PART 1
My ex-husband had made it very clear that I was no longer his problem.
So I gave birth on my own.
I had been awake since about two with pains I told myself were nothing, and by four I knew they were not nothing, and by half past I was in the car.
I drove myself to that hospital with one hand on the wheel and the other pressed flat against my stomach, shaking through every red light on the ring road, talking out loud to my baby and asking him to hold on for just a bit longer.
He could not.
He arrived at eleven minutes past six in the morning, about forty minutes after I came through the doors, and there was nobody in that room who knew my name before that morning.
Ten minutes after he was born, the doctor holding my son looked down into his face and went white.
