Chapter 3: Pregnant (Part 3)

As for myself, I paid close attention to my child. She wasn’t moving that much, but I knew she was okay.

At around seven in the evening, the power cut off twice. It was a WTF moment for all of us back then. It was just like the other night.

Then the cat appeared again, making a loud noise. My husband got so irritated that he wanted to go outside and throw something at the cat.

All of us in the clinic were getting nervous, and the midwife was coming in at regular intervals to check on my condition. She was obviously fearful, tired, and short on sleep. I knew she didn’t want a repeat of what happened last night. She even asked for help from another midwife and told her all about what happened the last time.

I started labor at around nine in the evening. Thank God that the power had already returned. My husband was also with me in the delivery room. The midwife allowed him inside as a bonus, so that he could also experience and witness my childbirth. He went through everything, and he didn’t faint or anything like that.

Did you know that when my child came out, she wasn’t crying? She was already smacked a few times on her butt, but she still didn’t cry.

Midwife A started to cuss out of nervousness. She said, “You’ve already taken the other one, damn it, don’t you dare take this one!”

Midwife B took out a large syringe. As far as I know, that was a last resort, and is used to wake up a baby that didn’t cry right after childbirth. I don’t know the medical term for this procedure.

They were all so scared and worried when suddenly, someone screamed. It was a small and short cry coming from my baby.

She was okay. She was absolutely okay.

But I promise you guys, that was the only sound we heard from my baby. She still didn’t cry even after we went home.

I’m sorry because I needed to cut this short. The last part is a bit on the long side, and it’s about what happened when we finally got home. Hopefully I can come back and write the rest of the story…

***

And I’m back.

There were two rooms in the house that we, as a married couple, rented out. One of them became our storage room. There were no mesh screens or even grills on all the jalousie windows. And we didn’t bother fixing it up since we would move again shortly after.

But the thing that made me the most irritated when we got home was the power outages. They’ve been occurring a lot more by this time. We didn’t have emergency lights back then, but we had a lot of candles and flashlights.

The baby and I slept together on our full-sized mattress, and my husband slept by himself on the other mattress. I didn’t let him sleep...