The long long long
version, so I don’t forget.
I was cleaning up from a little gathering of all my best
women friends in town. They came over to help paint my belly casting, something
I thought I had to do for a baby about to be born in Eugene, Oregon. I sipped
wine and we told stories, laughing. One friend brought her newborn, just six
weeks old, and she nursed him on the couch as we marveled over his long black
hair. The painting on the belly casting was celestial, a scattering of stars
across the navel and one breast aflame with sun. Someone had painted the earth
across my protruding belly with face paint, smears of continents mingling with
gauzy clouds.
My water broke that night, 11 days before my due date. But was
it really labor? Ina May must have been right: there was no pain! Four pairs of
changed underwear and an urgent call to my husband at work, and I was sure: my
water had broken, and a call to the midwife confirmed that contractions would
likely start within a few hours. We packed our bag (one nursing bra, one set of
electric candles, one set of gender-neutral baby clothes and an impossibly
small hat); we packed our cooler (trail mix, coconut water, 8 popsicles); we
went to bed around midnight and waited, giddy with excitement. We didn’t sleep
that night—at 12:30 on June 20th, the night of the summer
solstice, the longest day of the year, my contractions began.
We tracked the contractions on my phone and waited for them
to fall into a predictable pattern: 15 minutes apart, 12 minutes apart, 6
minutes apart, 10 minutes apart. We used our hypnobirthing techniques to
breathe and visualize the productive work my body was doing: opening, warming,
humming. Sometime around 2:00 a.m., the back labor started, and the difference
was immediate and profound: these were no “pressure waves” but pain monsoons,
overwhelming and intense. We listened to the advice from the midwife to sway on
hands and knees to get the baby back into position; I took the birth ball into
the shower, I laid in the bath. The only thing that helped was my husband’s
hands pushing into the base of my spine at the peak of a contraction, jabbing
as hard as he could against the little one inside me whose head rested firmly
against my nerves.
8 minutes apart, 3 minutes apart, 3 minutes apart, 7 minutes
apart. I let the midwives listen to my contractions over the phone as I panted
and kneeled over the bed, dully heard the advice to stay at home as long as
possible; prayed for opening. We had our 38-week appointment at 11:00 the next
morning; we would just go in then. We sent word to our families to let them
know I was in labor. At 9:00, the contractions were stronger and closer
together, and we decided to go to the Birth Center.
I lugged my body up on the bed, sweating and moaning gently.
I hoped I wouldn’t scare the expectant mothers in the waiting room. After
almost 10 hours of intense back labor, I was dilated to…a one. There’s little
that can prepare you for news like this; it seemed unthinkable to return home,
but we were instructed to do so and to try to sleep (sleep!) and prepare for
the work ahead. We stopped at the pharmacy for medicine to help me rest; we had
never gotten prescriptions before so the process of registration took forever. While
my husband sorted out the details inside the store, I remember writhing in the
backseat in the parking lot, trying to push my back against the door handle
against the pain. Somehow I ended up at home, back in bed, curled up on my
side.
The next six hours were a blur. This was a time of an
intense and otherwise unknown interiority: it was just me, and this baby, and
this pain. The rest of the world didn’t exist. My mom arrived; she had hopped a
flight from Colorado and was there to help. I registered her presence but I
didn’t look her in the eyes. I told people the next day that the medicine
didn’t work and I didn’t sleep at all, but my husband explains that I would
wake out of a dead sleep to yell, “HELP,” which was his cue to push on my back
as if to push right through me. At the end of the contraction, I would
immediately fall back asleep, and then wake in a few minutes in a haze. “Don’t
come in until ten or eleven at night,” the midwives insisted on phone call
after phone call, “it will be too early.” I don’t remember much except pleading
with God that my contractions would find a regular rhythm. That, and I couldn’t
imagine a contraction without Jeremy’s capable hands on my back.
Somehow, the back labor got stronger, the stabbing feeling
more intense. “I know it’s early,” I said, “and maybe they’ll send me to the
hospital, but it feels like something is wrong. We’re going now.” Around 4:30
and we were into the car again, this time with my mom driving as Jeremy gave directions
to the Birth Center from the backseat while pushing into my back. I remember a
vague sense of a world outside of me: the sun was shining, and there were
people going about what must be their ordinary days. Back at the birth center,
I stopped for a contraction in the parking lot, and another one as I leaned
into the bed. This time, there was no worrying about what anyone might think,
there was just the immediacy of a pain that was real and overwhelming. A new
midwife was on call; we hadn’t met her. She introduced herself, checked my
cervix, and I prayed. 8 centimeters. I had been through transition. It was
time.
I could have wept with relief. A new midwife on call came
in: it was Patricia, our birth class teacher who we loved; she knew what we
wanted in our birth and we felt confident in her care. Being there at the Birth
Center—surrounded by capable hands and calmer heads—felt like being thrown a
life preserver. I got into the deep, warm water of the tub and the pressure on
my back subsided with the gentle buoyancy. I made sounds like a didgeridoo; I
sipped water between contractions; I was grateful for the dim lights and the
big bathroom and the fact that I didn’t have to get in the car again.
At around 8pm, I had dilated to a ten and was almost fully
effaced, and Patricia suggested that I could begin pushing. It felt like the
marathon I had run finally had an end in sight. I squatted on the birth chair,
waited for the next contraction, and pushed.
And pushed. And pushed. And pushed. For over four hours. I
learned how to push, as many new mothers must; I got better. We tried an almost
laughable number of positions (on the birth stool, on my hands and knees, with
a rope, on the toilet, on the bed on my back, hanging from a bar, on the bed on
my side). This last position proved to be the most productive, so there we
stayed. But his baby wouldn’t budge. Patricia would rotate the head during a
contraction so he was almost in the correct position; as soon as the
contraction was over he’d snap right back, sunny side up. At one point while
Patricia was rotating his head, the baby’s little hand reached up and grabbed
her finger. She tried to push the hand back out of the way to make more room,
but there it stayed, stubbornly planted on his cheek. His head inched down into
the birth canal, then back up. I pushed. Patricia called in the nurse to be
ready for the birth. She spread oil to help me prevent tearing. I reached up
with my hand and felt a little head: the baby had hair! With Jeremy pressing
his fist into my back and my mom and Patricia holding my knees up, I pushed.
And pushed.
I couldn’t quite comprehend why the baby wasn’t here yet.
Patricia gently explained that I would need to transfer to the hospital because
I had pushed so long, the contractions had slowed and gotten weaker. With some Pitocin,
they might be strong enough to get this baby out. They started an IV drip with
sugar water, since I hadn’t eaten all day. Almost immediately, I started
vomiting between contractions. We coordinated the transfer and I agreed to the
plan: what else could I do? At around midnight, we were back in the car,
awkward and tired and confused. Someone held the bag with my IV. The
contractions, though they had slowed, were still persistent and nervy. It was a
short trip to the hospital, but it felt like the longest yet. The longest day
of the year was over and I was still, somehow, in labor.
In the hospital, a bevy of new caregivers arrived and
Pitocin was added to my IV drip. It did, indeed, make the contractions closer
together, but also stronger: I hadn’t realized that stronger contractions meant
deeper back pain. I threw up, I pushed, I heard the doctor explain that the
baby wasn’t staying down in the birth canal so we couldn’t use forceps or a
vacuum extractor. I pushed, and I cried. The minutes dragged on; the room was
unfamiliar, but reassuringly filled with machines that might help get this baby
out if I pushed hard enough. I pushed. Even when there were no contractions, I
pushed.
I’m not sure why the idea of a cesarean section hadn’t
occurred to me at this point. Certainly, I told myself, if I could feel the
baby’s head it was just a matter of time before he would come out. But the idea
was floated, it was suggested, it was recommended. If I wanted to I could
continue to push, Patricia explained, since the baby had never been in any
harm. But it had been more than 24 hours since my water had broken, and if I
pushed much longer there was a chance of damaging my uterus. Jeremy and I had the
gift of good advice for that was applicable in this moment: we asked everyone
to leave. We looked at each other. “I’ve done what I could,” I told him. “I’m
ready to meet this baby.”
The time between this decision and holding Jack was the
worst part of the birth. The c-section machine fluttered into action: we signed
forms, nurses scurried around to prepare me with an electric razor, the doctor
explained the procedure, Jeremy went to get suited up in scrubs, Patricia
consulted with the surgeon, my mom answered questions from the doctor about my
health and insurance. What they don’t tell you: even when the Pitocin is turned
off, the contractions continue, fast and furious, minutes apart and searing as
always. I couldn’t stop getting sick; I worried I would throw up on the
operating table. Someone told me that I could push during the contractions, “If
I wanted to? If it helps?” Nothing has ever felt so pointless and miserable. I
was placed on a gurney and wheeled into the OR where Jeremy could join me after
the anesthesia was administered, I was told. As the anesthesiologist waited for
me to finish a contraction and be still enough to administer the needle, I
leaned over the side of the gurney, my hands around the neck of a kind, perky,
blonde nurse, and I wept into her shoulder, in frustration and guilt and pain.
The effect of the nerve block was immediate and shocking.
The pain that seemed to never end had suddenly and immediately disappeared. My
husband couldn’t believe the casual and relaxed tone with which I greeted him:
“Hi, babe.” My arms were laid out, prone, and strapped down, as if on the
cross, I thought. Jeremy took my hand as best as he could. The doctors and
nurses were fluttering around and got to work quicker than I could have
imagined. I asked Jeremy if he would describe what was happening. It felt
disconcerting to be so present and attuned to my body in one moment and so
oddly absent from it in the next. “I’m not sure you want to know this?” he
said, explaining that they had opened me up and it was happening very fast. The
baby was about to come out – they confirmed that we did not know the sex, and
that they would let Jeremy tell me.
“It’s a boy!” he exclaimed, a red, wriggling little tadpole
howling fiercely against the cold and the new air. “He’s so big,” everyone
observed. Jeremy went with the doctor to the room where he was weighed and
measured and fitted with an electronic monitoring bracelet; he knew our plan to
bring him back as soon as the doctors would let him. “They’ll be right back
with your son,” someone said. I repeated the word again and again, like a salve
against his absence: “A son,” I breathed, “my son.” I heard murmurings from the
other room: he had grabbed hold of the scissors cutting the umbilical cord,
someone said, he’s so strong! And he’s so big, with such long hands and feet.
Eight pounds, eleven ounces! “My son.” He had a little sore on his left hand
from sucking in the womb. He’ll be a good self-soother, the anesthesiologist
predicted. “My son, the self-soother,” I practiced. “My son, he’s always been
so strong!”
And then he was placed on my chest, and he was my son,
making sucking motions with his lips and moving his tiny (big!) hands. I longed
to hold him, to feel his warmth against my arms, to touch the wet hair and
fuzzy cheeks. The nurse helped place him on his chest and he slowly crept over
to the nipple; he nursed right away and I felt a rush of pride. I was allowed
to hold him, touch his back, marvel over his eyelashes and weep over the
perfection of his feet. Jeremy stood by me, blinking back tears and holding Jack
firmly onto me. This was a far cry from the scene I had envisioned in the Birth
Center, but as I looked around the crowded OR all I could see was our family. I
was—and I am—so grateful for our happy ending.
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