If I could change one thing about that rainy Tuesday in January when my daughter was born, it might be that we’d called the cab a few minutes earlier. I’d suspected Aurora was ready to join us a couple of days earlier, even though I was still a week shy of my due date. My six-year-old son had been behaving strangely (even for a six-year-old) and I felt an unexplained urgency to purchase the car seat immediately from the store, rather than wait for a midweek delivery. So, nothing scientific, but possibly as reliable as a due date plucked from a shaky sonogram.

Tuesday morning, shortly after midnight and my son crawling into bed with us, the contractions began. First time around, my waters had broken before I went into labour and, because I didn’t know anything back then, least of all that I could say no, I’d allowed a whole host of interventions to follow that meant contractions took a different, painful form from the get-go. This time, I lay in the dark with these surges, keeping them a secret to share with my partner at daybreak.

Over oatmeal and tea, we let my son know his baby sister might be born that day. The promise that brought of a post-school play date and a possible sleepover with his grandparents sent him off to school in a jubilant mood. Alone in the house, I checked our hospital bags (again), cancelled some work meetings, tried to ignore the latest COVID headlines spilling from the radio, and then settled into waiting.

Rather than be seized by that unique panic of scrolling through Netflix and finding absolutely nothing we wanted to watch, we’d already agreed on streaming Forgetting Sarah Marshall (for reasons that are the subject of another story) during early labour. Outside, swollen rain clouds sucked every drop of colour from the sky, and, between the greyness and dull pain of contractions, I lost track of the morning.

We didn’t finish the movie. Around midday, I made a panicked run to the bathroom and vomited. As if shaken loose, the surges started coming in fast, furious waves. I rode them out by rolling forwards and backwards and forwards again over the birthing ball. My partner called our doula who, hearing my deep guttural moans in the background, told us to call the hospital and then call the cab. Bad weather meant bad traffic and my husband describes an interminable wait for our doula and taxi to arrive. But with his hand on my back and our favourite hypnobirthing MP3 playing, I felt entirely safe surrendering all responsibilities and details beyond the actual birthing of our baby.

My waters broke on our neighbours’ landing. I remember thinking I’d have to give birth right there, my cheek still mashed into the scratchy carpet worn bare by a thousand filthy feet. My husband and doula dragged, carried, and lifted me down the final stairs and into the waiting black cab. We crawled down a partially flooded Mare Street along with all the other after school rush hour traffic, stopping at every single red light. Draped over a hospital bag on all fours in the back, I had little idea that a ten-minute journey was taking nearly an hour. All I did was breathe.

The digital receipt says our cab arrived outside A&E at 3:46pm; Aurora’s official birth time is 4:11pm. The in between minutes were a frenzy of wheelchairs and doors being flung open fast. I roared through them with the force of all my ancestors. I’ve never released noise like that before, and I’ve never felt so fucking liberated.

Our daughter was born in the back corner of the room, next to the empty birthing pool. My husband knelt next to me, also on all fours, his cheek against mine, and repeated affirmations that we’d planned to hang around the room with the fairy lights. I pushed. Once: the head was out. Twice: her shoulders free. Once more. And then a hollow inside me and a new scream we’d never heard before. At just over seven pounds and with a full head of hair, Aurora had joined us on the outside.

When we sat back, our daughter was placed on my belly, exactly as we’d requested she be if her umbilical cord happened to be short. There was blood, of course, but not the post-partum haemorrhage I’d suffered after my first birth and was warned over and over would happen again if I didn’t have the injection before birthing the placenta. There was no injection; my husband, advocating on my behalf, made sure of that. As we’d believed, it wasn’t necessary. When the cord stopped pulsing, my husband cut it and we held our daughter for almost half an hour before our placenta came through. Not needing stitches and with Aurora declared healthy, we spent the next six hours on an oxytocin high, drinking heavily sweetened tea and eating buttered toast, our baby nestled between us. We were back home by midnight, introducing my son to his new sister.

While there weren’t fairy lights, or music playing in the background, or water in the pool—details that might’ve been present if we’d called the cab that bit earlier—the birth was every bit as empowering and healing as we’d hoped. Some months later, the fourth trimester now behind us, we’re tired and disorganised and late for everything, but we’re still doing better than OK.

As with the birth, nothing feels beyond us.