My Birth Story
July 29th
I go into labor on Friday, July 29th. I’m not ready. My due date is August 15th, most babies are born +/- 2 weeks of the due date, I was going to get ready and pack my go-bag that weekend. Get ready for my August baby. But it’s Friday, I’m tired, my back aches. Chores for the weekend. I just nap on the couch and rest all day, which is what the instructions from my midwife are anyway.
7:10pm: interview call with the doula
In June I’d decided I did in fact want a doula but that’s pretty late to decide that and so everyone I’d been calling was, understandably, all booked. I finally find one with availability and have a call scheduled with her just after 7pm. We talk for over 30 minutes. I am happy to hire her on the spot but want to look less desperate, so I say I’d talk it over with Dave and let her know.
I start to feel actually quite bad, like I’d drank some bad milk and it is working it’s way through my guts. There’d been a tiny amount of blood in my underwear though. I google “signs of labor”.
Hmm, it’s both vague and sounds like exactly what I was feeling. I tell Dave “I think I might be going into labor, because I feel like I’m dying of dysentry”. He says that seems really unlikely, then I show him the google results for “signs of labor” and he says ok well, when you describe it like that then it does seem like labor. He says let’s call the midwife, and I say no it’s too early, and he says you feel like you’re dying and you don’t want to call the midwife? So we page the midwife.
My midwife, Midwife A, is in the middle of a week-long backpacking trip. I am annoyed that she is gone right now. When I originally met her, she said “Wait when are you due because I am doing a long hiking trip in May”. I said I wasn’t due til August and she said ok great, she can take me on as a client then. It was tacit, but I assumed this was an agreement that she would not be going on any long hiking trips near my due date in August. One of the advantages of midwives is you’re supposed to be able to pick who delivers your baby, rather than just having whoever is on call. Since she is gone, I work with her back-up midwife instead, Midwife B. I actually had talked toMidwife B when I was originally interviewing midwives and I don’t really click with her, I find everything she says confusing and not comforting, also unlike Midwife A, she isn’t a nurse practitioner and so she can’t prescribe things to me. I’d worked with her before, when I got covid during Midwife A’s long hiking trip in May. She was unable to help then… though I’m not sure anyone could have.
8:20pm
I feel a twinge while I am laying down and think “that can’t be my water breaking can it?”. It feels too cartoonish! I get up and my legs are wet and the floor is wet. Dave is still on phone with the paging service and I say “Dave, my water just broke” which he relays to the page. Bramble comes over to sniff and I shoo her away. I note the time — 8:20pm. I read somewhere that it was risky to go more than 24 hours starting when your water breaks, and I know first time labors tend to take a long time. Sooooo I feel pretty certain that my baby will be born TOMORROW, July 30. I know her birthday. I’d spent so long imagining it in August, but she is going to be a July baby, just barely!
I’d read a few times it was good to have a “labor activity”, something to distract you and keep you on your feet while it took so long. I think I read in Amish communities that when labor starts, they bake a dozen loaves of bread or something? I don’t have a labor activity in mind, and I’m not much of a baker. It’s a cliche that first-time moms go to the hospital too early, and all throughout my pregnancy friends had encouraged me to stay at home as long as possible, so I want to try to get comfy and happily distracted. I had always imagined I’d go on walks, since I like to walk. But it is dark out. It’s nighttime. I don’t feel like taking a walk. I hadn’t imagined that.
I get in the shower — it seems like the right thing to do since I have amniotic fluid on my legs and I know I’ll be annoyed if I have greasy hair while laboring. We miss the return call from Midwife B, then Dave answers and we chat with her while I am in the shower. She says try to eat some food and try to get some rest tonight, since tomorrow will be busy!! And said the baby doesn’t have to strictly be here in 24 hours, just strongly on her way. She asks me to call her next when I meet the 5–1–1 rule: contractions happening at least every 5 minutes, lasting at least a minute, for an hour.
Dave and I look at each other after hanging up and joke that I should call the doula back now and ask “actually, are you busy TOMORROW?”. I do call her back! She doesn’t answer though and I don’t leave a voicemail. I’m not sure what to say. I call Ducker, and my mom and tell them we are planning on hunkering in bed with a movie to try to get some rest.
I keep going to sit on the toilet. I realize I don’t actually have to pee, but I LOVE sitting on the toilet. I can be so relaxed there. I hang out for a minute on our toilet, with it’s heated seat, feeling excited and nervous and trying to relax.
9:30pm
The discomfort in my stomach has coalesced into discrete contractions, so I start tracking them — but it is too annoying to do with my watch. As always when I am annoyed by a simple thing like this, I search the App Store. Perfect, there is a contraction timer app. I download it and time four contractions. It makes a little trumpeting noise and a notification popped up — “doo do da doo! you’re in active labor!”.
I can’t remember — wait is active labor the stage where I am supposed to start baking a dozen loaves of bread? Or is it the stage after that? There’s “pre-labor”, “active labor”, “stage 1”, “stage 2”, I forget what all these mean though. The contractions hurt. I note the time, I guess I’ll call Midwife B in an hour if it continues like this. I’m not very hungry, but I do eat a Noosa yogurt, given Midwife B’s recommendation to eat something. I ride out the contractions bent over our bar, or on the ground. Dave rushes around — we are at our beach house — so he is packing things up to drive to Bellingham where we’d planned to be home in the town the birth center is in.
9:51pm
Dave texts my mom “I’ll let you know when we start heading to the birth center tomorrow”
10:32pm
I feel very bad. I pull myself together to call Midwife B and tell her I’d met the “5–1–1 rule”. She says “Well, I can tell you’re not in active labor because of how chipper your voice is”.
In one of the best books I read during my pregnancy, Birthing from Within, the author says people tend to bring the same patterns they have to the rest of their life to birth, and recommends journalling as a way to work through the ways those ingrained patterns might show up in birth and to brainstorm ways to combat them or mitigate any negative impact they might have. When I read that I thought YES, that makes so much sense to me, I definitely want to do it. But I was busy. I had a job! I hadn’t done the work. I immediately recognized this as a pattern I’d had in my life — doctors don’t take my grievances seriously because I look like I have it together. I do not look like I am in pain. I do not complain. I don’t whine. I had not journaled on things I might do so that I didn’t repeat this pattern in labor, and I was in no condition to brainstorm now.
I think ok, well, she’s the expert, she sees women starting labor much more often than I do so she must know. We end the phone call.
10:43pm
We get in the car and start driving to Bellingham. My teeth are chattering like crazy and so Dave worries I am cold. I say no, not cold, I just feel freaked out. I feel full of adrenaline. It feels calming to chatter my teeth. Don’t I always do this when I’m freaked out? I’m confused. I don’t think I do normally chatter my teeth. It feels so good though. I make a note to myself, maybe I should try chattering my teeth again sometime in the future. It feels so nice. I google “teeth chattering labor”. It is a normal thing to happen. I am soothed to learn this. Everything seems so normal and so good. I am encouraged. Even my water breaking — I had read it doesn’t normally gush out dramatically the way it happens in the movies, don’t expect this. But that is what had just happened! Everything is going perfectly. We are driving and it is going by so fast. Normally the drive seems to take a long time. Maybe Dave is driving fast. I am distracted by screaming and moaning. I keep tracking contractions on my little app. I feel bad for Dave — he is driving and stuck in an enclosed space with me screaming. I worry about his ears. He looks ok though. He doesn’t look like he minds at all.
11:30pm
We get to Bellingham. I don’t know what Dave does. I immediately bend over our cold stone countertop. When we had first toured the house, I thought it was concrete, but it’s actually something fancy, so fancy it is advertised as a feature of the house, though I had never heard of it before we bought this house. I lean over it and press my forehead into it, hard.“Please save me, fancy stone”, I pray. “I’m sorry for thinking you were concrete”.
Midnight
I go to the bathroom and vomit up the yogurt. Welp, so much for eating. I google “vomiting labor”. It is also a normal thing. I am encouraged to learn this.
I live to track contractions on this app. It is my sole focus in life. It is the only way I am keeping it together. The only thing I can focus on. I am so much happier having something to do, something important to distract me. I guess this is my“labor activity”.
12:34am, July 30th
I call Midwife B again, even though I am supposed to wait until morning. I can’t wait. I’m dying, I say. I really think this is it and we should go to the birth center. She warns me and says if I’m not far enough along, we will just have to turn around and go home, and that I should really try to get some rest since I will be more comfortable at home. She says she just had a mom who came to the birth center and was dilated three centimeters. She was having a really hard time, so Midwife B stayed with her all night. When they checked again in the morning, the mom was still at three centimeters.
I wonder what the point of her telling me this story is. This is also a common thread in my life, where someone says something pointedly and I feel like it’s very important I understand what they’re really saying right now… but I don’t. It always feels wrong to say “Ok.. I don’t get it.” When I was younger, I thought they were being consciously oblique because culturally sensitivity around their real point meant it had to be tacit. Now, I’m not sure… at least some times it doesn’t seem conscious on their part. Because I don’t know what the real point of what she is saying is, I don’t know how to respond. My best guess is her point was “I want to recognize your pain, but also prove to you it’s possible to be in a lot of pain and not progressing quickly or close to giving birth by telling you about another person for whom this was true.” If that was her point, I don’t think that one story about one person one time is enough proof I shouldn’t come to the birth center, unless there were other things about this women that made the midwife think we’d have similar labors, but I don’t think it’s known — and certainly not by me — which attributes predict the type of labor a woman will have… but it felt antagonistic to learn about that by asking “what is it about this woman and I that makes you think we’d have similar labor experiences?” but maybe there was a nicer way —
While I was spinning up about this Dave interjects “look, I just looked up rapid labor in my book The Birth Partner, and Maia has all the signs”. Midwife B sighs and says “Yeah, everyone thinks they have rapid labor but it’s just that you’ve never been through something so intense before, but this is just normal.”
It’s just that you’ve never been through something so intense before. She’s right. I never have. I have definitely super never been through something this intense before. This feels wrong. Is this really right? Somehow when everyone told me to stay at home as long as possible, I didn’t realize that I would be absolutely sure I was dying during that time. How could anyone stay home through this? I need HELP and I need it now.
Midwife B continues “It’s really really unlikely for a first time mom but if you insist and tell me you really want me to meet you at the birth center, I will” I say I’m sorry, I KNOW it is such a cliche, that first time moms always go to the hospital too early and I have this image of myself being stronger than that, but I’m sorry, I can’t do it, I’ve failed, yes, I insist on wanting her to meet me there, please can we go to the birth center now. She says she needs 30 minutes to get ready — she has to pack a bag with some snacks “just in case we do stay there” her voice laden with skepticism — so we plan to meet there at 1:10am.
We hang up, and I resume screaming into the fancy stone. I keep hearing her say “It’s just because you’ve never been through something so intense before” repeat in my brain. That sounds like it’s going to get a lot worse, right? How was I supposed to make it through the night? How could anything possibly get worse than this?
We leave Bramble at home and, miserably, drive over. I think “there was no fucking way we will turn around and go home, I am having the worst fucking time in this car I will just stand and scream in the parking lot if we’re too early” I am cranking down on the “oh shit” handle and pulling most of my body out of the seat like it is covered in spikes. I am cycling through the pain management techniques I had learned for this moment, desperately trying to find something to make it bearable. One of them was to dive deep into the pain and describe it precisely out loud, which I do for a few contractions and Dave says he likes hearing it and understands it a lot better. But mostly I cling to the horrible default routine I’ve developed, saying “ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow” for the peak of the contraction, a teeth-chattering kind of foaming-at-the-mouth / being in an electric chair “juh juh juh juh juh juh juh juh juh juh juh juh” during the lulls and various loud, primal grunts in between. Should I record myself with an audio note on my phone? No. It’s remarkable, but I don’t want to remember this, and I don’t think future me wants to hear myself in this much agony.
I’m stunned by the difference between my experience and Midwife B’s tepid response. Maybe this is what being a good midwife is? Calm throughout a storm? But what the hell. Plus my app says I am in active labor. I wonder what the difference is due to. I go to my default assumption when things are confusing — I must be wrong. Maybe I am tracking my contractions the wrong way. I’ve been recording from when they start hurting to when they stop hurting. Maybe I am only supposed to do the very peak, the jam-my-jaw together “ow ow ow” time. That would make my contractions both shorter and less frequent, and then maybe I wouldn’t be in active labor? I change how I track them to the new way. Even like this, they are still so fast. The app says I am still in active labor.
1:13am
We get to the birth center a little late. We park in the parking lot and I look around, struck by how residential the neighborhood was. I wonder about the people who live nearby, if they knew there would be women screaming bloody murder all through the night by their house when they decided to live there? It’s hot and A/C in my town is rare, so their windows are open. I feel bad for them, though not bad enough to stop screaming.
There’s a handicap ramp. Ok, I can do this. I steel myself. It is formidable but I think “I just have to get inside of this building and then everything will be ok”. I make it a few steps and stop for a contraction. I make it a few steps more. We slowly move up the ramp this way, then walk inside and immediately back to the “big room”. I know it from a prenatal appointment I’d had in it. I walk straight to a nightstand — the closest thing to the bar and the fancy stone I’d been leaning over to make it through my earlier contractions — and bend over it, gripping both sides of it and digging my fingers into the edge. My fingers on my right hand go numb. It was made of wood. That’s fucking crazy. Why isn’t everything in the birth center made of titanium to withstand the forces of the madwomen within? Too bad, I am going to rip this flimsy fucking piece of shit wood nightstand in half.
1:42am
Dave texts my mom “Okay, we are at the birth center now! Bramble will be happy to see you”
Midwife B wants my vitals. She takes my temperature, measures my pulse and blood oxygenation. She wants to measure my blood pressure between contractions, but, you know how your blood pressure is measured, they have to inflate that stupid cuff and wait for it to deflate, it takes forever, maybe 30 seconds, and I don’t have any breaks long enough for the process. How is this supposed to work. Don’t they have some way of measuring your blood pressure that can happen in between contractions? This feels like a stupid oversight, yet another stupid flaw in the way that nothing in medicine is designed for women. We try a couple times. The reading is way high, way too high. This is not surprising to me since I’d had gestational hypertension, we were monitoring it and it’s why I was on medical leave before I went into labor.
I had gone in for lab work on the 28th, the day before going into labor. The lab work results say I have pre-eclampsia, and my kidneys were failing. Pre-eclampsia is the most common cause of maternal mortality in the United States. The night before, a friend had texted me bad news about their friend — she had had eclampsia, her high blood pressure caused a seizure, she had an emergency c-section while in a coma that she never recovered from. It is very scary. In order to go to the birth center, one needs less than 300 mg/dcl of protein in their urine to show that your kidneys were functioning well enough, otherwise it is too risky to do without more medical support in case of a seizure, and laboring moms need to go straight to the hospital. My results were 495 mg/dcl the day before so I had risked out of going to the birth center. But, we didn’t have the lab results at this time. My guess is that the lab order, which said in big looping handwriting MIDWIFE A CC MIDWIFE B was mistakenly only sent to Midwife A, who was hiking. But perhaps some other lame mistake happened in this horrible industry full of incompetent people and awful software. Maybe Midwife B just didn’t see them, or maybe they weren’t ready yet. So I had gone to the birth center instead of the hospital, though it was too risky for me to be there at all, and Midwife B was rediscovering how high-risk I was.
Midwife B asks me if I want her to do a manual exam, to see how dilated I am. It’s nice of her to ask, I’d read all this stuff in my hippie books about how manual exams pose a risk of infection after your water breaks, and that you should refuse unnecessary ones since they don’t even help anything and only serve the doctor’s curiosity — but I don’t give a fuck about any of that now, and the whole point of dragging her to the birth center is to find out how far along I was. I say yes. She checks and says I am dilated to 7 centimeters. I am so relieved. I don’t know what the cutoff is to stay at the birth center is and not have the midwife drive home, but I am pretty sure 7 centimeters exceeds it. And, even though I know dilation doesn’t happen linearly, being 7 out of 10 centimeters dilated was kind of like being 70% of the way done with something, which given how bad this something was, was a hell of a lot better than say, 25% done.
The midwife says labor is happening fast and the contractions are happening really fast, so we are going to try to slow it down by taking a bath. She never confirms we get to stay in the birth center but it seems clear we are. I get in and don’t like it, I feel so vulnerable on my back. She says give it 3 contractions in the bath, and if I still didn’t like it I could get out. After 3 I feel like I could stay. In hindsight, I probably could have been in the bath in a different position, but I didn’t think of that at the time. I want to dig out my eyes to distract myself from the pain. My left eye has always been a little worse than my right eye. I make a note to myself — if I decide to gouge out one of my eyes, I should choose the left eye, as it’d be less of a loss. Dave sits on the ground next to the bath holding my hand. I make special effort not to crush all the tiny merely human bones in his hand.
Midwife B tells me “when you have a contraction all the muscles in your body seize up.”
Again, she talks and I wonder what her point is. My best guess is that she means most laboring moms don’t have all their muscle seize up with a contraction or it would be better (for my blood pressure?) if I didn’t? or maybe both of those things? I am struck on this idea that not everyone has all their muscles seize up. Was it possible that this experience was less intense for other people, most people, than it was for me? The idea is unbelievable, confusing, scary. How could you endure this much pain without seizing up, throwing your head back, grinding your teeth together? What is wrong with me?
I kick my legs against the sides of the bath, hard.
My right arm was relaxed since Dave was holding it, and I try to get my left arm to relax too. Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.
Midwife B says something about an injection. I assume she meant Vitamin K. We say, “oh no we want to do oral”. She says no not the baby, don’t worry we won’t do anything to the baby without asking you… I couldn’t hear over my screaming. I assume she must have been talking about Pitocin after delivery? I think I say that is fine. I think I say I don’t care. I think I say whatever.
Midwife B asks me if I do homeopathy. Why is she asking? I immediately assume it’s because if I say yes, she will give me some homeopathy thing, something that at least some people in the world think helps at least a little with this situation. So I desperately nod yes, I do homeopathy. This, is a lie. I do not do homeopathy. She holds out a dropper of something above my mouth and I fret about what to do. God it’s going to become immediately obvious that I do not do homeopathy isn’t it? I don’t know what to do with this dropper. Do I swallow it immediately or hold it under my tongue like a cannabis tincture? Damn maybe she had been planning to give it to me regardless and only asked if I did homeopathy so she’d know if she should give me instructions or not. She says “This is Rescue Remedy, a classic Midwife A trick”. She also put a sugar pill (?? isn’t “sugar pill” another word for a placebo or a pill that does nothing? maybe it has electrolytes? but wouldn’t that be salt though not sugar?) into my glass of water, and insists I drink all of it.
Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.
She keeps taking my blood pressure, catching readings in the tiny amount of seconds between contractions. Still too high. Still too high. We need to get my blood pressure down. She asks “can you relax as much as possible?”. Dave starts stroking my arm. I am so frustrated, to be in the worst pain of my life oh and risking my life, and what I need to do is RELAX. Is this a joke? Hurry up and relax so you don’t die. Hurry up and relax so the baby is ok.
I remember in a book I read Ina May said ‘loose lips loose bottoms’. Or something like that. Loose lips loose cervix. I don’t know. I definitely remember I am supposed to keep my mouth open. I am supposed to make the sound a horse makes. I don’t know how to make the sound a horse makes. Should I have learned that before now? Should I have practiced making the sound a horse makes to prepare for labor? They do something with their lips, that’s definitely right. I don’t remember what it is though. Is screaming “ow ow ow ow ow ow ow” thousands of times good enough? My mouth is certainly open, most of the time. I need to relax my cervix. Oh my god it’s so hard it’s so impossible. Someone is cutting me open from the inside. I need to relax to help my blood pressure. I need to relax to help the cervix open and the baby get here. Relax relax relax.
Midwife B asks me where the contractions hurt. I say, uh, I think in my cervix. She said well yes of course the most extreme pain would be in my cervix, but that I should be feeling the contraction elsewhere too, maybe the top or the sides of my uterus. My eyes roll to the back of my skull. Does it hurt somewhere else? Does something besides the worst pain in my life hurt? I don’t know. No, nothing else hurts, how could I notice anything else hurting, sorry, I don’t know.
We can’t get a single lower reading on my blood pressure. Midwife B says according to procedure, I have to be transferred to the hospital. She says it’s too risky to stay at the birth center because it threatened my health and safety. She says of course, if you were pushing now we could just stay here. She says this somewhat pointedly. What does she mean? Am I supposed to be pushing now? She says the highest blood pressure happens during pushing, so that’s when I’ll be at the highest risk of seizure, of brain hemorrhaging, of my kidneys shutting down. She says I don’t know if you guys pray to anyone but if you do, now would be the time to pray. Fuck! I thought. We don’t pray to anyone! Is it too late to come up with someone to pray to? I want to ask her if she has any suggestions of someone or something we could pray to. Is there some kind of hippy good vibes entity that will carry us through this experience safely? They say there’s no atheists in foxholes but they are definitely no atheists in birth centers.
I’d read all these books about how giving birth in hospitals was so scary, bright lights, so cold, busy nurses running in and out of the room. But I have to say, being in an old victorian house, in the dark middle of the night, in the quiet, with life-threatening high blood pressure and with just a midwife I didn’t really click with… I am deeply terrified here too.
I kind of thought my midwife would help me through the pain somehow? I feel so on my own, in the bath with Dave next to me holding my hand and Midwife B, somewhere else in the room, sitting and writing (charting?). It is up to me alone to make my way through this. I use some visualization techniques I’d learned for pain management. To my surprise, they really did work, as the contractions started and swelled in intensity. All visualizations went out the window at the peak of the contractions though. The only thing that helps at all was a visualization I’d made up. I don’t know if this is accurate, but I imagine the baby nestling her head, testing and trying to pry open the cervix and make her way out. This makes me so happy I even smile sometimes. It was basically exactly like this:
Midwife B comes over and feels the bath. She furrows her brow in concern. Is the water too cold? Do you want some more warm water. I imagine what it would be like to care about the temperature of the water. Was the water too cold? Could I feel the water? I had no idea. I had not had any thoughts about the temperature of the water. If you were in a bath and someone was hacking you open with an axe, would you care about the temperature of the water? Could you even feel it?
I am obsessed with the idea of making progress. I can’t stand the idea that all this pain isn’t making progress forward. I tell myself each contraction opened the cervix one more hair’s width. Again, I don’t know if this is anatomically correct, if that’s how it works. But after each one I think “good. that’s one more hair’s width done, we’re getting closer”. It was so helpful to feel that it was a finite amount of time, however long. I could get through a finite amount of time, I just couldn’t do this forever.
I’d heard that some people napped between contractions. My contractions were 0, or 15, or 30 seconds apart. I was not napping in between them. Ina May, in the books I’d read, said she didn’t like the word contractions, and used “rushes” instead. She said to imagine a wave cresting up, reaching a crescendo and dying back. I am suddendly reminded of one scary time playing in the waves of Florida beaches as a kid. I wasn’t paying attention and a wave came up behind me and hit me, knocking the wind out of me and knocking me under the waves. Struggling under water, I couldn’t breathe and was hit by the next wave. I couldn’t tell which way was up, and the waves kept coming, one after another. When I finally got out I burst out crying, panicked and out of breathe and went and lay on the beach, the salt from my tears mixing with the ocean salt. Could you have napped, in the seconds between the waves hitting? Could you relax your body while you were drowning?
One of the reasons I was excited about the birth center was because they had nitrous oxide, a self-administered pain relief option that was less intense than an epidural but took the edge off some of the pain. I assume and resent that I can’t have it because Midwife B is not a nurse practitioner, so I don’t bring it up with her — I don’t think it will be good for our relationship for her to feel bad for not having the credentials to help me, once again. I think, it turns out, she could have administered it, she just didn’t offer because she didn’t know that I wanted it and didn’t know I had been planning on it.
I suddenly think “oh my god truly I cannot stand this pain another second this is it I am going to die” and start to panic and start repeating “I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok I’m ok” over and over again, trying to convince myself I can possibly live through this. Midwife B cheerily calls over from her stool “That’s the type of positive talk we like to hear!”. I think oh my god this woman truly does not understand how not positive I am right now. This is not positive talk. This is the only thing standing between me and dying right now. This is it. This is the end.
Midwife B comes over. She says “I am going to leave you two by yourselves for 15 minutes to talk and decide what you want to do.” In general I like having privacy but at this moment — naked and screaming and actively dying — I do not feel like privacy is what I need. I need help. As soon as she leaves I turn to Dave and say “I want to transfer to the hospital”. It’s not that I want the hospital per se, I am just having the worst time of my life ever and so, statistically, something different almost had to be better. What were the odds it can be worse. If someone said “let’s go to a cafe” I also would have done that. It is intolerable to be here like this. I also want pain medication. An epidural, anything. If they say the only option is heroin and it means the baby will be addicted for the rest of her life, I will take it. Sorry baby. That’s how the cookie crumbles sometime. I tell Dave “I want to go to the hospital, but I don’t think I can get out of this bathtub”. I am racked with pain and have just seconds in between contractions. I suddenly realize “transfer to hospital” had always sounded straightforward but now that we were here, staring it down the face, I didn’t understand tactically how it worked. It’s about a mile away. Do we get back in the car? Good god that was unimaginable. Do I have to get out of the bathtub AND dressed? I will not put clothes back on. Do we walk? I can’t walk either, but maybe I don’t have to put clothes on if walk, and could just bleed my way screaming on the sidewalk over to the hospital. Do they send an ambulance? I don’t think any ambulance things actually help here? It feels silly to go a mile in an ambulance? I am steel myself. It is too fucking late to transfer to the hospital. It is too fucking late because Midwife B didn’t want me to come into the birth center earlier. We have to have the baby here.
Zsh zsh zsh zsh zsh zsh zsh. Foaming out the mouth. Being electrocuted. Sometimes when I make these roaring primal grunts Midwife B pipes up “that noise will make your throat sore”. MAKE MY THROAT SORE?? She doesn’t understand. I am going to die. I am not going to fucking make it through this experience. I do not care if my throat is sore.
~3:45am
I gasp “I have to push I have to push”. I didn’t know pushing would feel like this. Like a bolt of lightening. Unmistakable, and it seizes me. I don’t have any say in it. My naive thought around pushing was that it would be like, oh I don’t know, throwing a shot-put, that I’d take a breath and then push during the out breath. But the urge to push happens just as I’ve finished an exhale, too bad, so I am pushing even though I don’t have any air. I cannot delay it one millisecond. The midwife says let’s move to the bed. I get out of the bath and walk directly back to my nightstand and frantically grab it. Dave asks “Do you want to use the bathroom?” No I don’t think I do, but wait, I’d read that a full bladder could impede the baby’s progress and it’s actually good to labor a bit on the toilet so I say yes and move to head back over to the bathroom but Midwife B says “you can just pee right there”, since I am standing over an incontinence pad to catch the blood. I just let her rip. This feels like the only indulgence that has happened so far. I think damn, they must really clean this place afterwards!
The midwife puts the birth ball (as far as I can tell this is just a normal yoga ball but we call it a birth ball because we are not doing yoga with it we are giving birth with it) on the bed, puts a towel over it, and suggests I lean over it while on my knees, with my hands stretched over the yoga ball grabbing the headboard.
I hear her on the phone, she says “we’re pushing”.
My contractions start slowing down. What a relief. I feel, for a moment, like I can catch my breath. Like I can relax some muscles. When another contraction comes I grunt again but Midwife B says “push that energy out your bottom instead”. I resolve to do this, I stop yelling and focus my energy out instead. Everything I’d read said you could change positions to keep labor progressing. Good god. Who had time to change positions? Who had the fortitude. No way. I am scared to even let go of my yoga ball. Sorry, “birth ball”. I half-ass some of the pushes. I love doing this. It feels so luxurious, so indulgent, to not push very hard. I wonder if Midwife B can tell, when I push a 4/10, I wonder if I will get in trouble. God pushing feels so good, compared to my cervix being wrenched open.
After a push, Midwife B rushes in to measure the baby’s heart rate, then says “baby’s heart rate is good”. I am worried to hear this. Was the baby’s heart rate about to not be good? What would we do then?
Midwife B says “you’re pushing in exactly the right place”. What does she mean by this? Why did she say that? Do some people not push in the right place? Where else would you push? Was she just trying to say something nice and this was the only thing that I am doing right right now or the only thing that is going well?
I don’t know how hard to push. Baby’s heart rate is good. I’d seen tv shows or whatever where there were doctors and nurses screaming PUSH. Is it supposed to be really hard? I have no feedback. Baby’s heart rate is good. Someone else walks in the room. Again I am obsessed with the idea of making progress. I know with pushing sometimes the baby’s head would progress out on the push, then recede back a little bit. I can’t stand this idea though. How could I work so hard only to lose ground? Baby’s heart rate is good. Ah ha, I feel the “ring of fire” I’ve read about, no mistaking that. I struggle trying to get my hair out of my face. Midwife C tucks it behind my ear. This strikes me as the sweetest thing. She is so kind.
Midwife B asks “do I want to feel the head?” I panic thinking lady I haven’t touched my vagina in weeks, my belly’s too big. I try to reach down it seems like the right thing to do even though I don’t really want to but I have no idea what is down there, everything feels soft and wet. I give up and quickly pull my hand back, frantically gasping “I can’t reach I can’t reach”. No you did touch it the midwife says! That was it. It’s soft, the baby’s head is soft, you felt it, their skull is soft. I don’t know. It all felt the same. I don’t care.
When I push, the midwives rush to press their hands against my perineum. It feels like a dozen hands but I know there must only be four, at most. Baby’s heart rate is good. I know tearing in the perineum was common, it doesn’t hurt at all there though. Every time I push, it hurt on the other side. Should I tell them? I don’t know if there’s anything they can do about that. I should tell them though. Oh god, I can’t describe it. What the fuck is that part of the vagina called? I cannot believe not knowing the names of different parts of the vagina is going to screw me over like this. It’s like an internet joke. Baby’s heart rate is good. I think of it as 180 degrees from the perineum. But when I have described locations like this before, people are usually confused, I think because I assume we both understand the axis I am rotating around. Could I specify? No it would be too confusing, since I was on my hands and knees. Up is down and down is up. I can’t tell them what it’s called I don’t know. I think of it as the “top” of the vagina but god that could be anything. They could think I’m talking about my cervix. Fuck. This is why doctors have words like “antemedial”, but I don’t know any of them or what that mean. I don’t say anything about the part that hurts, the part that I am certain will tear.
Baby’s heart rate is good. Wait, am I taking too long? Maybe I’m not pushing hard enough! I am pushing until it really hurt much too much, at the top of my vagina, near where I pee, I am pushing about a 7/10. Baby’s heart rate is good.
Again I think of throwing a shot-put. Pushing feels like a game where you have to throw a shot-put a certain number of meters to win. But you don’t know how many meters you need until you’ve accomplished it. Every time you throw the shot-put, you have a 1% chance of catastrophically losing the game, this would be the baby dying or having a seizure. If you were playing this game, how hard would you throw the shot-put? Me? When it’s the baby I’ve been working so hard for and thought some much about and want so badly? I would just absolutely fucking wreck my body throwing it as absolutely hard as I could.
4:15am
Baby’s heart rate is good. I can’t handle this risk, the uncertainty. I don’t know if I am taking too long, am I not pushing hard enough? I am going to get this baby out right now. No matter what I am just going to get it done. I am famous in my family for, if I can’t accomplish what I want fast enough, I try so hard I end up breaking the thing. I do not think of this at this time. I feel sure I will tear at that side of my vagina, whatever it is called, but I don’t care, lots of women tear it is doesn’t matter, this birth thing would be done and the baby would be here and I might be alive. I push harder, above a 7, I creep up to a 10/10 pushing, and suddendly realize fuck, 10/10 isn’t enough, it hurt and I know I was tearing but it still isn’t enough so I push more, harder, harder than I think I can, I crank it up to an 11/10, harder still, a 12/10 and it works, her head comes out, and I hear her crying and both midwives gasp with delight and start chittering about how she is crying and this never happens. I breath in, and think oh my god, there is a crying baby whose head is hanging out of me, I didn’t know it happened like this, this is ridiculous, I thought they didn’t start crying until they were all the way out. How can we would be hanging out with her head outside of me? I push once more and the rest of her slithers out quickly, Dave and the midwife catch her and immediately pass her through my legs up to me and they say the cord is short, watch out, the cord is short. She looks so good. I am so relieved. She looks so healthy. She has an Apgar score of 9.5. I don’t feel love at first sight. I don’t recognize her! She looks like a total stranger. But she looks so good. She is so red!! Her cheeks are so rosy. I think “Her name should be Rose”. The midwives wrap a blanket around her on my chest while I turn over to lay on my back. I am so tired. I know this is supposed to be such a special time but I feel so tired. Why did they give the baby to me, the tired one? She is so special and important and I am too exhausted to give her the attention she deserves.
4:23am
The midwives talk about vials, does it have a yellow cap, where is it, no it has a pink cap now. They find something and inject it into my thigh — I guess pitocin, probably? I don’t care.
The birth assistant, Midwife C, asks me do I want some ibuprofen. I say dear god, yes, I’ve never wanted anything more. She says ok, but it’s bad to take ibuprofen on an empty stomach. Oh my god, can we risk it, just this one time when I have just given birth, can I please just have the ibuprofen? She offers “We have a couple of different snacks here, we have Clif bars — ” yup, clif bar sounds perfect, let’s do it “ok we have a few different flavors of clif bar” oh my god I cannot believe the woman is offering me different flavors of clif bar that I’m only eating so that I can take two ibuprofen after pushing a baby out of my vagina. “we have one with peanut butter in it” “yes yes let’s do that one”. I eat a few bites, then the ibuprofen, then the rest of the clif bar, I don’t think she expected me to but I am starving, I am so hungry, this clif bar is dry but it tastes so good. She says I should have a sugary drink and prepares to start listing options again “fizzy grapefruit soda” yes perfect I want fizzy grapefruit soda “oh no, sorry, I didn’t say fizzy soda I said Izze soda… which is, incidentally, fizzy.” Yes. That is fine. Give me the thing.
Midwife B says I have to push the placenta out next. I say oh, me? no no, for me personally, I am actually entirely done pushing and cannot push again. Perhaps you can find someone else who is interested in pushing now. She says I have to. I weakly try pushing and feel the placenta slide out and relax. She says no, that was just a blood clot (?!?). She asks if I had contractions. I have none, everything is still and silent and exhausting and hungry and getting light out. She seems puzzled. I try pushing again, I don’t like that it makes my stomach hard when I push, that’s where the baby is laying, I worry she‘ll feel like I’m trying to push her off me. I want the baby on me. I want to be soft and have her nestled into me and for it to be easy. I do not want to push a placenta out.
The blood in the umbilical cord stops pulsing and Midwife B asked Dave if he wants to cut the cord. Dave looks at me and says, well, Maia was going to cut the cord. and Midwife B takes this very seriously and says if the plan was for you to cut the cord, then you should do it. Yes, that had been the plan, I wanted to symbolize that I am no longer taking care of her in this way but I will in a new way… but now I was so tired, so wrecked, so exhausted, so empty. But I say ok sure, let’s do it. She clamps off the cord and I cut it. It is kind of gross. Rubbery. Like cow intestine.
Now the baby is unhindered. I have an umbilical cord dangling out of me, with metal clamps at the end. I still haven’t gotten the placenta out. Midwife B says ok let’s give the baby to daddy and try some other positions. I am so relieved to hand the baby to Dave. I’ve been told that this is such a special time, the “golden hour”, that I should hold my baby this whole time and bond but too bad, I am so tired, I am worried I am not best able to make use of the time and care for the baby. Dave will be so good for her. He is laying next to me in bed with his shirt off and gingerly takes her, the midwives watching over us transferring the baby between us, to make sure we don’t drop her. I move over to a birthing chair and the placenta finally comes out. I pathetically crawl back into bed next to Dave. Midwife B shows us the placenta. It is actually pretty cool! So meaty. I love seeing the amniotic sac on one side and imagining the baby in there. We tell her we’re not keeping it or doing anything special with it, she can just get rid of it.
I remember the sunrise happening as she was born. But when I look up the sunrise that day, it wasn’t until 5:41am. So, about now I guess, the room starts to fill with light.
The midwife measures the baby, weighs the baby, inspects the baby. She is 6 pounds and 5 ounces. They ask about Vitamin K and we say we want to do oral and she asks if we brought it but we have not. We were never told to bring it. We had signed some paperwork saying we wanted oral a few weeks ago. I say let’s get the shot, I had read about it and it seems good. The baby cries when they wipe her with a clean wipe, but doesn’t seem to notice the injection. They ask if we want antibacterial eye drops. We decline.
5:56am
Midwife B asks if I have taken a breastfeeding course. I have not. Was I supposed to? She starts talking about positions, their names. I think about telling her I believe that people’s drive to categorize and name things in the natural world serves more as a mechanism to cope with the variety and unknowability of everything than is actually a helpful way to interact with the world, but I don’t, I just tune out as she talks about the football hold, the cradle hold, the cross-cradle hold. Midwife C is so kind. She gestures to ask permission to touch my boobs and I think please go right ahead! She just crams my nipple in the baby’s mouth and the baby nurses — I guess? I thought I’d be able to feel the milk flowing out of my boobs. But I don’t feel that. But it seems like maybe it is working?
They ask do we have a diaper for her. We don’t, but they have one and put it on her. They ask me if we have a going home outfit. I turn to Dave and ask “Do we have a going-home outfit?”. He says “I was just going to wear the t-shirt I came here in!” I say no no, not for you, for the baby! We don’t have one — I didn’t even know this was a thing, apparently it’s a cultural thing, you’re supposed to have an extra special outfit to take your baby home in, not just whatever random onesie. The only thing we happen to have in the car is an unwashed 3–6 month old sized onesie that was a baby shower gift. Midwife C disappears and comes back with a tiny, used, preemie-sized onesie (from where? in her bag? at the birth center?) that fits her perfectly. It had an embroidered owl on the front and said “Whoo’s cute?”. I think it is so tacky looked but I am so honored and touched that Midwife C has found this perfect tiny little outfit for her. She looks so frail, engulfed by this giant newborn diaper and preemie onesie.
I tell Dave I don’t know if it was really supposed to go like that. That it was pretty fucking horrible and pretty rough. Could that have been right? Midwife C says she thinks the reason women get beat up a little giving birth is to make sure they spent the first month in bed with their baby, and if they didn’t get a little injured they’d do chores instead. I don’t know if it’s too cheesy, but I loved hearing that, it made my heart swell. I love Midwife C so much in this moment.
Midwife C leaves. Midwife B inspects me and lets me know that I am torn. Ha. Yes. I know. Why do you act like you’re telling me something I don’t know? How could I have missed that pushing so hard I’ve torn my body? She leaves and goes back out to the parking lot to get Midwife C to come back. There is a lot of fuss and explanation about how really, it’s much better for Midwife C to sew me up, I don’t know why there is so much explanation involved, it must be expected that Midwife B would do that but they both seem in agreement that Midwife C is better at it. It definitely doesn’t feel like they know what they’re doing if Midwife C left and then right after was critically needed. They inject me with lidocain, or something. It is horrible. She sews me up. Every stitch is horrible. With one I jolt and kick her. I can’t help myself. She explains, the thing is, there are a lot of nerves here. Seems like a shitty explanation. It hurts because it’s an area that hurts a lot. It hurts a lot. I hate the stitches. They say it’s really much better, it will heal much cleaner, think about how it’s worth it. I’ve been hearing that story a lot recently. Sorry it hurts so much but it’s worth it. I am worn out on buying into this story. I can’t do it anymore. I am spent.
Midwife C packs up and leaves, again.
Midwife B says “your mom is here, and she brought her dog??” I said haha, oh no, that’s actually our dog. I have her tell my mom to wait outside and we’ll be right out. We pack up to leave.
7:50am
We meet my mom on the porch, takes lots of photos. Midwife B asks if we have a car seat. I say “yes I’ll go grab it out of the car”. She says “No I don’t want you walking that much”. I am annoyed, and stand there. Someone else gets the car seat. We put it on the porch of the birth center. Midwife B asks us if we practiced with a stuffed animal. We did not. We have no idea how to use this thing. We strap her in. She is so tiny. and yet so big! I can’t believe how real she is, how outside of my body. We drive home as a new family, and we’ve never driven so carefully in our lives. My mom brings us breakfast, I said get one of everything on the menu at Cafe Blue. My throat is so sore from screaming.
July 31st, and onwards
The midwife I’d chosen to work with, Midwife A, was still backpacking so Midwife B came to see me at home for my first postpartum visit, and for my second. When I finally did see Midwife A, she was so excited about the story of my birth. It’s a miracle, truly a miracle she raved. There is no treatment for pre-eclampsia (again, we have NO treatment for the most common cause of maternal mortality in the US! Nothing!) besides giving birth. Midwife A says “Your body knew just what it needed, to get the baby out as fast as possible, and made it happen!” She says if things had gone differently — if she had been around to get the results of my blood test — they wouldn’t have scheduled an induction until Monday, and so I would have gone into labor before then anyway.
I hear that she’s excited about the natural wisdom of my body to do what it needed to do — kick off an extremely fast and painful labor to save my body from carrying the baby. I guess, it just does not feel good to me to have my health and my baby’s health described as a miracle. I want a healthy mom and baby to be the default, expected outcome of giving birth in the United States in 2022. I do not want to have to depend on a miracle happening.
