Teacher Hu lived in an old residential complex without an elevator. Teacher Zhao climbed one flight of stairs and rested, then climbed another. By the time she reached the fourth floor, she was already muttering, “I’m getting old, I’m getting old.” Teacher Li and Teacher Zhang, following behind her, were also panting. Only Mianmian, being young, made it to the sixth floor in one breath and stood waiting for them at the door.
The door was slightly ajar. From inside came the faint cries of a baby and the muffled sounds of an adult soothing the child, mixed with the milky scent and a certain indescribable warmth that seeped out bit by bit through the crack.
Teacher Zhao rang the doorbell. Footsteps approached from inside, and the door was opened by Teacher Hu’s mother-in-law. As soon as she saw them, she ushered them in, saying, “Little Hu has been talking about it for days, saying her school teachers were coming to visit. Come in, come in!” She took the fruit basket from Teacher Zhao’s hands.
Mianmian entered last. As soon as she stepped inside, she saw Teacher Hu sitting on the living room sofa, holding a bundle wrapped in a pink blanket, looking up and smiling at them.
Mianmian froze.
It had only been a little over twenty days, but Teacher Hu looked like a completely different person.
Her face was still the same, her eyes and brows still gentle and soft, but her whole body had filled out considerably. Her cheeks had gained flesh, her chin had become rounder, and her once slender shoulders now looked fuller.
She wore a loose nursing home dress, the front of which was stretched high into two full, rounded curves—astonishingly large—that trembled slightly as she stood up to greet her guests.
Only when she stood did Mianmian notice her hips—broad and round, swaying from side to side as she walked. This was nothing like the Teacher Hu who used to wear floral dresses.
The old Teacher Hu always smiled with a hint of timidity and youthfulness, like a recent college graduate.
Now, holding her child and chatting with these older female teachers, she responded quickly and confidently, no longer with the shyness of a student but with a newfound ease, as if she had finally entered a circle she once couldn’t access.
Mianmian found a small stool in the corner, sat down, hugged her knees, and stayed silent.
She didn’t know what to say. The topics these aunties loved to discuss felt worlds away from her.
Teacher Zhang was saying, “Your milk supply looks good. Is the baby getting enough?”
Teacher Hu glanced down at her chest. “Plenty. It’s just that they get so engorged—hard as rocks if I don’t feed for a while.”
“That’s normal when you have a good supply,” Teacher Li said, reaching out to tickle the baby’s cheek. “If it’s so swollen you can’t sleep at night, have the baby’s father help you express it.”
“That just makes it worse,” Teacher Zhang chimed in. “The more you express, the more you produce. It’s a vicious cycle.”
The group burst into hearty laughter, completely unembarrassed.
“Speaking of which, you gave birth pretty quickly,” Teacher Li started on a classic postpartum visit topic. “I saw you at noon that day, and you were fine. By the afternoon, you’d already had the baby.”
Teacher Hu smiled without speaking, but before she could reply, her mother-in-law came over with a plate of fruit and took over the conversation:
“Quick? This silly girl had been in labor for over a day and didn’t even realize it.”
The teachers immediately perked up, leaning in on the sofa, ready to hear the story.
Teacher Hu’s mother-in-law sat down on a nearby stool, patted her hand, and spoke in a tone that was both affectionate and reproachful:
“The morning before, she got up and told me, ‘Mom, my butt hurts.’ I asked if she was going into labor, and she said no, it was just constipation—her stomach was cramping on and off, and she felt terribly bloated down there. She was sure it was because she’d been eating too much dry food lately. I told her, ‘Your due date is here, don’t go to work today. Take a leave and go to the hospital.’ But she wouldn’t go. She said she still had to proctor exams these two days and would wait until after the exams.”
Teacher Li widened her eyes. “And you didn’t think anything was wrong?”
“How was I supposed to know?” The mother-in-law slapped her thigh. “I’ve given birth, sure, but that was thirty years ago—I’ve long forgotten what it’s like. She said it was constipation, so I believed her!”
The women laughed again.
Teacher Hu gently rocked the baby in her arms and said softly:
“I really didn’t know that was labor. At first, it wasn’t very painful, just my stomach tightening up in waves. Plus, I felt extremely bloated down there, whether sitting or standing. So I thought it was constipation and figured drinking more water and going to the bathroom a few times would help.”
Teacher Zhang shook her head. “And you still came to work like that?”
“I thought proctoring while sitting wouldn’t be tiring, so I could hold on for two more days.”
Teacher Zhao sighed beside her. “You…”
Teacher Hu continued:
“But then at noon that day, I was squatting in the school restroom, straining, when suddenly I felt a gush—a lot of water came out. At first, I thought I’d wet myself. Later, I realized my water had broken.”
“Ah?!” several of them exclaimed at once.
“At the time, I was still thinking, ‘How embarrassing—straining from constipation even broke my water.’ Later, when I saw the amniotic fluid kept flowing, I changed into a pair of overnight pants in the restroom before coming out.” Teacher Hu looked utterly innocent.
Teacher Li patted her chest. “Oh my goodness, you silly girl, that wasn’t poop—it was the baby’s head descending. Once your water breaks, you should call an ambulance and go to the hospital.”
Teacher Hu said, “I was afraid calling 120 would disturb the students’ exams with the siren. I thought it wouldn’t happen that fast, so I decided to wait until my husband got off work to pick me up and drive me to the hospital. After all, the hospital isn’t far—just a twenty-minute drive. Who knew that once I returned to the classroom, the pain became unbearable as soon as the afternoon exam started? I couldn’t even sit still.”
Teacher Zhang said, “No wonder when I saw you during my rounds that afternoon, you looked so pale, completely drained.”
“Yeah, after you took over for me, I was in so much pain I could barely walk. I leaned against the wall and inched my way to the office. The pain was so intense I felt dizzy and disoriented—I wanted to roll on the floor. I couldn’t even lie still on the folding bed; pushing down hard was the only thing that felt somewhat better. Later, I felt something strange in my overnight pants, like there was something there, but I couldn’t reach it myself.”
Teacher Hu’s mother-in-law sighed repeatedly beside her. “Listening to you all talk about it, my legs have gone weak from fear. Thank goodness this silly girl is strong and healthy—going through all that and still being fine!”
Teacher Zhao asked again, “How long after getting into the ambulance did you give birth?”
Teacher Hu thought for a moment and said:
“Very quickly. The doctor wanted to check how many centimeters I was dilated, but as soon as he took my pants off, he said, ‘The head is almost out—what’s there to check?’ The ambulance had just reached the road outside the school gate, not even at the first traffic light, when I felt a force inside my belly—completely beyond my control—rolling downward. I couldn’t help but let out a loud cry, and then there was excruciating pain around my butt. The baby came out all at once.”
The women were laughing and sighing, gathered together chattering away.
“The first birth being this fast is considered quick.”
“That’s the child being considerate of the mother, not wanting her to suffer.”
“Exactly! When I gave birth to my daughter, I screamed my lungs out for a whole day and night, and ended up having a C-section.”
“Yours was because the baby was too big. I had an episiotomy…”
Mianmian sat in the corner, listening to them talk, her face already flushed red as if about to catch fire.
Those words—direct, spicy, and completely unfiltered—swirled around in her ears.
Things like how many centimeters dilated, episiotomy, lochia—she had never heard women talk like this before.
Yet they spoke so naturally, so loudly, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
She stole a glance at Teacher Hu.
Teacher Hu’s chest was swollen and full, and the baby squirmed in her arms searching for milk. She casually unbuttoned her blouse and put it into the baby’s mouth, her movements so natural and practiced.
Then, with her chest exposed while breastfeeding, she continued chatting with a group of middle-aged women about childbirth, so openly and calmly.
Mianmian suddenly felt a wave of confusion.
Does having a child turn a young girl into an auntie?
Teacher Zhao spoke up again: “I need to bring this up with the principal. In the future, when female teachers at our school are pregnant, they should be required to take paid maternity leave starting from the thirty-eighth week, no exceptions. If someone ends up giving birth at school again, it would be too much suffering.”
Several teachers nodded in agreement. Teacher Hu’s mother-in-law went to refill the tea, and the topic shifted to children—whose grandson weighed over eight pounds at birth, how chubby the little arms were—all lively and cheerful.
The women’s conversation shifted from childbirth to postpartum confinement, to breastfeeding, to babies pooping and peeing, and then to marital intimacy.
Mianmian listened, her face growing redder and her ears hotter, but she couldn’t bring herself to leave. The words seemed to have legs, crawling right into her ears.
“…After the confinement period, you have to be careful. Don’t rush into intimacy; your health comes first.”
“Teacher Hu is young, she’ll recover quickly. A month should be enough.”
“But you still have to take precautions. It wouldn’t do to get pregnant again so soon.”
Suddenly, a faint ache spread through Mianmian’s abdomen, accompanied by intermittent prickling sensations that radiated from her lower belly to somewhere she couldn’t quite pinpoint. There was also a feeling of needing to use the bathroom, an urgent, pent-up sensation.
She tightened her legs slightly and shifted her sitting position, but no one noticed.
When she returned home in the evening, she asked Jiang Yu’an:
“Why does giving birth feel like you need to poop?”
Jiang Yu’an had just returned from the hospital and changed his shoes. Seeing her distracted expression, he guessed she had probably heard some adult content while visiting his mother today.
Well, it was just as well. She wasn’t that young anymore; he might as well take the opportunity to give her some physiological education and help desensitize her.
He didn’t laugh at her. Instead, leaning back against the sofa, he spoke slowly:
“Because anatomically speaking, both processes use the same set of muscles and the same neural reflexes.”
“The final segment of the birth canal and the rectum, which lies right behind it, share part of the pelvic floor muscle group and some nerve innervation. So when the baby’s head descends to the lowest part of the birth canal, it directly presses against the rectum, stimulating the pressure receptors in the rectal wall. This stimulation sends the exact same signals as when the rectum is full of stool.”
“So the mother will feel a strong urge to defecate,” he continued, his tone matter-of-fact. “When this signal reaches the brain, the body automatically generates the impulse to push downward.”
Mianmian listened intently.
Jiang Yu’an spoke openly, without any avoidance:
“How about that? Isn’t the human body fascinating? In fact, many mothers do defecate during childbirth because as the fetus descends, it compresses the rectum, squeezing out its contents. This is so common in the delivery room that midwives are long used to it and don’t give it a second thought.”
Mianmian stared at him blankly:
“Senior, how do you know all this?”
That roguish grin of his returned:
“Obviously, if I didn’t even know this, what would I be doing here?”
Mianmian gazed at him, inexplicably feeling reassured:
“Thank you for being willing to tell me all this. When I heard the teachers discussing those things today, I was really scared. Now that you’ve explained it clearly, I feel much better.”
Jiang Yu’an’s eyes were gentle in a way that didn’t seem like him:
“You did very well, and you were right. Don’t keep your doubts bottled up; talk more with adults.” He said, “I’m going to sleep now. I still have work tomorrow.”