Chapter 3: Chapter 2: Born again

Life as a fetus in the womb was… Well… It was quite horrible, to be honest. I had expected to be able to relax in the cozy warmth of my mother’s womb, maybe having to deal with the occasional irritation of my twin bashing me when they got a little too excited. Maybe we would have some pushing contests from time to time. But, overall, I expected to just fall into a routine and be able to relax, and sleep my time away until I was ready to be born.

That was the hope, anyway. What I did not expect was the one thing few people ever consider, and just think is an obvious part of being a fetus. I was connected to my mother’s blood supply through an umbilical cord. And that meant that I was subject to some substances running through my mother’s bloodstream. There was a fetal blood barrier that kept things like viruses and bacteria from affecting me, but it was not a complete shield. It had to be open enough for me to get nutrients, after all.

There was something else small enough to pass the barrier, though, and it was making life in the womb absolute hell for me. Hormones. Or, to be more specific, adrenaline. Occasionally, I would hear a lot of noise going on outside the womb. Some yelling voices, some of them high and likely female, others low and likely male. I couldn’t make out any words, it was all muffled by the flesh and fluid. All I could tell about it was that it was clearly not English. The exact words were not important, though. The important part was that, whenever the voice I’d identified as my mother started to become frantic, I felt a sense of absolute existence-rending terror wash over me.

Objectively, I knew that this was an outside influence. It was this adrenaline being pumped into me. It was entering my bloodstream in quantities far higher than my tiny undeveloped body could handle, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. Well, almost nothing. My sibling seems to have made the discovery that getting really aggressive with their kicking can sometimes do more than just work out some of the energy the fight or flight response is demanding they utilize. Sometimes, our mother actually calms down pretty soon after one of us starts kicking as hard as we possibly can. Unfortunately, it’s not only the wall of the uterus my sibling kicks.

So, every time our mother gets agitated by whatever is upsetting her, I am driven into a position where I have to protect myself against my sibling, while I’m also trying to help them in expressing our protest against whatever our mother is doing. We have gotten better at our coordination lately, I’m getting kicked far less, and far more of the kicking is actually getting directed at the walls of the uterus.

Once again, though, this winds up raising several questions. Well, I don’t think our mother is dealing with any real imminent threat to her life. Most of the things that get her agitated seem to be verbal arguments, while some of the other voices seem to be trying to reason with her and calm her down when she gets worked up. This makes me feel a lot less guilty about joining in with my sibling’s protest efforts, but it still makes me wonder just what it is that gets our mother so agitated.

The other far more disturbing thing, though, is that my sibling seems to have gotten way too good at directing all of the kicks in a way that avoids hitting me lately. Recently, we have even begun falling into patterns, where we will take turns, where one of us will hold still and brace ourselves against the other as they do the kicking, trying to help one another get as much leverage as we can.

My sibling is way too smart for someone in their fetal stage. This has me facing two separate and equally hard to parse options. Either we are not actually human and instead belong to a far more intelligent species that develops this level of learning capability even in the womb, or my sibling is exactly like me and retains memories from their previous life. Both of those options have some pretty serious implications to them. The strange thing is that it’s the latter that would be the easier to stomach of the two. I mean, it’s already happened with me, right? I would have to be stuck just babysitting my babbling infant of a twin if I was the only one, after all. If they are like me, then we really will be the same, and even be able to relate better to one another.

Well, I couldn’t do a lot more than just think about it until we were born. Once we are out of the womb, we will have more freedom to figure each other out.

After a while, it became increasingly clear that my sibling was just like me. As things became more cramped here in the womb, we became increasingly careful not to accidentally hit each other. We would take turns stretching our legs, but we only pushed for our stretching. Neither one of us actually kicked. unless it was in protest over our mother torturing us with adrenaline down our umbilical cords.

This was a dead giveaway that my sibling absolutely had to be someone like me. I had already confirmed that this body possesses the stepping reflex and babinski reflex. These two reflexes in combination help infants later on, when they are figuring out how to walk, but in the womb, it creates an involuntary compulsion to extend your leg quickly. The only way to avoid that becoming a kick is if there’s some intention there to stop it from happening. I don’t think that kind of intention could be worked up by someone who’s new to this whole existence thing, no matter how smart they are.

After a while, we did manage to settle into a bit of a routine. Our mother’s agitated states became less frequent. I don’t know whether it was us very consistently delivering kicks, that really must have been quite painful, only when she got riled up, or if it was the people around her talking to her and working out whatever it was that was bothering her. Whatever it was, it was quite nice not having to deal with that all the time. It was a good thing too, because things were starting to become very cramped in here with two bodies filling the same space. I’m quite sure we’re well into the third trimester by this point.

We had already managed to get both of our heads pointed downward, but that’s nothing to judge our development on. We were both sentient beyond what we ought to be, and we had flipped ourselves intentionally. I had just started the effort myself at one point, and my sibling very quickly picked up on what I was doing and followed suit. But, things have definitely gotten very cramped.

We spent most of our time sleeping these days. What else is a prenatal child with adult levels of cognizance supposed to do? It’s an excellent way to pass the time; when nobody can tell us how much longer we are going to have to wait around in here.

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I have begun to wonder lately exactly what it was that triggers a woman’s water to break. It happens when the amniotic sac bursts, but is it an internal or external force that causes it? It makes me wish I had actually researched prenatal development beyond the general overview all nurses are given in an A&P class. Clearly the infant kicked a lot during its development, so it would probably require some rather extraordinary freak conditions for the infant to be able to burst it by themselves before it was time. So, some hormone probably weakened it beforehand.

The question though, is what will cause the contractions to start? Obviously, it was Oxytocin that actually triggered them. I still have nightmares about learning the hormones of the hypothalamus and their functions, so there’s no way I could forget the function of Oxytocin. But, I also know that all hormones that come from the hypothalamus or pituitary are, in turn, triggered by some kind of signal that comes from the body. So, it’s a chicken and egg thing here. What causes what?

This has been bothering me, because it’s quite obvious there’s some hormone that weakens the amniotic sac, and then it probably makes it so some innocent movement by the infant can make it burst. But, what happens if the infant is content to just sit still long past the time they were ready? Would the amniotic sac stick around for longer? Or would contractions just start on their own and grind the side of the sac against the baby’s body until it was broken? Or, on the other end, if the sac was burst early, would labor start in order for the baby to be born safely before something could go wrong from the premature rupture?

I am beginning to think having too much time with my own thoughts is a dangerous thing. I start constantly obsessing over things, and fearing something might go wrong. Well, you can’t really blame me. The two of us are in a pretty vulnerable state right now, and there’s about a million things that can go wrong in the gestation or birthing process that can cost one or both of us our lives, possibly even our mother’s life too. Well, medical technology these days is pretty good, so I don’t think anything will go THAT wrong. But then, what if we are born on some other planet to some humanoid alien species that’s still living in the stone age?

Yeah, as I said, too much time to think. But, I suppose it’s not really that outlandish of a possibility either. I have given up on ruling things impossible, though. I’m a reincarnated infant who can somehow think like an adult despite having such an underdeveloped brain, after all. I should probably accept that there are just things well beyond what I can understand out there.

Well, speaking of the devil, the contractions went ahead and started. I must have missed our amniotic sacs bursting, because right now my arms are wrapped around my sibling, with no membrane barrier between us.

My sibling winds up being the first one out. Guess that means I’m the younger twin. When the time came for me to be forced through the birth canal, I was not ready for just how much it would hurt. This passage was just too small for a baby’s head. I knew the skull literally had to deform in order to make it through the birth canal, but I never really understood what that meant until I felt like my brain was being forced down my spinal cord, and my face was being squeezed like a tube of toothpaste to the point I am certain my nose would have broken were it not made almost entirely of soft cartilage at this stage of development.

I felt like the only thing keeping my eyes from being squeezed out of my skull was the fact that the walls of the birth canal were also pushing them back into their sockets. After my head, my shoulders contorted in order to fit through. That was also quite the experience, but the pain was nothing in comparison to the initial pressure on my head. But, when the pressure was finally let off, I felt the cool air of the outside for the first time in this new life, and it was yet another new shock to my system as it felt like my head was dunked into a vat of ice.

I instantly began to cry. I came out crying the very second my head was clear and before I was properly fully born. Someone caught me as my birth was complete, and then I lay there, crying in my birthday suit.

The cold of the air was torture after just leaving that warm fluid environment, and all the new lights and sounds were incredibly disorienting. There were several voices talking to each other rather excitedly, but I couldn’t make out anything about it.

Someone wrapped a blanket around me, partially shielding me from the horrible experience of the chilly air of the outside world. As I kept trying to listen, I had to conclude the language I was hearing was not English.

It felt like everything was against me in this moment. But, I was able to calm myself with one simple fact. I was a newborn. I would have time to figure this stuff out, and I would be protected by the adults around me as I tried to make sense of things.

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