had mistaken it for strength, the way you do when you are young and have not yet learned that the two are not the same thing, that real strength has no need to announce itself and that the men who cannot enter a room quietly are usually compensating for something they are terrified you will notice.<\/p>\n
By the time those soles crossed the delivery-room tile, I had learned the difference in full.<\/p>\n
And still, some animal part of me, some exhausted laboring part, felt the old reflex flicker \u2014 the trained instinct to make room, to smooth the way, to become smaller and more pleasant so that the large man would not be displeased.<\/p>\n
I want to name that reflex, because I think a great many women will know it.<\/p>\n
Even then.<\/p>\n
Even flat on my back at the end of a thirty-hour labor, with my daughter\u2019s head crowning, the first thing my body wanted to do when my husband walked in was apologize for the inconvenience of my own pain.<\/p>\n