To experience the world as it truly is-
[james burke]

Three hours ago, I was standing in the bathtub, wondering if my water had really broken. Now, the midwife is at my feet, I am out of my mind, and God is apparently out to lunch. 

You can push whenever you're ready, the midwife tells me. This reminds me of the people who lean over the deathbeds of their loved ones and say It's okay! You can go now! We release you! 

Before she has finished speaking, I transform into an entirely different creature, one with only a gut to bear down and a throat to roar. It is the closest I hope I will ever come to demon possession. 

To push a living thing with bones out of your body is to surrender to the absurdity of creation. Why this way? Just out of curiosity? I bellow some version of this question to the room at large, but in labor everyone assumes anything you ask above a certain decibel is rhetorical. 

Why this way? Why do stars consume themselves? Why is light a particle and a wave, and also neither of those things? I picture some dark colossus offering a cheery shrug. Why not?

Push! says the midwife. Push! says my doula. Push! says my husband. My body says nothing. She simply wrings me like an old towel.

I push.

A cattle prod presses against the very center of me. The baby's shoulder is stuck, wedged firm like a pebble in the tread of a tire. My flesh tears. Oh, it tears. Don't push don't push don't push says the midwife, and she throws one of my legs backwards, then the other. 

I tear again, and again, cursing the long-gone male anesthesiologist who told me, three hours ago, that delivery was "imminent" and there wasn't time for an epidural.

Now, PUSH, says the midwife. A howl rises from my throat, summoning my atoms back from the indifferent universe for this one task. The sun has set, here on the brink of the solstice. It's almost midnight. Subatomic particles thrum. A star is eating itself, right this moment, unimaginable lifetimes away. Somewhere, the sea breaks itself, striking blind against boulders in the dark.

I am consuming myself, breaking myself too, drawing close to a threshold I recognize from my first birth. Then, something gives, her body cleaves from me, and all at once she is on my belly. Bloody as a rare steak. Silent as a monk.

The midwife moves quickly. I don't seem able to feel fear, the same way I will not be able to feel my bladder or the tops of my thighs for weeks. The enormity of giving birth has caused several parts of my body and personality to simply gone offline. I do see the midwife knead the umbilical cord, and wonder in a distant sort of way if this counts as delayed cord clamping, a vestige from another forgotten birth plan.

The baby flushes with color. Though I am a voyeur watching this happen from some parallel universe, I am still grateful. She arches her back, splaying her tiny fingers, and for the first time this night someone other than me in this room is roaring. I kiss the crown of her head, and in the photo taken just after my lips are bright with my own blood. 

The flurry of the room around us recedes, and we gradually become aware of each other. Her eyes are unfocused and muddled the deep blue of dark matter. Tufts of hair spring directly, absurdly, from the seashell curve of her ears. Bruises are already starting to darken across the tiny bones of her face. I don't know yet that her collarbone is broken, snapped like a wishbone by the fury of my body. 

The midwife helps my husband cut the rubbery cord binding me to my daughter and I hold her to me, but she remains remote, a cosmonaut pinwheeling through the dark after her untethering. I hold her and try to put a positive spin on what has just happened, as my unknit flesh slowly adds blood to the pool around us and her newly broken bone burns in her tiny body, but all I can think of is the one-star review I saw once about Badlands National Park. Not enough mountain.

Finally, I remember what my mother told me, her second-born daughter, when I was born. I draw close to her ear so no one else can hear me whisper. We are going to be friends.

Why this way?

Why not? 

The sun spills over into the parking lot as we buckle her into the back, and I draw the shade of her car seat down. Birds are chirping their morning greetings to each other. We made it, I whisper to her, but she doesn't hear and doesn't care. For her, the fact of her existence is already as mundane as the tying of my shoe. She is fast asleep. 

Beyond our wedge of the world it is dark matter and stars burning and the roaring void of the unfathomable black hole anchoring our universe, but not here. The veil is already slipping closed, and here, it is just another day. An ordinary day, one that just happens to be the very first day of her life.