"Ily" I typed into my cellphone and hit send. I'd been SMSing these three letters to the Shrink every 15 minutes since the day she was due to give birth to our daughter. The letters are shorthand for In Labour Yet? The Shrink was a week overdue. I went back to my work.
A minute later, my cellphone pinged. A message had landed. I was expecting yet another "No". I was wrong.
"I think so," the Shrink wrote back.
I'd been planning for this moment since we had discovered we were going to have a baby, so why did I freeze?
Perhaps it was because I was going to play a hands-on role in the birth. The Shrink, against my better judgment, was planning a home delivery. "I don't do doctors," she declared. "And no drugs," she insisted.
"What?" I asked. "Not even for me?"
I'd been to all the midwife appointments and had attended the antenatal classes. We'd gone through the step-by-step labour routine. I had three jobs: get an urn, make sure there's petrol in the tank (the Shrink had agreed to let me take her to hospital in case of a life or death emergency) and lastly - and this was the important one - keep the tea rolling.
Urn? Check! Petrol? Check! Tea? Check!
After nine-and-a-bit months of nothing happening at all everything seemed to be happening so fast. It didn't help that I was also in the middle of my own parental existential crisis. I was being consumed by all these terrible stories about the state of the world - the economy had gone toxic; the environmental clock was ticking its way to Armageddon; and every day there was an even more gruesome crime tale. I became morbidly obsessed with crime stories. I followed the story of a mother who throttled her tik-addicted son. Then there was the 11-year-old girl who was raped and killed.
It was the last thing that I should have been thinking, but as I gunned it down the M5 to meet the Shrink I wondered why we were bringing an innocent little thing into such a bad world.
I got home to find the Shrink walking up and down and doing breathing exercises. She contacted the midwife and I made my first round of tea. There was a second drama playing out. A few months earlier the Shrink discovered that a good friend of hers was also pregnant. They'd both decided on home births, they had consulted the same midwife and, what's more, they were due on the same day. And now they were seven days overdue too.
"It's a-million-to-one odds of both of you giving birth on the same day," the midwife soothed. We hit the labour lottery, of course. And the midwife's partner was on leave. The midwife, who called back-up, juggled between expectant mothers.
The Shrink's labour intensified. I made tea. The midwife arrived. I made more tea. She left. I made tea. She came back. I made tea. For the next eight hours there were contractions, dilations and there was tea. So much tea. At about 5am the Shrink became strangely quiet. She'd been in full labour for about 12 hours but had "stopped progressing". She was now whimpering in a crumpled heap on the floor. She was in a dark place. I put my arm around her. There was a, er, pregnant pause and then the normally mild Shrink exploded: "This is all your fault."
"I know," I said as gently as possible. "Can I get you..."
"No, I don't bloody want another bloody cup of tea."
The midwife swallowed hard. "I think we need to go to hospital," she said.
The threat of hospital did it, because things started to progress. At 6am I made my last round of tea. Rachel bounced into the world an hour later. I cut the umbilical cord at a few minutes past 7am and the midwife jumped into her car in time to make her second delivery at 8.10am.
"She's beautiful," the Shrink sighed, popping Rachel on to my chest.
I felt her little heart beat. The fear, horror and panic that I'd been agonising over for the last nine months melted. I looked down at this little life on my chest. She smelt like peaches. Maybe the world isn't such a bad place, I thought.
Rachel celebrates her first birthday today. My pop job for the day? I must keep the tea rolling.