Scenes from My Surrogacies: A Memoir in the Making

I tried closing my eyes in the hopes of coaxing myself back to sleep. Even though it was nighttime and the room was dark, keeping my eyes shut prevented me from looking around the room and jumpstarting my mind with thoughts about yesterday’s pants and shirt sitting in a wrinkled heap near the foot of my bed, or the clutter that was collecting on the mantle above my dresser. But keeping my eyes closed had a down side to it as well - without any other sensory distraction, I was focused on the contractions – how long they were, how intense they were, how far apart they were, and that only intensified the pain. By the mere fact that I was obsessed with discerning whether or not I was actually in labor, I should have known that I was. But logic and rational thought are not the hallmarks of labor and delivery, at least for me they’re not.