Birth Story

The day before my son Søren was born I had
been 40 weeks and 5 days pregnant and not very comfortable. I’d just
lived through three weeks of uncertainty and several false starts, the
conviction that this pregnancy couldn’t possibly go so long, and worry
that I wouldn’t recognize real labor for all of the false labor I was
experiencing. I had woken up 3 days shy of 38 weeks pregnant with regular but
not terribly uncomfortable contractions that got me pretty excited, and an
examination showed that I was 2 cm dilated. And that was three weeks before.
Up until that point, it had been a great pregnancy. The unknown baby felt like a
partner and I could marvel at how our bodies worked together, how we were a
complete system of two people. Although I was huge (and strangers were
comfortable pointing this out to me)

Even
with all of my discomfort and my impatience to hold our baby, I felt sadness
about the pregnancy ending. I was experiencing every feeling in the book, not
to mention feelings about those feelings. I felt guilty about being irritable
with my husband and children and I hated being forgetful and indecisive.
Grocery shopping without a list took forever, because by the time I had decided
what I wanted to cook I’d have to backtrack across the store to find some
ingredient, only to realize I’d forgotten what I was looking for. Not
knowing the baby’s gender, I was annoyed by other people’s endless
speculation. Rather than worrying about childbirth itself I worried about my
children being cared for while I was in labor, and about inconveniencing the
people I had to ask for help, making my husband miss work, keeping a friend on
alert in case all of the sudden I needed her here to watch our older boys. I
didn’t know what to expect from natural childbirth but I wanted the
powerful feeling of being able to do anything that I had felt after our second
son’s birth. I had no doubt about wanting it natural, wanting to feel it
all, I knew from my previous two births that I could handle labor without drugs.
My greatest doubts were about my abilities pushing a baby out… all previous
experience with being “coached” made me think I couldn’t do
this without someone telling me exactly how to do it. So I spent a lot of
nervous energy getting the house ready and searching the web for birth stories
that would give me a story I could tell myself about how mine would happen. I
also appreciated reassurances from Becky that fearlessness is not necessary for
a good birth, that I would in some sense be alone, be directing my own birth,
but that she’d be there to keep the boundaries
safe.

So finally, Friday morning,
November 22, the first day the baby could be born and be a Sagittarius (this was
important to my husband, who claimed that, as a Gemini, he had never gotten
along well with Scorpios) and the morning that two months earlier I had
predicted I would have the baby, both of my older boys were in school, my
husband left for the office he hadn’t seen in two weeks, and I was alone
for the first time in weeks. Of course, it seemed like a good idea at this
point to remove all items from my kitchen cupboards, sort and toss, scrub the
shelves and replace things. When my husband invited me out for lunch I knew I
wouldn’t be able to eat and I started worrying about how I was going to
get everything back in the cupboards because I was feeling pretty awful. But I
took a lot of breaks, and felt well enough to walk to my older son’s
school six blocks away to pick him up in the afternoon. A classmate’s
mother brought our second son home from his preschool and my husband arrived
home to feed them dinner, which was good, because I started throwing up and
wanted to be left alone in a big way. Scented candles protected me from the
smell of dinner cooking but I was still wretchedly sick, with diarrhea and
vomiting for several hours.

After the
kids went to bed and it was clear that I felt too bad to sleep we decided to put
on a dvd. This was useful because it helped me keep track of how I’d fall
asleep and then be woken up by contractions and watch for a minute and then fall
back asleep. We were not timing things because the excitement of that had worn
off with the third or fourth night of false labor. But the sleeping and waking
for contractions convinced me this was the real thing, so we called my friend
Jenny to come stay with our sleeping boys and called Becky to meet us at the
birth center. One of my few vivid recollections is of Jenny helping me put on
my shoes while Raven ran around collecting stuff. Driving the empty streets at
one am all I could think was that I wanted to get the baby out so I could drink
a glass of water and not throw up. One of the things I had been looking forward
to about giving birth outside of a hospital was getting to drink and eat if I
wanted and it was disappointing to be unable to keep anything
down.

We got to the birth center just
seconds before Becky and got settled in very quickly, putting in the c.d. I had
chosen for labor and lighting a few candles. An examination showed I was 5 cm.
dilated. Becky announced that we would indeed be having a baby that night, and
I think it was the first time Raven believed it. As soon as a bath was drawn we
both got in and passed the next hour or so in relative comfort, After a while it
seemed like a good idea to get out and check my progress, giving my husband a
break from supporting me in the tub, and I spent some time on the birth ball,
trying a few different positions before deciding to get back in the tub. I tried
drinking water again only to throw up immediately and had to brush my teeth to
rid my mouth of the vile taste. I only had the slightest sense of time passing,
like when the c.d. had to be restarted, everything was just about keeping my
body relaxed and breathing. I do remember thinking that the baby inside me was
much too hypothetical to breathe for, but I could take this breath, this
contraction as if I were doing it for one of the sons I already had, sleeping
safely at home in his bed. I felt able to talk and laugh until I was clearly in
transition. I remember saying “I can’t do this” a couple of
times, not because I really believed it, but because it got Raven and Becky to
reassure me that I could do it, that I was doing it. The tub offered the
greatest comfort and it seemed that the baby might be born there, but then I
knew I needed to be in the bed.

Sometime around 4 a.m. I was fully
dilated and after the exam my water finally broke, but I was very sleepy and not
feeling any urge to push – that didn’t come for nearly an hour. I
tried a push or two but it didn’t feel right, so I struggled to the toilet
and back and I waited for the urge to come. It was unmistakable once it arrived.
Raven was seated on the bed behind me, up against the headboard while I reclined
between his legs.

I lay back between pushes and he helped me
curl up into the pushes when the contractions came – the feeling that the
two of us were pushing together was unlike anything I had experienced with our
previous births, as was my sense of my own agency, the feeling that in that
room, I was the one directing things, listening to my own body, trusting it,
doing what I needed to do – I didn’t feel like a patient. The
midwife assisting Becky offered me sips of water between pushes and I
didn’t throw up and it was amazing how good drinking water could feel.
After nearly an hour of pushing I asked Becky how many more pushes this was
going to take and she didn’t have an answer, but I really wanted this to
be over with and I gave the next push everything I had and the burning sensation
came and someone in the room used the words “ring of fire” and I
knew that only I could make this pain go away and that if I could get through
this everything would feel much better and that I had to do this and his head
was out. His whole body didn’t just slip out, following, though, It was a
wait for the next contraction and another push for his shoulders and then there
was a baby wrapped in a towel lying next to me, beautiful but slightly purple,
with a nice round head, very alert, and quick to let us know it wasn’t ok
to move him when he was just getting comfortable.
We were prompted to
check to see if it was a boy or a girl (not that it mattered to us at this
point!) and we had our third son. Raven cut the cord and I have no recollection
of delivering the placenta because all I was interested in was our Søren.

Before the delivery of the placenta
Raven was on the phone to our house to tell Jenny and the boys that we had our
baby, and minutes before he called Jenny had woken, looked at the clock, noted
the time (6:03), and speculated the baby was being born. We agreed she would
bring the older boys as soon as they woke up, and after a few more minutes of
soulful gazing, I put the baby to my breast. When we finished, I got Raven
lying next to us to hold the baby to his bare chest and I climbed out of bed and
went to take a shower, amazed I could stand up and walk. I returned to a
freshly made bed and we rested and enjoyed a nice breakfast while waiting for
the rest of our family to arrive. The baby was weighed and measured right there
at the bedside, never leaving our sight, it was amazingly unobtrusive, and I was
very surprised to learn he weighed ten pounds and three ounces. Although I had
been given an episiotomy birthing our first son, who weighed just over eight
pounds, and had had small tears birthing our second son, who was almost nine
pounds, my perineum had come through this birth intact. In short order my
rambunctious and ecstatic older sons arrived at the birth center
and after a few
parting instructions on caring for the baby and me and setting up a home visit
late Monday afternoon, our newly enlarged family was ready to go
home.

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