When I was maybe sixteen or seventeen, the family had taken the obligatory summer day trip to the amusement park. The drive home was a butt-numbing three hours with very little to look at, and it was getting late. After the first hour-long leg of the journey, we stopped for dinner. Big steak, plenty of greasy onion rings, salad, soup, brownies, the works. I had that wonderful food coma feeling -- which, sadly, wouldn't last long.
The time came to get in the car and go stir-crazy for two more hours, so I stopped in the bathroom (my philosophy: ya never know when the next bathroom's gonna be available). Though I felt a bit of company knocking at the back door, it was not enough to bother. I figured I could hold it until we got home.
WHY?!?!
We got on the road, and shortly everyone but my dad and myself were sound asleep. The highway didn't seem too crowded for about twenty or thirty minutes, but then WHAM! Every car in Pennsylvania and New Jersey must've been parked on that highway, and we were at the end farthest away from the motherland.
We crawled a bit, then stopped, then crawled a bit, and then stopped. And then the steak baby in my belly started kicking a little, then wiggling, and then stopping for a brief moment before starting up again. After about an hour of creeping down the highway, we discovered that it was construction being done on three of the four lanes, and that people don't understand how to merge into one lane.
Before we had even reached the merging point, I started having those electric shock cramps in the undercarriage, and was in a cold sweat. I kept trying to fall asleep, thinking maybe I could ignore the pain and wake up back home and this hell would be over! Bu, my efforts were wasted. Every stabbing pain made me skooch and gave me goosebumps.
Finally, we got into the one moving lane, and were going pretty quickly past the construction as I silently cursed the Department of Transportation. Once we were past the construction the traffic cleared, and we were going at a much faster (and much happier) speed. Just then, the realization hit me: we had been in the car for well over two hours, but we still had more than an hour left to go, and I was wishing for an epidural or a mallet to the skull.
I kept myself together. Basically. Every five minutes, I'd clench my teeth, struggle to breathe around the behemoth in my belly, dig my nails into the seat, and change my position to keep the dinner log in.
After an eternity of doing this dance, I felt a ripping pain where God split me, and yelped. I was going into labor much earlier than I'd hoped. I started shouting at my dad, who was a little hard of hearing, "Dad, pull over!"
"What?"
"PULL OVER!"
"Why?"
"I need to go to the bathroom!"
"What?"
"BATH-ROOM!!!!!"
At this point, he and I looked at the side of the road and both realized that pulling over was not an option. The road had no shoulder -- instead, concrete walls lined either side.
He told me to hold it. Easy for him to say.
For the first and only time in my life, I began to hyperventilate. A combination of pain, panic, and a horrible realization that my father had just passed our exit.
"DAD! Where are you going?!?!"
"The next exit gets us there, too. Just calm down."
It was true, the next exit did get us there, but by the time we reached home I was in tears and had bent the cross I was wearing -- squeezing metal made me feel slightly better than squeezing the seat.
We pulled into the driveway and the whole family was awake, eagerly watching my normally quiet and cheerful self become this raging, angry, ready-to-kill beast. We hadn't even stopped in the driveway and I was out the door, waddling like I was being chased. The garage was opening very slowly that night, and while I was shuffling towards the slowly-opening door, I heard my father laughing. I flew through the house and dove into the bathroom. Door was locked, pants were down, butt was on the seat, and the delivery began in one fell swoop.
There really was no pushing or struggling involved. The only trick was that I had to keep from being propelled off the porcelain bus by the tremendous force. A deuce of biblical proportions, only to be followed by the River Jordan.
I stayed on that porcelain piece of heaven for a good half hour, just to be sure, and gingerly cleaned up while laughing like a crazed serial killer. I emerged from that bathroom limping, smiling, proud, relieved, and hungry again. Overall, a worrying experience, not to ever be re-attempted.
