Labor and delivery is no day in the park ... It hardly resembles an enjoyable experience, though many a nurse will tell you that, "When all is said and done, you'll forget that there was ever any pain involved." Try as they might, they never were able to convince me that it was so. In fact, even through my haze, some drug induced and others from sheer exhaustion, I held firm right up until the end that there was no way in hell, I was ever going to forget just how much pain was involved with the whole birthing process. To me, it was more like walking a tightrope over the valley of death. If you made it all the way across, you could concern yourself with the counting of little fingers and toes and who baby most resembled. If you didn't, well in all truth you'd be the absolute last to now, too tired to realize that you had barely managed to go the distance before conking out.

Earlier I was reading a book that jogged a memory from my own experience with the labor process, a time when I was much more naive to the ways of the world. Only 21 when I had my daughter, I still suffered from the fledging belief, that honor was something we were all endowed with. I didn't realize yet that sometimes the right thing to do is the hardest thing for some people to actually do. Maybe this is because, I've always had this absurd confidence in myself that I could handle anything that life had to throw at me. I thought that I had learned enough from my growing years, that I was much more life smart than a lot of people of my same age. I've since learned that too much confidence is just a smokescreen for having none at all.

Just days before my body gave its concise signal that it was time to birth my baby, my now ex issued a clear warning. I was told, without any hesitation or the slightest indication of guilt, that should I so much as say one mean spirited thing during delivery that his only response would be to simply walk out and away from me, without so much as a glance behind. The funny thing was, that even though I had never had any intention to purposefully resort to name calling, his so called declaration threw me for a loop. I remember thinking to myself that he had to be joking, who in their right mind would say that to the woman about to have their child. Although I didn't know it then, the answer to that question was, a man who had already begun having an affair with his co-worker months before his baby's due date.

What really strikes me as odd about the whole sequence of events, is that I listened to him. Scared that he would leave me, I simply shut my mouth, turning my head away and squeezing my eyes closed as tight as I could when the contractions would rip through my body. I vaguely remember moments of being there and not being there, looking at him through half shuttered lids as he sat across the room in a green lounge chair, intent on that nights basketball game. Meanwhile, my father paced nervously in the hall and my stepmother rarely left my side, slipping me ice chips when my lips began to bleed, from the damage my teeth were inflicting on them. For 22 hours of labor, it was her and not him who sat there holding my hand and reminding me to breathe through my contractions. An idea, days earlier I had thought to be quite moronic ... I mean who really forgets to breathe? It turns out, it wasn't so stupid afterall.

Doomed from the start, it was a short 4 months after KC arrived that he eventually walked out for good ... Although not without a final ultimatum from me. I was a safety to him, as long as he thought that he could come and go as he pleased, he was loathe to actually leave permanently. In the hours when he didn't come home, I would wait up half the night knowing that he was with someone else. Still, I clung to the belief that my baby needed her Daddy and so I let him play his perpetual game of pong.

Like a slow moving tingle, an awareness began to creep through my body, a familiar liquid in my veins. I wasn't a door mat, and I was tired of being one for someone who wasn't worth the 2 cent shoes that had dared to leave treadmarks on my soul. The light that had previously been extinquished began to smolder, an almost imperceivable flame but then it grew into something that with each passing second became more recognizable to myself. A once youthful and foolish pride became the sound voice of maturity. The one that could finally say all the words that had been internalized but never said for a listening ear.

The last day, poetically as it was, came on Mother's Day. I remember that as he stood there, tucking in his shirt and adjusting his tie, the smug look that sat on his face as he informed me he would be late coming home tonight. Meanwhile, outside in my driveway, his girlfriend was busy honking on the horn every other second to hurry his progress out to her car. Something inside me snapped, enough had finally become enough and from some far reserved well deep down in the pit of my soul, the words came bubbling forward. "Don't bother coming home tonight.", I had said, raising my gaze to meet his sqaurely in the eye. Taken aback, he chuckled as if I amused him in some small, inate way. Lifting my chin, in an assertive manner, my voice stronger this time, I spoke slowly and surely. "Don't bother coming home tonight ... You don't live here anymore."