It was the first day of my husband, John’s new job. He decided to leave his love of farming to work as a fiber-optics technician for our local area phone/internet/cable company. This was something that he thought had a more reliable and steady future. He was to start training two weeks ago. After my eight and half month checkup, my doctor thought I would be having the baby anytime within the next week. John’s boss offered to let John wait two weeks before starting so he could spend more time with the baby and not have to worry about taking time off of work. We thought this was a generous offer and took him up on it. We nev

I was lying on our black leather couch, underneath a wool blanket we had bought in Mexico, when I noticed my pain would come and go every twenty minutes or so. I got up and walked into our office and picked up a pad of yellow paper and a blue ink pen. I was going to record when I had my pain and how long it lasted. Surely this wasn’t the beginning of contractions, was it?

Around lunchtime, I went out into the cool seventy degree weather and hung some freshly washed clothes on the clothes line. The wind was blowing slightly out of the south, perfect for drying clothes. As I was hanging a pair of John’s blue jeans on the line, I felt a dull cramp-like pain in my stomach. I blamed it on the undercooked chicken sandwich I had for lunch, and didn’t think about it again. I continued hanging the basket of freshly washed laundry on the clothes line and went inside. As I was loading the dishwasher with a sink full of dirty dishes from the night before, I had another dull pain. This time it would not go away. I figured that I should lie down and rest until the next load of laundry was ready to be taken outside.

“Hurry up, let’s go!” John yelled upstairs.

“Make sure to call me if you have any problems today,” John said as I shut the back door behind him. I thought to myself, “I’m not going to have the baby today. I feel fine.”

Some topics in this essay:
Beginning Life, John I’ll, Sioux Falls, McKennan Hospital, Word Count, sioux falls, freshly washed, minutes apart pain, apart pain, past nine, minutes apart, clothes line, okay wait, weeks ago,