I had some trouble coming up with a title for this portion of the story. “Standstill” came to mind, but didn’t quite capture the feeling that we were up against around midnight that night. We had paced ruts in the floor, dimmed the lights and rocked on the birthing ball, and tried to will this…

We spent the rest of the afternoon at home, I paced the floor, baked a little (challenging the time clock of labor to beat out the forty minutes on the oven timer for banana bread), sat in the tub a little and mindlessly cleaned corners of an already immaculate house. My parents arrived, the kid…