The doctors had given us no reason to expect the baby early — so on August 2nd, 2024, I followed my normal post-dinner routine. I washed the dishes. I fed the fish. And then I sat at my desk to compose the next day’s plan:

7:45 wake up.

7:50-7:55 yoga.

7:55-8:05 meditation.

8:05-8:30 study Tz’utujil.

8:30-9:00 breakfast.

9:00-lunch read.

Post-lunch, casino with Rosa.

I ripped the page from the notepad and pinned it to the corkboard next to the window, where the lamplight set it glowing like a sacred screed. My eyes passed over each item on the agenda. Through pursed lips, I muttered, Do it! Do it! Do it!

The schedules had started as to-do lists, which seemed necessary for a newly married grad student with multiple part-time jobs. But when Rosa got pregnant and life grew more complicated — health insurance, doctor’s appointments, frantic “is this normal?” calls to my mother — simple bullets were no longer enough. I started blocking out chunks of time for important tasks and genuine obligations — things related to work, school, or the basic functioning of life. Soon, I’d decided my leisure time should also be apportioned to appropriately edifying activities. After all, isn’t there more to life than the bare necessities? Don’t we live in the age of “self-actualization” — and isn’t “me time” precious? I was determined to “become the best version of myself,” to “reach my full potential.” These buzzwords, while vacuous, represented a path forward, a way to be in the world. I could learn languages. I could publish novels. I could be interesting and clever, smiled at and seen. But to achieve all this, I had to be efficient with my time — that most elusive of resources.

Surprisingly, the scheduling worked. Yes, there were downsides. I’d take my walk between 5:15 and 6:00, an activity that was supposed to be for gazing at flowers, dreaming up poems, and rubbing noses with baby deer, and instead find myself manically planning the next day’s schedule. I’d occasionally experience a panicked, falling sensation, realizing I’d let myself tumble off the thin wire of the plan — some distraction, or sometimes a genuine need, having made the rest of the day’s schedule untenable. But mostly, things were all right. I made money. I wrote. And Rosa never accused me of the selfishness I worried would define me.

Life was good. I was committed to being a lifelong scheduler.

I woke to Rosa’s panicked voice, the blazing digits beside me reading 5:30 A.M. What now? I thought, stifling a groan. She’d always been a hypochondriac, and the pregnancy was making it worse. I hoisted myself up on an elbow just as she turned on the light. As I followed her gaze down her leg, I saw the stream of liquid was already darkening the carpet.

“I think this is it,” she said.

For a moment, the meaning of that “it” remained closed to me, like a bubble floating in the pre-dawn bedroom. I still inhabited the day I’d planned the night before, a day that was to include breakfast, a study session, a drive to the casino — a day with no room for such an “it.” But then, reality burst open, and whatever it contained destroyed the day, bleaching time and erasing that page I’d tacked beside my window.

This was it.

Rosa washed up and changed while I threw things into a backpack. I made no plan for a certain number of days; I just stuffed the bag with whatever my hands could find — a random assortment of toothbrushes, nursing bras, newspapers, T-shirts, and onesies. Then, with the backpack over a shoulder and a car seat swinging awkwardly from my hand, I led her out to the car, leaving our apartment dark and empty behind us.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. I like to think of myself as an iconoclast, yet when “they” say something, I usually believe them. I’d always prepared the same breakfast every morning: two scrambled eggs with onion and spinach, three turkey sausage links, a dollop of refried beans, two pieces of avocado toast, and a big mug of black coffee.

But as Rosa sat atop the exercise ball, her belly its own spherical mass beneath the hospital gown, I felt an emptiness inside me and realized I’d eaten nothing. While I hadn’t checked the time since getting to the hospital — looking at my phone would have felt profane — I knew I could trust my stomach. It had to be well past nine.

The door to our “birthing suite” opened, and the smiling young nurse strode in.

“Okay, honey,” she said to Rosa. “I’m going to check that cervix now, okay?”

I translated the comment into Spanish, and Rosa winced before climbing atop the bed. This was a part she’d been dreading.

“Alright, sweetie— just spread your legs a bit, and try to lift your butt.”

“Que levantes el trasero, dice.”

“Así?”

Rosa hoisted the middle part of her body. She trembled a little — maybe from fear, maybe from physical strain.

“That’s it — now just me just slip my fingers…” The nurse, her gloved hand covered with goo, began the examination. Rosa’s cheeks contorted.

“Ah.” Rosa grimaced as the nurse pulled out of her.

“No dilation,” the nurse said. “But I could feel baby’s head right there!”

“So…?” I asked.

“So this might be a long process. I’ll talk to the doctor, but for now, we’ll probably keep things steady and wait. Eventually, she might go on Pitocin to speed things along. We need the birth to happen within eighteen hours of the water breaking to avoid infection.”

“Wow, eighteen hours. This is — quite the process.”

“Oh, it’s a process, alright!” The nurse tossed her glove in the trash and washed her hands. “I was in labor for sixteen hours myself.”

“I just wish we’d managed to sleep past five-thirty.”

The nurse laughed on her way out the door. “Soon, you’ll be praying to sleep till five-thirty.”

As I helped Rosa down from the bed and guided her back to the exercise ball, I wondered if the nurse’s insinuation could really be true. You don’t sleep past 5:30? That didn’t seem — possible.

“It hurt,” Rosa said.

“I’m sorry.” I massaged her shoulders, the gown’s fabric shifting like a loose skin beneath my fingers. My body felt light and airy.

“Also,” I said, “aren’t you hungry?”

Rosa stood rigid beside the bed, her face clenched in places where I’d only ever seen softness.

“Is it over?” I asked.

She nodded, her breath so heavy that it sounded like a wheeze. I looked at the screen, where a moving line graph somehow tracked the tightening and loosening inside of her body. The mountainous depiction of her latest contraction had literally extended off the chart.

“That looked like the worst one yet.”

She nodded, too exhausted to speak.

It was sometime in the afternoon, and things were moving along. Rosa had begun taking Pitocin through an IV in her arm, which meant each contraction was more painful than the last. In the goal-oriented calculus of childbirth, pain was a positive. It signaled that the labor was beginning in earnest, that Rosa’s cervix should widen, that the baby should be born before the eighteen hours were up.

There was nothing I could do for her. The nurse had given me suggestions — massage her legs, hold her from behind, lift her belly — but none of them helped. Most just made the pain worse. And so she stood alone during each contraction, her body taut, her arm held straight against the edge of the hospital bed. My only remaining task was to monitor the space between those volcano-shaped mountains on the screen. The faster they came, the further along Rosa was in her labor.

Rosa’s body tensed once more, and I reached down to pat her hand. Then I leaned toward the monitor. Sure enough, the line was moving upward. I squinted, trying to make out the vertical dashes that marked five-minute intervals, assessing how long had passed since the last contraction.

Six minutes. They weren’t getting any closer.

Six minutes between contractions. Ten hours since her water had broken. Eight more hours until the risk of infection would set in.

This is what time had become for us — and none of it could be scheduled.

“Shit.”

The doctor removed her gloved hand from my wife’s vagina. She exchanged a worried glance with a nurse, then resumed her bedside manner. “Okay, so — we’re still not getting any dilation.”

She paused, and I translated the message for Rosa.

“Frankly,” the doctor continued, “I’m surprised. I really thought we’d be somewhere after four hours with the Pitocin.”

Again, I translated. I could see the muscles in Rosa’s face begin to twitch.

“We’re at fourteen hours since your water broke. And we’re still not even a tiny bit dilated — so this is usually where, and I know this is tough, but this is where we usually say it’s best to go ahead and do a C-section.”

With each syllable of my translation, Rosa shut her eyes tighter — and then the word “cesárea” slapped her tears free.

“I’ll leave you guys alone for a few minutes,” the doctor said. “To talk it over, okay?”

When the doctor left, Rosa’s sobbing got louder. She hated hospitals, feared medications, and had done everything within her power to limit medical interventions during her pregnancy. She couldn’t accept that all her efforts had been in vain.

“What about all that walking I did? What about the exercise ball? The healthy diet? Why would this happen to me? To me? I did everything you’re supposed to!”

For a moment, I worried she’d refuse the operation — putting herself and the baby at risk. It felt strange, to convince her, to tell another person that letting herself be cut open was a moral imperative while I had nothing to lose but some sleep. But — the baby. I had no choice.

“I’m sorry, amor. I’m so, so sorry. No matter what we do, things don’t always go according to plan.”

Rosa stared off somewhere, and then her face suddenly slackened. I knew what that loosening meant. She’d acquiesced to fate.

Amid the doctors’ procedural chatter, a higher-pitched message was clearly directed towards us: “Just a few minutes to baby!”

Minutes. I knew the word, but under those circumstances, I wasn’t entirely certain what it meant. I was with Rosa beneath what felt like a tent but was actually a teal hospital sheet separating our heads from her sliced-open belly. Above the thin fabric, we could see masked faces staring downward, and we heard the clinking of instruments, the stepping of feet, and the good-natured jokes between doctors that might have been genuine but were probably meant to reassure us. For me, their laughter helped — making the whole thing feel normal. Rosa, her arms spread wide in a Christ-like pose, was violently shaking.

“You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay,” I repeated dumbly.

She nodded and stared at the operating room ceiling.

The talk beyond the curtain grew faster, more excited. There was no more laughter.

“Soon,” I said. “Real, real soon.”

The bonneted heads congregated at the far end of the bed.

And then we heard those newborn wails.

Before I could process that ancient sound, the doctor said, “Here he is,” and the baby was held over the sheet, his body a flailing mass of blood and confusion.

“C’mon, Daddy,” said a nurse. “Cut the cord.”

I didn't want to leave Rosa, couldn’t bear not having my face pressed against hers. But I knew our son needed me, or tradition dictated I man those scissors, or something, something — I just had to go. I kissed Rosa’s quivering cheek, ambled to the little measuring table where the baby writhed, and sliced through the rubbery cord as directed.

A moment later, I was in our birthing suite, my chest ludicrously bare for the “skin-to-skin” thing, my son’s body pressed against me.

“They should wheel your wife in within half an hour,” the nurse said. “Just gotta sew her up.”

Half an hour. Half an hour. Half an hour. I wanted her there now.

Roberto was hot and alive against my chest, his hands instructed by some instinct to press against me. He opened and closed his lips in a vain search for milk.

“No, no, no,” I said. “That won’t work.”

Some of my chest hairs had fallen and gotten caught between his lips. I tried to reposition his tiny body so I could free a hand and swipe the hairs, but I was terrified his head would slip away from me. So I just held him and stared downward, watching his fingers, long and slender, sway like corals in a reef. Everything about him was human — his skin, his nails, his back hair and his eyelids — but I sensed that he wasn’t yet of this airy world. He was still a creature of the womb.

I stared downward and I held him.

And then, Rosa was there.

***

It’s been four weeks since Roberto was born, and we’ve settled into a new routine. Rosa, nearly recovered, gets up throughout the night to feed him. In exchange, I take him to the living room when he decides to start his day — whenever that is. Usually, it’s around nine.

Yes, it turns out the nurse’s warning was off; I do sleep past five-thirty. It’s just that I don’t fall asleep until well past two. Baby Roberto is a night owl.

When he wakes up, his first desire is to eat. So I feed him, often listening to a podcast as I hold the bottle to his lips. Then he needs changing, a process which can take two minutes or ten, depending on whether he pees all over the changing table. Then I put him into his swing for a bit of upright digestion. Sometimes, he dozes off at this point, and so I’ll put him in the living room’s portable crib — but often, the diaper change has energized him, and his eager face brightens towards the day. When this happens, I put him on the playmat under his mobile, where he whacks repeatedly at his stuffed koala and rubber duck.

He’s often happy to play alone — but there are mornings when he wants something more, when he fusses, when he’s apparently decided Daddy is an essential component of his magical game.

I haven’t done yoga. I haven’t meditated. I haven’t made breakfast or studied Tz’utujil. All I’ve done for myself is drink a glass of water and scarf down a banana. Still, I lumber down to the ground — grunting as I go — and roll over on my side so my face is just beside Roberto’s. He immediately stops his whimpering. I talk in a mix of English and Spanish, shaking the supports of the mobile so the stuffed koala jingles. His eyes widen. His arms flail. His lips ripple into what might be a smile.