And then, in the middle of my spiraling, soul-leaving, totally feral meltdown…
The doctor walked in.
Not casually. Not calmly. Not even with an ounce of sympathy.
The man strode in like he had just kicked open a set of saloon doors in a Western and said:
"Shut the hell up and just push."
That was his greeting. His first words to me.
I wish I were joking.
If looks could kill, my mother would have incinerated him on the spot. My sister looked like she was about to throw hands. And me?
I screamed louder.
I'm not even sure what I said. I think I was speaking in tongues at that point. My body had taken the wheel, and my brain was just clinging to the bumper.
Push? PUSH? Sir, I am about to spontaneously combust, and you want me to push
You make a birthing plan before you go to the hospital— like somehow, with enough bullet points and boxes checked, labor will listen. Mine? Total waste of time and paper. Might as well have written it in crayon on a napkin and flushed it.
Because nothing went according to plan.
I spent the next fifteen minutes in full-blown panic mode. I'm not proud of it, but I completely broke. I was sobbing. Hysterical. At one point, I actually said, "I don't want him. I don't want to do this. You can keep him. I can't do this."
I meant it in the moment. I was desperate, begging for someone, anyone, to make it stop. To undo the last nine months. To erase the pain that was swallowing me whole.
The contractions weren't waves anymore. They were tsunamis! I couldn't find the surface. I couldn't breathe. I was drowning in my own body. My mom held my hand, her voice steady but frantic, "You're okay, baby. You're okay."
But I wasn't. And then the doctor grabbed a scalpel.
I saw it and snapped.
"Don't cut me!" I screamed. "Please don't cut me!" I was sobbing, thrashing, hysterical. But he did. He cut me. The worst kind of episiotomy —no numbing, no warning, no mercy. Just hot, blinding pain. I screamed through the entire thing.
He didn't even flinch.
I was too weak, I thought. I wasn't ready. I couldn't do this. I kept begging —my body shaking, my brain overloaded, my heart screaming for someone to save me.
Then Ashton's heart rate dropped.
Everything stopped.
The room went eerily quiet. The monitor beeped. And in that one terrible breath, nothing else mattered.
I remember saying, "Just do a C-section. Please. Take him out. Just —save him."
But the doctor shook his head. "It's too late," he said. "You have to push. If you don't, he won't make it."
And just like that, the panic vanished.
Because it didn't matter what I wanted. It didn't matter that I was terrified. The only thing that mattered was him.
I couldn't lose my boy. I wouldn't.
So I pushed.
I pushed like my soul was on fire. I pushed like my life and his depended on it —because they did. One more breath, one more scream, one more final shove of everything I had left inside me.
His head was out.
They cleared his airway.
One more push—
And he was here.
2:32 a.m.
Just two and a half hours after labor had started, Ashton was born.
I collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably. Not from pain, not even from relief —but from the impossible beauty of it. He was here. My baby. My son.
They took him across the room immediately to suction and check him. His heart rate had dropped fast, and they needed to make sure he was okay.
I kept asking, "Is he okay? Is he okay?"
The nurse reassured me gently. "He seems very healthy. We just want to be sure."
While they worked on Ashton, the doctor stitched me up. Once again, no medication. Just cold hands, sharp needles, and pain. But I didn't care. Not anymore. After everything, it just felt like background noise. That man should not have been practicing medicine, but I didn't have the strength to care.
My mom and my sister Marie got to hold Ashton first. I was too wrecked, physically and emotionally, to even lift my arms.
And I was oddly okay with that.
Watching them hold him, seeing the tears in my mom's eyes, the awe on Marie's face. It grounded me. It reminded me that I wasn't alone. That even if John wasn't there, I had people. I had love in the room.
When I was finally stitched and cleaned and the chaos settled, my mom placed him in my arms.
He was perfect.
And honestly? Brand new moms are blind.
Looking back now, he was a very typical newborn baby— squishy, red, a little alien-looking. (Let's be honest, all newborns are ugly, but I never tell anyone that. I guess now you all know.)
Larissa looked at him and smiled. "He looks just like John."
And for a moment, that made me happy. It didn't hurt. I was sad John wasn't there. I wanted him to see his son. To see this.
Rim finally came into the room after I was cleaned up, stepping in like he half-expected the walls to still be bleeding. The poor man looked shell-shocked. To this day, he swears it sounded like an exorcism in there— screaming, growling, a few words in what he claims might've been ancient Latin. My sister Marie still laughs about it, saying she's shocked my head didn't spin all the way around. "I was waiting for green vomit and a priest," she jokes. "You sounded possessed."
After all the bustle and visitors, I finally fell asleep, my mom staying by my side.
At 7:00 a.m., the phone rang.
It was John.
He was excited, a little overwhelmed, and yeah, He was a bit hurt that no one had told him sooner. But we video chatted for nearly an hour. He smiled. He stared. He said Ashton was beautiful.
And then, in a rare, soft moment, he told me to rest. That he'd be there when he could.
And for the first time that night, I finally let myself close my eyes and sleep.