The nurse placed my newborn in my arms and the world narrowed down to just him. His face was still red and crumpled from the effort of arriving, his eyes sealed shut, his tiny fists curled against his chest like he was already prepared to fight for something. I had been in labor for fourteen hours.
I hadn’t slept in two days. Every part of my body ached in ways I hadn’t known were possible. And none of it mattered because he was here and he was breathing and he was mine.
The first thing my husband did was glance at his phone. I noticed it the way you notice something that should have surprised you but doesn’t, the way you notice a thing you’ve been quietly preparing yourself to notice for a long time without admitting that’s what you were doing. Daniel stood on the other side of the bed with his phone tilted slightly away from me, his thumb moving, and his mother Elaine sat in the chair by the window adjusting her bracelet with the practiced boredom of someone who had decided before arriving that this experience would not particularly move her.
His sister Melissa was scrolling through her own phone near the door. I looked down at my son. His breathing was small and uneven and perfect.
Then Daniel looked up from his screen and said, “Take the bus home tomorrow. I’m taking my family out for hotpot.”
For a moment the room went completely still. “What?” My voice came out weak, not from anger yet, just from the sheer distance between what I had expected someone to say and what he had actually said.
Elaine adjusted her bracelet one final time and sighed. The sigh of a woman who considers other people’s pain an imposition on her schedule. “Claire, don’t create a scene.
You’ll be discharged in the morning. The bus stop is right outside the hospital entrance. It’s not complicated.”
“I gave birth six hours ago,” I said.
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