Happy 18, RTT!

Eighteen years ago on this date, I was in active labor.

In contrast to my labor with Max – which lasted 37 hours, and was kind of like the last scene in 8½ if you can picture Marcello Mastrioni screaming, "GIVE ME A CAESARIAN!!!!" at the top of his lungs: Practically everyone I knew kept wandering in and out of the delivery room – my labor with Robin went very quickly.

I'd had an epidural with Max. In retrospect, I think my OB probably should have given me a Caesarian because Max was just this huge baby. Only a nine pounder – I'd gotten really sick about two weeks before I delivered him, and we both lost weight – but his head was really big, plus he was 22 ½ inches long, and by the time he crowned, I was just exhausted. They had to use vacuum aspiration to get him out, so poor Max was born with this enormous bruise on his head, which made him very cranky for the first month or so of his life.

I didn't want a repeat of that so I decided to go au naturel with Robin. And I must say, in the unlikely event that the patriarch Abraham sought me out in my Long Gisland hideaway and swooped me away to the Promised Land so God could do His divine IVF thang and get me pregnant at the age of 90, I'd opt for natural childbirth again. It hurt a lot, but it went really fast. From beginning to end, it couldn't have taken more than an hour and a half.

The pain was just surreal. I mean literally, I felt like a wolf howling on the dark side of the moon. And Ben was with me every step of the way. He screamed when I screamed. I could feel him inside my head. Despite the agony, I never felt alone. When people ask me why I put up with so much shit from Ben for so long, and felt so awful when what should have been dissembled years before finally fell apart, I always remember how present he was during Robin's birth.

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Robin's birth was kind of a miracle.

I was 43 years old, for one thing.

For another, I'd miscarried some months previously – I'm dreadful with time stamps. But I'd been working in the ER one evening the previous winter when all of a sudden I started to bleed, really, really heavily, so they carted me off to Kaiser and did a D&C.

As to why I was always getting pregnant, I really don't know. Ben and I made love a lot, but we always used birth control. By this point, a kindly gynecologist had finally told me that my uterus was actually tipped – which was probably the reason I kept getting pregnant even when I was using a diaphragm throughout my 20s and 30s.

Ben and I once discussed the dates of the Kaiser D&C, and it was very odd because we determined that Robin really should have been scraped with the other products of uterine conception.

But he wasn't.

I think maybe really my hearty Calabrian peasant DNA wanted to be passed down to a dozen offspring.

Anyway, I started having periods again, kept on having periods and didn't gain weight, though it's true my waistline thickened suspiciously to the point that my coworkers began making jibes. In fact, the bleeding was rather abnormal in many ways, whose details I'll spare you but you can look them up under "perimenopause" if you're really curious.

And then one month I missed my period. Just as I thought, said I to myself. Premature menopause. I made an appointment to see my GYN.

"I'm fine with it," I told the doctor.

"When was the last time you had a PAP smear?" he replied.

So he put me up in the stirrups – the most undignified and vulnerable of all positions, in my never humble opinion – and disappeared from view between my legs.

About a minute later, he reemerged with a very strange expression on his face.

"First of all," he said in a careful voice, "you're not going through premature menopause."

"I've got cancer!" I shrieked. "Look! I'm a medical professional! How long do I have to live?"

"You don't have cancer either. You're pregnant."

He would have known, you see, because your cervix actually turns this rather distinctive shade of violet when you are with child.

"But that's impossible," I said.

He did an ultrasound right then and there to convince me. Yep. Indisputable! Someone was living in my uterus. Clearly a male someone.

No one could figure out quite how long he'd been living in my uterus, though. This caused complications later on. Since no one knew when he'd been conceived, no one could really predict when he would be born. When he finally did leave Waterworld to make his debut in the Land of the Living, he was post-term.

He pooped while he was being delivered and aspirated. They call fetal poop meconium, so his official diagnosis was "meconium aspiration." I heard him cry, and then they whisked him away within seconds, off to the Intensive Care Nursery where I sat unmoving by his side for the next ten days of his life. They put him on supplemental oxygen but never had to intubate him.

I brought in a few of the toys we'd purchased against his arrival. A white bear. A cow rattle. Lined his Ohio table with photographs. Mama and Papa. Grandma Lynn. Brother Max. Sandinista the Nicaraguan Trash Hound. When it turned out they couldn't scare us with his respiratory status, the hospital lackeys started talking about brain damage. Impossible to say, they'd tell me. Can't test till he's older.

He never cried. He lay there very still, staring at something I couldn't see. He wouldn't make eye contact with me. They wouldn't let me pick him up and hold him. They wouldn't even let him eat, but he never cried.

They kept putting in deep lines for hyperalimentation, and the deep lines kept infiltrating. I knew what an infiltrated line looked like, and I kept screaming at the nurses: "Your fucking line has infiltrated – again." I was what medical professionals call a Problem Parent. But that was really the only thing I could do for him, keep his little pink parenchyma from becoming fluid-logged.

After ten days, they finally ran out of reasons to keep him in the hospital and sent him home. In the final two days, without consulting with me, they started bottle feeding him formula – and this was INFURIATING because I'd been pumping and had breast milk I could have brought in. In fact, I was never able to breastfeed him. Once I got him home, he clearly preferred the bottle since bottles are so much easier to suck from than human mammaries. I suppose I could have starved him until he took my breast out of desperation, which is what the La Leche League recommended. But after everything he'd been through, I just couldn't bring myself to do it.

My first experience with not being able to say No to him, I suppose.