I am loving reading your stories! Thank you all so much for sharing them!
Here's my son's birth story. It is... suuuuuuuper-long. And features some, ahem, vivid language featuring four-letter words. Here's hoping the length doesn't break the thread, at least.
(Marcie was our doula, and Awakenings was the name of our midwifery practice. Juli and Sharon were our midwives from Awakenings, and pretty much everyone else mentioned is a family friend. Side note: We had just met our dear friend Daniel's brand-new girlfriend Sheela about two weeks before... They just celebrated their wedding anniversary the other day! :joy Oh, and my mother is deaf and my husband and I are both fluent signers, but nobody else who attended Ryu's birth knew how to sign. My mother spent most of this day signing without using her voice at all.)
Friday, April 17, 2009
Oh, my beautiful little Ryu!
The alarm rang at 6:00am. I was contracting. Ugh, B needed to turn that thing off—wait, I was contracting. There wasn’t any doubt about it; this felt different than everything I’d felt before.
I didn’t say anything and let it happen. B hit the snooze and came back to bed. I lay there, contracting, and then it went away, and then—around when the alarm went off again nine minutes later—it hit again. He hit snooze again. The contraction went away again. When it rang again and I was contracting again, that was enough.
“Good morning, honey. I just had three contractions.”
“Three?!”
“Yeah. I think we should do a shower and breakfast and stuff.”
Kept contracting through the shower. Kept contracting through breakfast—we ate the last of Robbin’s strata. Something was happening. Something was happening.
We tried not to freak out. We decided to go for a walk.
I don’t remember what we talked about on most of the walk. We went through Strawberry Creek Park, around by Café Zeste, and up to the Bread Workshop. He got coffee and I got a milk chocolate croissant, swaying through a contraction as I asked whether that pastry down there was a bear claw or an almond croissant. When we got out of the bakery, I told him, “No more public interactions. I felt like an idiot having a contraction as I talked to her, swaying around all over the place.”
“Okay, honey.”
My exciting milk chocolate croissant was awfully bready—no chocolate in sight for the first third of the pastry. I held it up to B to see. “Fail,” he said. I giggled right through a contraction. Huh... it was pretty obviously still early days. But I was walking around, after the shower, after the breakfast, and still having contractions, so even if it was early days, was it labor? We thought it was.
It had been an hour and a half and I was still contracting pretty regularly—we were timing it on my phone. So we called and left a message at Awakenings, then sent Marcie a text.
We got home. We examined the silly little iContraction app. There didn’t seem to be much of a pattern to them—four minutes apart, ten minutes apart, eight minutes apart, five minutes, ten... I waffled over whether B should go to work. Finally, it seemed like he should really go. I was walking and laughing through contractions, and they weren’t that regular. I could be doing that for the next two days! He shouldn’t miss work unless he had to. He kissed me goodbye. His hand was on the doorknob.
WHOA, WHOA, no, there was a big big contraction, I was going to need help if I was going to get through these, “Honey! C’mere! I think you should stay. Stay.”
So, he stayed.
We wandered through the house as he got it ready. He picked stuff up in the living room and I lay on the couch, calling him over for each new contraction. He tidied up the kitchen as I lay in bed and hollered out for him to time each fresh wave.
Should we tell my mother? She was in LA. She was planning on being in Fremont by evening, but it looked like she was going to have to skip Fremont. But what if we were too soon? It took a while to email her, and when I finally did, she didn’t write back.
B called Daniel. “Our heat’s out and it looks like we’re having a baby today. Do you think you can head out to the store and pick us up a space heater? Oh, whatever, anything under 200 bucks is fine. Thanks, D.”
I wrote again, to every parental email address I could think of. This time she responded right away—she was on the road, she was driving too fast to email. She would be here by 3:00pm. Okay.
Juli was checking in with us; Marcie was leaving messages. I was certainly still contracting (“Is her belly hard when she’s feeling it?” “Well, yeah!”, but then I had to think about it; my belly was getting hard, right? Surely it must be?)—was it more regular now?—and pretty much fine. Every single one hurt, and every single one seemed a part of a general build toward hurting just a little more, but B was there, and listening to me, and reminding me of everything I knew that I knew, but couldn’t quite access on my own. When I said they hurt, he said they were productive. I’d come out of one and tell him, “That was a bad one.” He’d say, “No, honey, it was progress!” I kind of can’t believe it, but it was exactly what I needed to hear. I stopped characterizing them as bad or painful. They were what they were and I was getting through them and he was helping me. We agreed we’d check back with Juli at 1ish. We agreed that Marcie didn’t need to come just yet.
Daniel came by; I was in bed. I heard him helping B put together the birth tub. I was so thankful that he was there, and proud of myself that I could let B go about his business and put together the birth tub without coming to be by my side for the contractions. I was okay to handle at least a few by myself. When the tub was ready to go and filling up, Daniel came in and visited for a minute and we talked about Sheela. It felt so good to chat with him and tell him how much I like her, but when the next contraction came, I’m not even sure what I did—I think I just kind of curled inward and left the conversation. I think I said goodbye, at the very least, and then he was on his way out.
B told me he was going to the back room to clean up some of the clutter for my mom, and started to give me the phone so I could call him for help. “No,” I said, “I’ll just come back there with you and be with you, okay?”
“Yeah, honey, that’s great. We can put on some ER episodes and you can—“
“Nooooo hospitals.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, duh. Okay, Pushing Daisies.”
“Nooooo dead people.”
“Ha. You’re right. Well, I don’t know what we have for you to watch.”
“I can watch the B Show, honey. That one is funny.”
“Yeah, but it’s mostly reruns.”
“I don’t care. That guy is great, I love him.”
“Okay.”
So I labored in the back room for a while. Come to think of it, I guess I probably labored in nearly every room of our house for at least a little bit, except Ryu’s room. That makes me smile.
B was so good at partnering my laboring self. Anything I needed, he got. Anything I didn’t know I needed, he reminded me. Every single contraction that I called for him, he dropped everything and was there. I loved him so much, and it was so good to tell him that.
We came back inside and I returned to bed. I don’t remember Marcie arriving, just knowing that she had decided to come (“Marcie says Juli told her your family has a history of going fast, so she’s just going to come on over”), then knowing that she was there, and being happy for her to take over being next to me.
Looking up at her there, standing over me in the midday light streaming through our curtains, I thought—wow. All that stupid Ina May stuff is real. Marcie is so beautiful. I’m seeing white auras. I told her about it, and she and B both kind of laughed. Really, though, I saw that stupid hippie aura, and being able to tell her about it felt, again, like I’d felt when I was talking to Daniel—it was so good to smile and say nice things while all this was happening.
“Have you been applying counter-pressure?” she asked B, and while I’m sure he had been doing some of that, suddenly when she mentioned it in those terms, I thought, “That is what I need every time.” We were still timing contractions at that point, I think, and so they started switching off—whoever was attending me listened for me to say “contraction,” or “push,” or “pressure please,” and they hit the stupid little iContraction button and pressed on my back. “Lower, Marcie.” “Higher.” “Yes, that’s nice. Thank you.” Over and over. The breaks between contractions were such a blessed relief. Marcie told me how great I was doing, and I wondered. All I was really doing was trying my best to relax when the wave swept over me—was lying there quietly really doing so great? I just worked on not tensing up at the pain, not dwelling on how much it hurt, trying to focus on how good it was that labor seemed to be working.
The pool. The pool was ready! I wanted to get in. Frankly, I’d wanted to get in for days and days, just because I’d so looked forward to laboring in that birth pool. B said it was full enough, and it seemed as though it was probably warm enough. I got to change into my little nightgown—the gown I’d reserved for laboring! The gown I was going to give birth in!—and got into the pool.
Oh, my, I was so buoyant in that pool! How was I going to anchor myself down? I was just floating around in there—it was so big. And it wasn’t that warm. But it was good to be in the water. We thought about ways I could still lie on my side; it seemed so important that I be able to lie on my side. We found a milk crate for me to lean on, and that seemed to do the trick. Here was a contraction—oh, applying counter-pressure was not an easy feat while I was sloshing around in that pool.
I was in the pool for a while, despite the petty annoyances of having to brace myself for counter-pressure and the not-quite-comfortable temperature. B worried about me leaning right on a milk crate, and got me a foam kneeling pad from the birthing kit; it was such a nice idea in theory, but it floated so well that it kept getting away from me. I stuck with using the milk crate by itself.
My mom arrived at two-thirty. I couldn’t believe it—ninety minutes before, she’d been close to Fresno. I waved a finger at her for speeding, then slipped into another contraction. She whipped out her camera and took a picture with the flash. No flash! I might have felt bad about how vehemently I needed there to be no flash, but I was just in no mood to fuck around with stuff like that. I did not need bright lights in my face. Ugh. Come on.
In the pool was the first time I put a name to an interesting sensation I was feeling. It wasn’t quite that I had to poop, but more that the feeling of holding my rectum closed was too much effort to handle during a contraction. (Since when has it been work to keep my rectum closed? Weird.) Gingerly, I tried the experiment of letting it relax a little during a contraction, and that felt right. I wasn’t actively working on opening it, or anything; just letting it relax into the shape it seemed to want to be in. It was a big relief, as though I was leaning the muscle against a door frame so it didn’t have to work as hard. I told Marcie about this, and she didn’t seem to know quite what to make of it, but whatever—the sensation was good and it didn’t seem to be doing any harm, so I went on doing it.
After watching me go through a few contractions, my mom said to me, “So it doesn’t hurt very much, does it?” Uh... what?
“Yeah, mom, I’m feeling a lot of pain.”
“Well, you don’t look like you’re feeling very much!” O... kay. I really didn’t know what to say to that, so I’m pretty sure I said nothing at all.
The contractions came and went. B spent some time doing the counter-pressure, then Marcie again. Each new break between contractions felt like the absolute high point of my day; but then, after one contraction, the pain didn’t go away. I was clearly done with the contraction—my belly was soft, and the, I don’t know, contract-y sensation went away—but not with the pain. It just sat there in my back. Oh, dear. The counter-pressure didn’t seem to touch this pain that was only tangentially related to contracting. Suddenly, it was very very obvious that I was done with the pool. It was not warm enough. I could not get enough traction to make counter-pressure very helpful anymore. This floating around business was simply not okay. I made the announcement that I was headed back to bed, and marshaled the resources to get up and walk with the pain. I stood up, and it was nice to see that while I’d been in the tub, somebody had had the forethought to line my entire path back to bed with towels and bathmats, so I didn’t really have to worry too much about dripping. I clambered over the tub’s edge, shrugged myself into the biggest, fluffiest bathrobe we have in the house, and shivered my way back to bed.
Now, why didn’t I want to just take that wet nightgown off? I guess by then I was well into late first stage, and moving into myself and being irritable and irrational, because I wanted nothing to do with taking any clothes off. I rolled myself into bed, soaking nightgown and bathrobe and all, shivered under a sheet, and demanded more blankets. I’m sure at least B tried to convince me to wear something dry instead, but it just wasn’t happening. Come to think of it, I know that I ended up wearing a dry sweatshirt later on, but I have zero memory of finally consenting to changing out of that nightgown. It was almost a surprise to see it drying on the towel rack the next morning.
It seemed clear that this between-contractions pain was now here to stay, and I was so happy to be back in my safe (semi-)warm bed. Juli arrived fairly soon after I got into the bedroom, and sat by our side to see what I was up to. During the first full contraction since she’d arrived, I heard her whisper to Marcie, “Is she this quiet during every contraction?” It was absurdly gratifying to hear this, even in the middle of a contraction. She also called Sharon fairly soon after that, and I remember her reporting that I was “turned really far inward” at the moment. Seeing as how those words reached me as though they’d been spoken at the other end of a dark tunnel, that seemed apropos to me.
Juli did a quick cervical check. Nine centimeters. NINE! Holy SHIT! All the pain made so much more sense! Look how much work I’d done! Oh my GOD! It had been... oh, eleven hours of labor? And I’d been calm and quiet and done my thing and relaxed through every contraction (well, okay, I’d tried to relax through every contraction, and mostly succeeded), and I was DOING IT. I think Juli was surprised, too. She said something to me about how quiet I’d been, and I told her, all duh, “Well, yeah, that’s what we learned during Bradley class.”
She said, “Yeah, people learn it, but they don’t necessarily do it, and you are REALLY doing it.” Again: I’m not sure how I got the wherewithal to feel as smug and self-satisfied as I did at that moment, but man was I ever proud of myself when she told me that. And yet, even as I felt that, I also thought—but seriously, how else could anybody possibly do this? Reacting to the pain any other way would have cost energy I was pretty sure I did not have.
The persistent, between-contractions pain was taking its toll, though. During contractions, the “relax your rectum” feeling was getting stronger and stronger, until I realized that I was probably doing something akin to pushing. I wasn’t sure I could face being told to stop doing it, so I didn’t say anything and tried to keep it minimal for a while.
B was beside me, Marcie was beside me, B was lying next to me and holding my hand and I was telling him I loved him, oh, wow, I loved him so much. I don’t think I can ever really tell him how grateful I am that he was right there beside me the whole time, that he spent every minute of the entire day doing everything I needed. I probably will never be able to tell him exactly how much he made it possible for us to do what we did. I just knew, all day, that whatever happened, we would be fine, because he was right there. Having that faith was utterly necessary, and he gave it to me without a second thought.
Sharon arrived. Just like everybody else, she had to announce her presence to me before I was aware of it. Some little inkling of her significance sort of presented itself to my brain: “Hey, the gang’s all here now; apparently this show is officially on the road.” It may have been Sharon’s being there that prompted me to bring up my pushing shenanigans with Juli. I don’t know why, but at that point, having kept it to myself for that amount of time, I felt awfully worried about telling her, almost scared that it would turn out to have been a really bad thing to do. So, I explained the rectum feeling I’d told Marcie about, and said, “I’ve been doing something like pushing for a while now. Is... is that okay?”
She laughed at my furrowed little brow and told me that whatever I felt like doing was fine. What a relief. I guess I had really internalized the idea that you must only push when you are told it is okay to push. It was nice to hear that I should just do what my body told me to do.
So I started letting that feeling do its thing. I was pushing. Not huge pushes, just letting my body relax into the motions that it wanted to do.
My mother piped up: “You are doing really good; I guess it’s not that painful. Wow, that means it’s going to get a lot worse, huh?”
I lost it completely. I had been in continuous pain for what felt like hours, and here she was looking at me and deciding that it didn’t hurt AT ALL? And trying to psych me out for it getting WORSE! I let loose on her with a supremely nasty look. “Mom. How is that helpful? HOW is that supposed to help me? Why would you say such a thing?” Poor midwives; my mom had been signing only, and I’d used my voice when I responded to her, so they had no idea what she said, and only heard me snapping at her. Poor mom; she wasn’t really thinking carefully about what she was saying, and I believe she may have thought she was saying something supportive, trying to help me gear up for the challenges ahead. I did not need to feel scared about what was coming up, though. I put it out of my mind, and I guess B dealt with soothing my mom, for which I am thankful.
This gradually increasing pushing must have gone on for a while; the next thing I remember was Juli asking everybody to leave the room for a minute to give B and me some privacy, and telling us, “Go ahead and love up on each other for a few minutes. We’ll see if that gets things going.” Hearing this, I was so relieved that I knew what she was talking about. I think if I had never read Spiritual Midwifery, I would’ve been awfully weirded out to have our midwife tell us to get sexy with each other in the middle of labor. As it was, though, it made a lot of sense, and even sounded pretty good—kissing would probably distract me from the pain for a few minutes, right?
So, everybody left, and B leaned over me, and good Lord, that was some intense kissing. It felt so good, and again, I had a little flash of “Okay, okay, Ina May, you are a batty old hippie, but you know what you’re talking about.” It did feel spiritual. It did feel positively “tantric.” We were connected way more deeply than we might be during a run-of-the-mill makeout session.
It obviously connected very deeply within me, too, because we hadn’t kissed for more than thirty seconds before BAM, I had a crazy contraction that took me much further than I’d been before. Whoa. Whoa. That was a little much. I did not want things to rev up that quickly. “Okay,” I told B, “I think that did it. I think that was enough.”
So we just lay there quietly together, riding out the contractions, doing the counter-pressure, until Juli came back. We told her how it had gone, and she observed a few more contractions, then asked us to do it again. Wait, what? Again?! No, ma’am. Noooo, thank you. I told her I didn’t think it was a good idea. She sort of raised her eyebrows and told us, “Well, we can go on like this for some hours more, or you can try it and we can get this baby out sometime soon.”
Well, shit. She was forcing me into making out with my husband some more. Dammit, I was going to have to keep it up with the sexiness. I can’t remember if this struck me as funny during the moment, but B definitely found it funny, and I think Juli and Sharon did too. Okay, fine, I would kiss him, fine.
They left, and I collected myself, and manned up, and we made out. Again, it felt amazing, and again, oh, OH, when I contracted, something entirely other than my conscious self seized me and puuuuuuuushed on me. Oh, dear. I was definitely going to do the involuntary poop thing if this kept up.
Okay. Okay. I could encourage myself and keep it together. By the time everyone came in again, I had started talking aloud about what was going on. “Okay. I can do this. It’s coming and I can do it and I’m going to PUSH PUUUUUUUSH!” Or “This is good, this is progress, I am doing the work, huuuuhhhhhhh, puuuuuuuuuuush!” Or even just “I CAN DOOOOOOOOO IIIIIIIIIIIITTTTTT!” After one or two of these big cheerleading efforts, I came through the contraction and felt the need to let everyone know what I was going through—I remembered what B had spent the morning telling me, and instead of letting out a complaint, I looked all around the room, wide-eyed, and told them all: “This is hard work!” That one got a big laugh. Laboring Tee is a hilarious stand-up comic. (Or a lie-down comic?)
I was still lying down. I was still in the bed. At some point, it did dimly occur to me to find it amusing that I was laboring essentially flat on my back. Wasn’t this exactly my problem with hospitals, that they “make you” labor lying down? And here I was! Every time I thought to change position, though, the idea was instantly shut down by how painful it was to move. Fine, then. I was laboring lying flat, and there was nothing anyone was going to do about it. Whatever.
Push, push, push, PUSH, push, I was so desperate for a break, I was so desperate for a minute’s respite from the pain, and none was coming. I was so desperate to make my own decisions about what my body would do next, and I couldn’t. I’d feel a contraction coming on, and tell myself: Okay, Tee, three really good pushes in this contraction and then you can rest through the rest of it. But my body went rogue on me. I’d push for my count, and try to relax, and my body would push yet harder. It was terrifying, and I screeched, “I can’t stop pushing!” Again, hilarity. Everybody thought this was great. “Yes, that’s good, honey!” It was good? It was? Okay. Okay. It was good. It has to be a mark of how loving and trusting I felt toward everybody (and how loving and trustworthy they were toward me) that their word was enough for me—if they said it was a good thing that I was no longer in control of myself, then yes, it was a good thing and I could let it go and not be in control of myself. I didn’t have to freak out, even though it was frightening.
So, I stopped really counting pushes or deciding how many I’d be doing, and just tried to devote myself to pouring all of my effort into every push my body sent my way.
It seemed to work. I was... yep, I was involuntarily voiding my bowels. Awesome. I felt the need to announce that out loud, and Marcie calmly informed me that she was on it, and then there she was, wiping me off. Thank God for the perspective brought by that deep level of labor; I didn’t care at all.
B said to me later that he believes this was our experience of transition. How lucky are we? If transition is the scary, dark place that convinces a woman that she can’t do it, I can’t imagine going through it in a nicer way than starting with kisses and ending with the sense that even if I couldn’t control what was happening, I was surrounded by people who understood what was going on and thought it was great. Looking back on it, this is probably one of the aspects of the birth for which I feel most grateful.
This body-directed pushing was really getting us places. The sensation of pushing slowly shifted its focal point away from my rectum, and firmly into the birth canal. I began to be able to feel Ryu moving through. Then, my water broke! It BURST, like a water balloon! I have no idea how far the amniotic fluid gushed, but it felt like I’d positively exploded something with my vagina. This, too, needed to be announced. “My water broke!” I gasped. “I POPPED it!” Okay, obviously it had been pretty evident to everybody else in the room, because once again I was the comedian of the year. Laboring women stating the really, really obvious are funny.
Outside of that big event, it seemed to me like very slow going; I was so impatient, and I’d certainly been hoping for a very quick second stage (my mother and grandmother were both surprisingly fast pushers for all of their children; I myself was born in 20 minutes flat). It started to feel important that I make sure to include the baby in all of my pep talks, so my little cheerleading slogans moved from “I can do this” to “we can do this”—“Feel that, baby? You’re moving down!” (This is probably seriously overcorrecting what I actually said, which may have sounded more like a gigantic, grunted “DOWN, BABY! DOOOWWWWWWNNNN!”)
I pushed for another year or so—or maybe it was another thirty minutes. Or five. I really can’t say. Juli said she could see his head! “Oh! Hi, baby!” I called. Everyone fell all over everyone else trying to clarify that he wasn’t out yet, and I said, “I know, I know, he can’t hear me yet,” and then they had to correct me on that, of course he could hear me, from inside just as he’d been able to hear me for months, and I realized that ultimately we were all on the same page but language wasn’t working for me at the moment and gave up trying to make sense of myself and pushed some more, since that was all I was good for anyway.
For hours, I’d been resistant to basically anything that wasn’t lying on my side and laboring. Every sip of water took cajoling. Marcie made me a milkshake with coconut milk and strawberries; they basically had to threaten me to take each swallow.
I got incredibly literal; if Sharon or B asked me “do you want to do xyz?” I blithely answered “no thanks” and completely ignored the real meaning until they re-phrased it to “please do this xyz.” My stubbornly literal piece de resistance had to be, when his head was close to emerging, telling Juli, “but I don’t want to open my legs!”
“Honey, you’re going to have to open your legs to let him be born.”
Oh. Right. Okay, then. Open it was.
Another series of pushes, and Juli told me to reach down and feel his head. The little bit of him that bulged out of me was so soft! That was his skull?! Oh, man! And I could feel his hair! “Oh my God, he has so much hair!”
Pushing, pushing, and he was moving forward, oh, it hurt, it hurt so much, oh God, was I tearing?, “No, no, I can’t push him further, I’m tearing,” but everyone looked and assured me, “No, sweetie, we don’t see any tearing,” and again, I find it amazing that this encouragement was enough. I most certainly did feel tearing, and I was tearing—they didn’t see it because they were looking downward, and I was tearing upward—but they told me it was okay for me to keep going, so that was all there was to it: I kept going.
He crowned, and despite the rushing pain, it was wonderful. A few more Herculean pushes, and there he was—there was his whole head! Juli and Sharon saw the cord wrapped around his neck, so they eased him out of that, and here came his slippery little body, and here was our son, caught by his father, all white and blue and purple, and it’s true, that’s the most beautiful thing you can ever see.
He figured out crying quickly, and spent most of the first hour screaming—he had a lot to say about his day, too. The placenta took forever to get out, but after massage, concentrated pushing, some extremely awkward squatting, several different homeopathic herbs, and a Pitocin shot, as everybody was walking out the door so B and I could do more making out (ha ha, it was a last resort this time, ha ha, it’s funny how reluctant Tee is to kiss her husband), I finally felt the contractions that got the thing out. B cut the cord.
Sharon took me to the bathroom so she could help me shower and pee. Showering turned out to be a no-go for the night; I was awfully woozy, and found out later that I’d managed to lose a fair amount of blood.
Jamiko came over with a burrito for B, and ended up hanging out with Marcie, laughing and talking for so long that my mother later asked me, “Was that Marcie’s boyfriend or what?” Oh, Jamiko.
We got some instructions on using the Sitz bath herbs to make compresses, and some discussion of what my few tears looked like and whether we should do stitches (it didn’t seem to make sense to). We pinched my nipple into all sorts of shapes and got through a few trial breastfeeding runs. Marcie offered me “some toast,” which turned out to be the single greatest English muffin with butter I have ever had in my life.
By 10:30 or so, everybody was packing up to head home and we were just about ready to get under the covers and go to sleep. And... that was it. We had this beautiful momentous thing happen in our home, and when it was over... we were home. We just curled up and went to sleep, or, rather, B and Ryukichi went to sleep, and I lay there all night staring at them, lost in the most wonderful, clear-headed, hormonal high.
It’s now 10:30 at night on Saturday. It’s been exactly eight days, and all three of us are here together in the place where we started out together. I feel so profoundly fortunate that we were able to do it this way. I wouldn’t trade a minute of it for anything.