Reckoning with Birth

By Nancy Linnon
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I always imagined birthing him in the middle of the night, a velvet midnight-blue kind of experience. Instead, he started into the world at 5:30 a.m., just as the sun drained the light from the moon, and I remember mostly pale shades: the beige interior of my car speeding to the Birth Center; the light peach on the birthing room wall; the egg white tile on the Jacuzzi tub; the ivory lace that hung over a set of French Doors opposite the bed. He is a fire sign, but I think of air on the day he was born.

Early on a Wednesday morning, 10 days before Jacob’s due date, I wake and head toward the bathroom as I have two or three times a night for nine months. This time, though, when I stand up from the toilet, liquid continues trickling down my thighs, pooling on the worn linoleum floor. I wake my husband, Jesse, I shower, and I pay careful attention to the cramps in my lower pelvic area.

“Do you think maybe I just have the flu or something?” I yell to Jesse on the other side of the shower curtain. “The cramps don’t feel the way they said they would.”

In another three hours, I will be seven centimeters dilated, and one hour after that, I’ll be ready to push. But now, in the nascent moments of impending parenthood, I take my time. As I dry off, I suggest taking a walk before calling the midwife. The moon is almost full. I wear black leggings and my “labor shirt”—a white T-shirt that my best friends decorated with encouraging phrases: Just Breathe and Have Him Quickly. I believe we have plenty of time for this stroll, but a couple of blocks away, the cramps begin to slow me down every few minutes. Still, I don’t call them labor pains. We return home and Jesse makes me fried eggs and toast and I clean my plate.

During the previous month, Jesse and I have attended Saturday morning childbirth classes. We’ve learned about the stages of labor, gathered tips on how to make it through without medication, and toured the Women’s Birthing and Health Center in Tucson, AZ where we plan to birth our boy with the help of midwives. In one of the classes, we watch a movie of different women in the throes of natural childbirth: one woman screams unabashedly; another rocks silently through much of her dilating; a third sits big-bellied on a stool in the shower, hoping the cascading water would hurry her labor. Immediately after the baby is born, each woman is shown gazing tearfully back and forth between her partner and the baby. Watching them, I am tearful, too, imagining washes of color and transformation.

It is my first baby, but I feel calm. The day before, I write in my journal to my baby: “I’m ready for you now.” Perhaps ‘ready’ is too confident a word. What I mean is that I’ve done all the preparation work I can think of—not just buying the crib and diapers but discovering a new-found confidence in myself.

The pregnancy was not planned. In late April, I went to the drugstore wanting to buy tampons, but purchased a pregnancy test instead. At home, the two pink lines appeared almost immediately and I paced the house with my hands over my ears, peeking periodically at the stick balanced on the bathroom sink, hoping I would see the two lines join miraculously into one solid not-pregnant mark. Jesse and I were not married, and at 35, I was still unsure I wanted children. In these modern days of “trying” to have a child, my surprise pregnancy left me feeling irresponsible and unworthy. Even at the dawn of the new millennium, being my age, unmarried, and pregnant felt illegitimate. Was I allowed to want a child I did not plan?

And yet, after the initial shock, I realized that not planning the pregnancy did not mean it wasn’t the right thing to come into my life. In fact, as the pregnancy progressed, I felt stronger and more capable than I ever had. The words “fierce with reality” kept going through my mind. I had run across the phrase some years before in a book by Florida Scott-Maxwell and decided to look it up again: “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours,” Scott-Maxwell wrote in her book The Measure of My Days. “When you truly possess all you have been and done…you are fierce with reality.”

Pregnancy provided tangible reassurance of some essential capability I possessed—not just to carry a baby, but to create and persevere—and the self-doubt that had plagued most of my life shriveled. I, like many other women, felt intimately aware of the sacred. One morning, I awakened to a churning energy in the center of my belly, as if Jacob’s spirit had ignited within me as my conscious mind slept. I’d never experienced such an arresting moment.

Seconds after finishing my “in-labor” breakfast, I am laying on our bed, the pain coming in faster waves, and Jesse’s calling the midwife. She asks me how far apart the contractions are and I glance at the piece of paper where Jesse has tried to track time, but I can’t seem to do the math that will yield the appropriate answer.

“I’ll meet you at the Birth Center in about an hour,” she says calmly.

Inside, I know how fast this labor is going to go, and I’m angry that she appears so nonchalant, yet I don’t insist that we need to be at the Birth Center now. Already I have let go of my own reins.