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[ CONTESTANT #1 ] TRICK OR TREAT! SMELL MY FEET! The baby wasn't due until early November, but my birthday is at the end of October, so one day it sinks into me that I could end up as one of those cute filler stories on the 10 o'clock news -- "Mother Gets Best Birthday Present of All" -- and then spend my next 15 or 20 birthdays hosting kiddie parties during which I will have terrifying flashbacks of myself writhing, sweating and swearing like a sailor. When the birthday passes without even a twinge, I breathe a big sigh of relief. But I've forgotten about Halloween. On the morning of Oct. 31, after 12 hours of good steady contractions, the midwife tells me to come in for an exam. I am in good spirits, bags packed, anticipating excellent dilation. Three centimeters? Four? Maybe five? This should be all over by dinner time, I tell myself. The satisfied expression on the midwife's face as she examines me is thrilling. "Great!" she says, snapping off the latex glove. "You're 1 centimeter dilated!" "One centimeter!" I snarl, sitting up. How could this be? At this pace, it'll be five more days before I can even start pushing. My husband looks forlorn. "Aren't we going to have this baby today?" he asks. The midwife laughs. "Go home and take a nap," she advises. "We're going to be up all night. I'd say we'll have a baby at -- oh, 4 or 5 o'clock tomorrow morning." We go home. We try to nap. But now my uterus is getting serious and it hurts too much to lie down. No rush, though. The midwife doesn't even want us to try to get to the hospital until after the annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade is over, since this year's route is between our apartment on the Eastside and the hospital on the west, and a terrible nor'easter is blowing through. For the next six hours we are alone in an eerie twilight world, timing contractions, trying gamely to labor comfortably in familiar surroundings. Isn't this why we chose a midwife? Ha. The only two things that happen all afternoon both happen at the same time: A friend calls to see how things are going, and in the middle of a colossally painful contraction, I stagger to the kitchen sink and vomit loudly. I see the longing look my husband gives the phone as the friend hastily hangs up. There goes his last link to the world. Now it's just me and him, like Mr. Rochester locked in the attic at night with his mad wife. We rinse the sink. When the midwife finally agrees, at 9 p.m., that it's time for the hospital, we can't get out the door fast enough. Between contractions we drag our two Macy's shopping bags full of birthing paraphernalia out to the front stoop and I huddle with them while my husband runs up the street for a cab. My uterus is now hogging most of the oxygen and I'm fairly disoriented, which is why I panic when I see the two teenage girls sauntering toward me. A marauding Halloween wolf pack! I'm a sitting duck, too big and woozy and loaded down with bags to defend myself. The girls walk up to the stoop, looking right at me, and my heart stops. "You having that baby now?" one asks snidely, and all I can do is nod yes. They laugh and then suddenly move on. "Good luck," one yells over her shoulder. The cab pulls up. The driver takes in the size of my belly and the Macy's bags and is not happy, but nothing's going to stop my husband now from getting us to the hospital. He grimly gives the address. The driver hits the gas pretty hard and we zoom two blocks north, one block west ... then stop. And sit. And sit. And then all three of us realize why traffic is not moving. The parade has ended, but the resulting traffic jam is still engulfing most of lower Manhattan. For half an hour we inch across town. For some crazy reason I'm considerately trying to muffle my moans into my husband's shoulder, but the driver keeps watching me in the rearview mirror. Now he seems convinced that he's going to end up in one of those cute filler stories on the 10 o'clock news -- "Trick or Treat? Cab Driver Delivers Little Halloween Pumpkin." But I hang in there. Two blocks from the hospital, there's a police barrier. The driver pulls up next to a cop and my husband leans out of the window. The cop is very big, very young and plainly new at his job. My husband frantically explains that we are trying to get to the hospital to have a baby. The cop is insulted; surely we don't think he's so inexperienced that he'll fall for that hoary old trick! The barrier stands fast. My husband starts swearing and I picture myself at the hospital, alone, making frantic calls to a bail bondsman between contractions. "Stop!" I beg. "Let's just get out and walk, OK?" My husband starts to argue, but the cab driver, who couldn't agree more, has already started helping us out of the cab. Out go my husband and the Macy's bags, followed by my bulging belly. Now the cop looks at us and realizes he's just screwed up. He apologizes repeatedly and offers to lift the barrier, but by this time the cab is screeching away downtown and there's not another one in sight. We hoist our bags and set off. It is the longest two-block walk of our lives. The lively parade crowd is streaming east; we're struggling west. Every two or three minutes another contraction begins and we drop the bags while I lean on fences, trees, stoops, anything, to wait it out. Vampires, witches, devils, ghosts swirl around us, laughing, each time we stop. No one gives us a second glance. Apparently they think I'm in costume, too. Twenty minutes later we reach the hospital. The ground floor is deserted but the guard waves us in without comment. At least he realizes it's not a costume. The hallway to the elevators stretches out ahead of me, tile after tile and fluorescent light after light, like the bad-acid-trip scene in a "Hawaii Five-O" episode my mother once made me watch so I wouldn't take drugs. Drugs! If only I had some now! A lone cleaning woman approaches and looks me up and down. "You better hurry," she advises, and plods on down the endless hall. When we finally reach the maternity floor the midwife springs on us, frantic. We're over an hour late. She's called every hospital downtown wondering what's gone wrong. Still, she assures me, I'm not going to have the baby today. She's now predicting 1 a.m. or 2 , but no sooner. At least my husband now has someone coherent to talk to. During one lull in the action, I hear them discussing the weather. But the walk, or the vampires, or something, has done the trick. At nine
minutes to midnight, my daughter is born. An hour and a half later, as I'm
wheeled out of the birthing room past the nurses' station, one of the nurses
who saw me come in looks up. "Done already?" she asks in amusement. If only
she knew.
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