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charge nurse, shoots me a look that I can’t
quite read. I can’t tell if she thinks I should follow Amanda to apologize, or
if she thinks Amanda is annoying, too. Maybe she just knows that I’m on edge
because Stefia is being buried today and I’m stuck here with Miss Ice Chip. And
honestly, that’s just about enough to make me want to drink about a quart of
whatever they shoot in your spine for an epidural.
    Numb me up and make me stupid so I can totally forget this
day even happened.
    I shuffle papers on the desk at the nurse’s station, making
a mental note of what rooms are full and who is closest to delivering. Room 310
is closest but wants to go au natural and refuses to let her labor be augmented
unless there is a medical emergency. Room 307 is a good four hours from
delivery and would literally do anything to speed it up. Room 303 has a whole
list of things she wants after the baby arrives.
    The mothers are all so needy. And so worried. And it makes
me wonder when it was that things got so complicated. Birth is just birth. It’s
the same process as it was a thousand years ago. Babies are still just babies
and they need to eat and sleep. Why do we complicate things?
    The hard stuff comes after the birth. Most women don’t want
to hear about that while they’re trying to push their baby out, but I think on
some level they know it’s true. The hard stuff comes later. But it’s not even
the stuff that new parents think is going to be hard. Not all the stuff that
people talk about or read about or research while they’re decorating the
nursery or deciding whether or not to vaccinate. It’s the stuff that no one is
brave enough to talk about.
    I contemplate what kind of parent Miss Ice Chip would be.
She’s a total flake. To be honest, I’m not even sure how she got hired except
for maybe her sparkling bedside manner. She makes most patients smile, and she’s
calm and peaceful—perfect for those new age hippy mothers who come in and think
that low lighting and soft music will change anything about how their babies come
into the world. But as a nurse, as someone who needs brains to complete a task,
she’s a shame to the department.
    Amanda as a parent would be hilarious.
    Except that’s the thing people don’t get. I’ve watched
hundreds of women walk out of the hospital with babies, bringing them home to
raise them up the right way. They’ve all got different ideas about what that
is, though. They’ve all read different books, followed different baby gurus on
Twitter, and liked a multitude of conflicting baby-raising things on Facebook.
But what they don’t get is that it doesn’t matter.
    It really doesn’t.
    Or I should say it has no bearing on how your kid turns
out. It has no bearing on how their life ends up. And no one wants to talk
about that because it makes parenting seem worthless. If a child’s life is
going to turn out how it turns out, why do we all try so hard? Why do we debate
babywearing and vaccination and whether or not a child should be breastfed for
five weeks or five years?
    Does it matter?
    No one wants to contemplate the answers to these questions
because if there’s any truth to them, then a parent’s job is pretty worthless.
And who wants to be the bearer of that message? Who wants to be the one to
point out that if you offer a golden platter of Everything Perfect to two
different kids, they might each take that platter in opposite directions? One
might cure cancer while the other invents a new kind of atomic bomb and
purposely blows up three quarters of the world.
    How much of what we do even matters?
    I don’t know if any of it does.
    And neither did Stefia.
    **
    I talked to Stefia for the last time a little over a month
ago. Of course I didn’t know it would be the last time. It’s funny, I always
think if I would have known it was the last time I was going to talk to
someone, I would have said something different—awe inspiring or infinitely
humorous. But we