I lie on the examination table. Dr. Sammy glides the heart monitor over my belly which rises from the rest of me like a perfectly round burial mound on sacred ground in the middle of the English countryside.
    I hear Spence roll a chair back and forth in the corner of the room. From the monitor, I hear the wooshing sound of the baby’s heartbeat.
    “There it is,” says Dr. Sammy.
    I have given up wanting more from Dr. Sammy. At first I wanted to hear things like, “That is the strongest heartbeat I have ever heard in a fetus so young. How do you do it all? Writer, Actress, Mother of a Toddler, and now this…creating the most genetically perfect baby I’ve ever encountered.”
    Dr. Sammy pulls me up and I sit on the edge of the table, my feet dangling like a child’s.
    Spence bangs the chair against the wall.
    “Spence,” I say, careful to use my perfectly modulated mommy voice in front of Dr. Sammy. “Let’s choose not to crash the chair right now.”
    Pat hates this phraseology. He says it leads the listener, in most cases Spence or him, to believe that they are part of the choice. I got the idea from a Suzie Ormond book. This guru of home finances says that with children you should never say, “we can’t afford that.” Instead, you should say, “we’re not choosing to spend our money on that right now.” I like the egalitarian sound of it. Pat says it’s subterfuge.
    Spence looks up at me, smiles, and sails the chair across the room, crashing it into the wall. I guess he made a different choice.
    Dr. Sammy looks at him and returns to me, “Any questions?”
    I bury the ones burning to be asked, the ones he cannot answer. Will I be able to lose the weight? Will this baby be a crier, like Spence? Will I be able to juggle the needs of two children and still be able to write? Is a Roth IRA the best way to go? Is painting my bedroom a dark blue going to make it look smaller? How can I get rid of the ants in my house without spraying the baseboards and poisoning us all? When Spence is fifteen and yells at me that I’m a bitch, how will I be able to bear it?
    I look at Spence kneeling to inspect the bottom of the chair.
    I breathe in. “What are the chances of my having a C-Section again?” I ask.
    Dr. Sammy leans against the counter.
    “Well, we’ll go over your options when we get closer to delivery,” he says. “You can try for a vaginal birth if you want. But you have a higher possibility of rupturing, since you’ve already had a C-Section. Doesn’t mean you will.”
    “Rupture” sounds catastrophic to me, like a blood soaked near-death experience. “Near-death” being the upside. What about death-death? What about machines screeching a flat-line while my screaming baby is whisked away and blood gushes out of me like a fountain, as Dr. Sammy yells “Code Blue, I’m losing her. I need some fucking assistance here, STAT.” -- I’ve seen the shows.
    Dr. Sammy flips through my chart. “There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a vaginal birth.”
    That’s OK, I’ll take the C-Section, I think.
    “You’ll probably want to go over your options with Pat,” he says.
    C-Section is fine.
    “If you decided on the C-Section…” he continues.
    C-Section, yes, that’s the one I want.
    “We’d schedule it a week earlier than your due-date.”
    “A week earlier.” I say.
    “Yes.”
    “I’ll take the C-Section.”
    “Well,” he says, “ as I was saying, we can talk about it in depth at your next appointment.”
    “If it were up to you, what would you do?” I ask.
    Dr. Sammy closes my file.
    “Well,” he says. “If it were up to me…Look, I’m always going to err on the side of being conservative. So, I would go for the C-Section.”
    “Yes,” I say.
    “But,” he says, “a lot of women really want to go for a vaginal birth. It’s important to them. Me, I’m not really into vaginal heroics.”
    I want to tell him that the only remotely heroic thing my vagina ever did was pity fuck Tom Englebach my senior year in college, after he told me his sister had cancer.
    Truth is, if my vagina did anything heroic, it would be the first of my body parts ever to do so.


    I blame my mother for my cowardice. Take away her fears and she is only half a woman. It took 2 valiums and a double gin and tonic to get her on a plane when I was a girl. On walks through our neighborhood, she shoved me between her and big dogs like a human shield. There were no matches in our house, or sharp knives, for fear of someone hurting themselves. I didn’t see a neatly sliced tomato until I was in my teens. The bits of tomato that were added to our salads looked like tiny globular internal organs.
    My fears range from the physical fear of pain to social fears to a fear of being trapped alone in a small room with a boring person who has a tic and likes to talk. When I was around ten, my mother read one of those popular 70s books about being your own best friend and being OK while others are OK. She told me that the book didn’t help much because its advice about confronting one’s fears was to ask yourself, “What is the worse thing that can happen?” And her answer was always, “That I will die.” It wasn’t an answer that gave her much comfort – or courage.
    Maybe my fear of just about everything is a cellular ode to my mother. If so, I am the only child of hers to sing it. My youngest brother is quite the opposite. Risking his life is his hobby. He and his wife go off into the wilderness exploring unpopulated places with names like, Dead Man’s Cove, Last Resort, and Crazy Joe’s Rattlesnake Prairie. Every Christmas they send a picture of themselves smiling as they jump off a cliff into something that looks like molten lava or a Nordic void.


    I get a phone call from Nurse Charlene. I can tell she still hates me.
    She tells me that my C-Section appointment is for December 10th at noon. A familiar blast of adrenaline rushes through me as I write C-Section down in shaky handwriting on a notepad. I’ve elected to have this surgery, it’s true. But that doesn’t ease my terror of the needles, slicing and bloodletting that a C-Section will involve. My eyes blur as I start to pant.
    “Will that work?” she asks, her voice tight.
    “Huh?”
    “Can you confirm noon for your C-Section?”
    “Right,” I say. “Is there…can I…drink the night before?”
    “No liquids after midnight,” she says.
    “But up until then, can I have alcohol? To calm my nerves.”
    “I’ll have to ask the doctor,” she says. The whole sentence, an exasperated sigh.
    “OK,” I say. “If not, can you ask him if there’s a pill I can have? Maybe something that numbs me from the neck down before I get to the hospital. My husband can carry me in.”
    “I don’t think there’s anything like that,” she says.
    “Would you just check,” I say. “You’d be surprised. My dentist gives me something called, I don’t know what the medical term is, but he calls it green gin. It tastes like peppermint and wipes out your fear response and your memory.”
    “Green gin?”
    “Yes. Just ask him for green gin.”
    My panting increases and I grab onto the kitchen counter.
    “So you’re confirming December 10th,” she says.
    “Yes,” I say. “I have to go now and find a paper bag.”


    Pat comes home to find me prone on the couch counting backwards from 100.
    “Looks like you got the appointment,” he says.
    “December 10th,” I say, waving the paper bag around.
    “Do you need a pan?” he asks. “Are you going to throw up?”
    “No, no,” I say, starting short staccato breaths. These are yoga breaths called “breath of fire”, meant to help calm the system. I try them, even though usually they make me lose all feeling in my fingers, which starts a panic that I have MS.
    Pat sits down and watches me.
     “OK, look,” he says. “The baby has to come out. And this is the safest thing. Now what is it you’re worried about?”
     I stop breathing fire and gasp, “That I will die.”
     “We could all die tomorrow,” he says.
     “I know,” I say. “And I can’t figure out why everyone is so calm about it.”


     But through all this hysteria -- through all my very real, heart-stopping fear – I know that I will have this baby, C-Section or not. I will have it shuddering, spitting, peeing in my pants, undoubtedly highly medicated. But I will do it. I will enter my own Dead Man’s Cove – and return with the exhilaration of having survived. And I know that I will do thousands more things that quite literally scare me shitless. This I inherited from my mother as well, the choosing to do it -- the thing that terrifies you -- anyway. Because choosing not do it is like dying. And I’m not ready yet.