HANNAH: I''d been trying to finish an episode of a TV show I was writing before the baby came, so I''d gone to bed at 2AM. When I woke up around 4 AM, the pain felt a lot like what I''d been feeling the last few day -- pressure on my cervix. So I went into the spare room and watched Netflix. I was half-way through an episode of The Good Wife when the pain got bad, and I . Kept watching the episode! As in what''s going to happen with Alicia and her husband who fucks hookers but is nice to her now and will she win in court this week? And then at some point the pain was so bad I couldn''t lie still, and I finally clued in that I was nine months pregnant, five days past my due date. I''ve heard of this happening before: a woman I know googled "40 weeks pregnant water coming out of vagina." So the first thing I did was . I wrote an email to my bosses, the showrunners, so that I could send them the episode of TV I was working on.

Then I opened the episode doc, and I edited it for a while uh . yeah, while I was having contractions. Yeah. Yep. Then I woke up Christian. Christian''s response was "I''m too tired for it to be happening." Which was him being funny. But he did go back to sleep and I did lie beside him in pretty bad pain for a while being polite about it.

Ahead of my labour, Christian and Amy my doula asked me what I was scared of. I wasn''t scared of labour pain being bad (because I''d a car accident that knocked out six of my front teeth and then I spent a couple of years having surgeries to reconstruct them and also I was hit by a car , and that hurt ) but I was afraid of what the pain would make me do. I was scared of what was at the bottom of my psyche that I might let go of when the pain was bad, that it would shortcut me to my true self, and I''d find out I was actually a . bad person. And for the first twelve hours, the pain was fine, or, not fine , but . I was in my bathtub and my water broke and the amniotic fluid moved with so much velocity that I could see it pumping out of me through the bathwater. And now it was like someone was punching down onto my cervix, and it was stinging as though things in there had started to rip, and that''s when I started wanting to push. In the cab on the way to the hospital, I could tell that the cab driver was worried about his seats, so I tried to hold in my amniotic fluid.

When we got out of the cab I was heaving and I could see people looking at me the way you look at a person who''s in the middle of a physical crisis. In reception, the nurses were freaked out when they saw me. I was saying: " I want to push !" So they started asking emergency questions, like my blood type, and "do you think you''re going to deliver in this elevator?" Upstairs, on the maternity ward, the nurse examined me, and . MAEV playing HANNAH plunges her arm into the fish tank. Onto her hand is projected a video of Esmé as a baby. no. I''m trying to uh They''re talking and I''m uh trying to Cooperate and The nurse''s saying the baby''s way down my birth canal putting pressure on my cervix and that''s why I want to push so badly And Christian''s looking at them and nodding And someone somewhere''s screaming . ? But they''re saying I''m only 3 centimeters dilated and "good job" on those 3 centimeters but I have to be 10 centimeters before I start to push so at least another four or five hours and maybe more if I keep pushing down because .

I''m going to rip the shit out of my cervix And Christian says "but it''s been twelve hours" . And no, they say, I can''t push. And Christian''s nodding yeah. And then I start barfing And there are no contractions What the fuck is fucking "contractions" it''s just one long fucking contraction! And the whole time The only thing I want is to do is push And all that went on for the next four or five hours! And for those hours, the nurses and Christian and my doula say to me every few seconds "don''t push." Maybe MAEV steps out of her role as HANNAH and goes up to the audience and says: MAEV: Hey so we get a sense of this can you four people say "don''t push" for five hours. Just kidding I''m just kidding. MAEV goes back to playing HANNAH. Beat.

HANNAH: And here''s where I learn what''s at the bottom of my psyche.