1.17 More Beginnings

Here’s the terrifying part.

Forget pain reduction. We’re on our own if something goes wrong.

I’m on my own. Jesse knows some military field medicine, and I’m grateful for that, but it isn’t going to help if things go badly wrong. Plus, he’s so freaked out, I’m not sure he remembers his own name.

I’d like to console myself that women have been giving birth for thousands of years, but I know better — women have been dying in childbirth for thousands of years. This is the single most dangerous thing I can be doing with my body.

What was I thinking? All I had to do was visualize this moment, in waves of pain, sure both I and the baby will die horribly from a breech birth wedged in the birth canal, and I’d’ve put the breaks on me and Jesse the first time we kissed.

It’s a boy wow.

I named him Wesley. I always liked that name. Jesse didn’t protest. I’m not sure he even heard the name I picked because he was still gaping at the fact that a baby came out of my body.

I’m going to sleep now. Jesse can figure the next part out.

Since Wesley was born, Roselyn has been on a tirade about the crying in night and the helpless mouth to feed.

She’s also given Adelle a hard time for the chronicle she’s been keeping of life in our camp. She insists that the whole thing is a waste of time because nobody will ever read it.

Samuel has been reacting to the tension by building an elaborate fantasy world.

That’s probably smart because tempers do get tight when nobody is getting normal sleep.

Meanwhile, Adelle quietly entered adulthood herself.

Timi certainly noticed.