Twenty years to the day when I had that first wave of labor pains engulfed me. It was nothing like the ones we describe in ob/maternity nursing. That low back pain that radiates to the front that gradually increases in intensity, that period of contraction that makes everything else stop except that one piercing moment of excruciating pain that slowly recede as the contraction eases out, that moment I slipped off the chair not actually realizing I had slipped off. And so that was the signal you were about to come.
