The DU Lounge

if they were going to have roast beef for dinner on Sunday like always. Since they never had roast beef on Sunday, he asked what she was talking about. She said she was talking about Sundays in the other house. With the other mommy. Before the fire.

That wouldn’t be remarkable except for something else. One night she went upstairs to the bathroom. Her mother followed, and found her standing in the dark in the hall. She looked at her mother and said it reminded her of how dark it was before she was born. When asked if she remembered anything else, she said she had a rope around her neck, and that she had told her mother not to sit on Daddy’s bed.

Her parents had a waterbed. Her mother found it difficult to get out of it as her pregnancy advanced, and began sleeping on the conventional bed in the guest room. As she neared the end of her pregnancy her parents came to help, and she moved back into the master bedroom. Her water broke when she sat down on the waterbed. Her daughter was born with the umbilical cord around her neck. No one had ever told her these things, and our friends had never told anyone about the circumstances of how her water broke.