While we were having dinner at my parents’ house, I started having contractions. They rushed me to the hospital. Before leaving, I told my sister, “Please look after my five-year-old daughter.” After a few days, I gave birth to my newborn baby. I rushed home to check on my daughter. When I knocked at my sister’s house, no one answered the door. I kept ringing my sister, but she wasn’t answering her phone. So, I called my parents and they just told me, “She must be coming back soon. Stop worrying.” But before leaving, I heard some faint noises coming from inside. So I decided to break the door down to check. That’s when I found liquid coming out from under the storage room door. I quickly called 911 in panic. When they arrived and quickly opened it to check inside, a shocking truth was exposed.
The contraction started during dessert. One moment I was laughing at my father’s terrible joke about the pot roast, and the next I felt my entire abdomen seize up like someone had wrapped steel cables around my middle. My fork clattered against the plate as I gripped the edge of the dining table, trying to breathe through the sudden pain.
“Honey?” My mother’s voice cut through the fog. “Are you okay?”
I shook my head, unable to form words as another contraction rolled through me. These weren’t the false alarms I’d experienced for the past week. This was real. This was happening.
My sister Brooke jumped up from her seat, her napkin falling to the floor.
“How far apart are they?”
“I don’t know,” I managed to gasp out. “This is the first one.”
That was a lie. I’d felt a dull ache for the past hour, but had convinced myself it was just indigestion from my mother’s cooking. Denial is a powerful thing when you’re not quite ready to face reality.
The second contraction hit barely five minutes later.
My father was already grabbing his car keys. My mother was frantically searching for her purse. And Brooke stood frozen in the middle of the chaos like a statue.
“We need to get you to the hospital,” Dad said, his voice steady despite the panic in his eyes. “Can you walk?”
I nodded, gripping the back of my chair as I stood. Everything felt surreal, like I was watching myself from somewhere outside my body.
The baby wasn’t supposed to come for another week.
My daughter Autumn’s fifth birthday party was tomorrow. We had forty cupcakes waiting at home and a bouncy castle scheduled for delivery in the morning.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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