Rebecca Winfrey
Essay #1
September 1, 2004: Alexander J. Williams
I went to bed nervous and anxious last night. I had done this once before, now there I was over three years later doing it all over again. I was having my second child that day. I was about to do what millions upon millions of women throughout history had done since the beginning of time, yet I felt special. Different somehow, like I was the first woman to ever give birth. It made me wonder about life itself. As I was wondering about what the meaning of life was, I felt my baby kick, and realized it was this. I was meant to love and cherish my kids and my life, and be loved by them in return.
My alarm went off at four in the morning, on September 1, 2004. It was the day I had been waiting for since the day I found out I was pregnant Christmas day of 2003. My mind was racing, and I couldn’t seem to pull it together long enough to get ready to go. The doctor had scheduled me to have my labor induced at six that morning. At the rate I was going, I was never going to make it there on time. When I woke up my boyfriend, James, up and told him I was going to go get in the shower, I thought to myself, “Here I am about to have my second child, and what I am most worried about is whether or not my legs were shaved.”
After my shower, I got dressed in the cutest maternity outfit I owned. It was a light pink top with little yellow daisies printed throughout the fabric, and my stretchy jeans, with the spandex where the belly is. As soon as I got back into the bedroom to start doing my makeup, James looked at me and said, “I don’t know why you wanna get all dressed up, it’s not like you’re going anywhere special, you’re going to the hospital.” I just glared at him. How dare he say that? If I want to get dressed up to have a baby, I will!
When he got out of the shower, I swear he looked like he just stepped off the pages of a magazine. The smell of his aftershave wafted through the air into...