The story of my son’s birth was mysteriously erased from my computer. Centimeters of dilation lost, timeline lost, contraction history lost, direct quotes from my doctor lost. The medical story, the story of facts and numbers, vanished.
At first I despaired in the loss of history and record. I thought, “I need to write it as best I can again before I forget ALL of it!” But when I thought about re-writing the whole thing, it felt like a bore, like a labor I did not want to endure. Maybe that was the universe sending me a message: That story does not matter. Or, that story is not your story. There is another story underneath that story. A story of inner journey. A story of the senses. A story of imagination and the worn landscape of birth.
First, the waiting
This is my story. I waited for my baby to be ready. I waited calmly, patiently, peacefully. I loved that baby in, and I would love that baby out. While I waited, I danced, read, meditated, did yoga, shoved butter-covered popcorn into my mouth at matinees, ate spicy Indian food, wrote, and lunched with friends. My husband and I drove around town in the evenings with the windows rolled down, listening to music and eating ice cream and grinning at each other. I revelled in these last days.
I stayed in a focused state of calm readiness because I didn’t know at which moment I would be called forth to the threshold of motherhood, at which moment the most challenging feat of physical endurance in my life would begin. Imagine training for a marathon but not knowing when that marathon would begin or what the course would look like or even how many miles you would run. What would you eat? How would your mental state be? How well would you sleep?
I was 13 days past my due date. If he didn’t come in the next day, I was going to be medically induced. I would take that path if necessary, but it wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted an unmedicated birth unadulterated with interventions. I wanted the pure and raw human experience, the primal one…at least as primal as is possible to have in a 21st century, first-world hospital. I also wanted my baby to say in his own time, “I’m ready for the world, Mama. Bring me home.”
Then the listening
Finally, he told me. I went into labor naturally after a sunset walk around my neighborhood with my husband. I didn’t say anything to Lloyd because we had lived through so many false labor alarms that I felt like the boy who cried wolf. We went to sleep as usual, but less than an hour later, I was getting out of the bed again. I wasn’t convinced that “this was it” just yet. This wolf baby had pulled the wool over my eyes several times before.
I moved in the low glowing light of our den, leaning over my birth ball and rolling with the sound of the waves coming through my earbuds. “Please be the real thing. Please come now,” I urged. I invited the waves in my body to come over me stronger and stronger. I willed them to stay. I wanted to be taken away to sea, carried to the place where babies are born. I was ready for this journey. I summoned the waves to get stronger and stronger. I gave the power to them. I surrendered to the vast ocean within me and around me; my waves joined the waves of all the other women birthing across the world, of all the other women birthing over centuries. I joined my foremothers in this sacred sea dance.
After a couple hours of our slow dance, I knew it was real. I had never felt anything like this before. These were the strong sensations of bringing a baby into the world. I knew these could be the last hours for me to spend alone with my baby. I knew that once these feelings stopped, my baby would no longer be a part of my body. I labored privately and from within. I said my goodbyes to this stage of gestation and to the baby I knew only from touch and inner movement. Soon I would say “hello” to this baby’s face, “hello” to honoring a separate being. Soon I would see myself as a mother, a baby in my arms.
I walked down the hall to wake up my husband. I was ready for him to start walking this journey with me.
Then the action
Lloyd is the kind of person who loves to be called to action. If this had been the first year of our marriage, he probably would have sprung out of bed and dropped to the floor and done twenty push-ups by the time I finished my sentence. But he had mellowed over the years, and so when I went into the dark bedroom and told him, “Lloyd…It’s time”, he slowly rolled his body to the side, put his feet on the floor, and said, “Ok.”
He helped me labor at home for awhile longer until we called my doctor, and she said it was time to go to the hospital. I wasn’t sure if I was far enough into labor to go into the hospital because I still felt functional and like my feet were firmly planted in this world. But by the time we got to the hospital, being asked to sign my name on papers seemed like an insane frivolity. I was approaching the edge of the other world, the world where my baby had been living all these months. Soon after arriving at the hospital, I took off my dress and my underwear, and that was the last time I cared about clothing.
My doulas, or birth helpers, arrived. Susan and Jess transformed the room into a labor wonderland. Purple and blue LED candles flickered, nature music floated, essential oils swirled. I soaked in the tub while Lloyd and Susan slowly poured water down my belly and back. I walked deep into the labyrinth, and there was no turning back–only one way out. I had no idea which ways the path would take me. I couldn’t see what was ahead. But I knew that when I emerged from the labyrinth, I would carry my baby in my arms.
Imagination meets reality
I thought labor would be like a neon trip, an out-of-body transcendent experience with the pain piercing through me like a concentrated golden light, a laser-like ripple of sensation. I thought it would be the kind of pain that would electrify me and spark me, the kind I could hang onto, hit with a dart, target with a lasso. I thought my senses would be heightened and sensations amplified. I don’t know why I felt like labor would be a space cowboy rave.
Instead, it owned me like seasickness. It washed over me completely and made me dull, weary. It was in every direction I went, and it made me heavy, drowsy. What I thought would be a force field of light and energy spinning around me was actually a dark, heavy anchoring. This was not romantic. This was not starlight on the sea. I didn’t feel like I was dancing with my foremothers anymore. I felt like my face was plastered to the toilet, and I didn’t care.
I tried to ride the waves, and I often found myself slumped over the side of the boat letting my insides empty. I vomited until I dry heaved. My birth attendants soaked a rag in cold water and moved it from my cheeks, to my forehead, to my neck. I rocked and swayed and had no idea how long this ride would last or how quickly time was passing.
I tried to keep my eyes on the horizon, that still, constant point within me. I felt lost at sea, buffeted around on my wreckage, nowhere to go but over and under the waves. I covered my face with my hands and braced myself. I tried to breathe in calmly so I wouldn’t drown.
I didn’t know who I would be in labor. I think I had two visions: I would transcend beyond myself and would become one with the divine orb of Every Life. Or I would release my battle cry, and I would become a loud, demanding, angry force of nature like I’ve never been before. I wanted to see my wild and let loose and yell at some people. But this wasn’t a bachelorette party. I wasn’t hired for a part on Broadway. This was not a metaphysical peyote journey. I was still me, just me birthing a baby. I traveled inward. To a place without thoughts, without time, without truth, without words. I thought I would enter the garden where Everything lived. I entered Nothingness. I birthed in the void.
One of my favorite birth articles, written by midwife Jane Studelska says:
To give birth…a woman must go to the place between this world and the next, to that thin membrane between here and there.The place where life comes from, to the mystery, in order to reach over to bring forth the child that is hers.”
That sounds amazing. Is that where I went? It didn’t feel like anywhere special when I was there. It felt like planning a trip to Disney World and spending our vacation at a gas station instead. Granted, it was a gas station with some amazing helpers. And I did leave with the best souvenir possible.
I said “yes”; birth said “no”
My mind was hazy, and all the “no’s” were wrung out of me like that washcloth they kept bringing to my face. There was no room for “no” in this land. I only had energy for “yes”, for taking one step forward at a time, one contraction at a time, doing the next small thing that needed to be done. How could I say “yes” to birth in so many ways and have it feel so much like a “no”? I felt like I was telling birth “yes”, and birth was telling me “no”.
Every time Susan suggested a new position, no matter how much my body felt permanently plastered in place, I broke through my cement mold, making one crack and another and another until it all crumbled around me, and my body moved forward.
“Sitting backwards on the toilet can be really productive in opening your hips,” Susan said. So I picked myself up off the floor and waded over to the toilet.
“Hands on knees while pulling on a rebozo over the back of the bed can sometimes get you there,” she said. I nodded and somehow got myself facing backwards on the bed, which felt like parallel parking a semi truck. I pulled on the rebozo, which is basically a long scarf, and rested my head on the mattress between contractions.
“A warm compress on the perineum can be helpful in giving you a place to focus your pushing,” she suggested. “Ok,” I said. So she gloved up and reached into her crock pot of warm water to fish out a towel. The warm compress on my bottom must be what heaven feels like, and she was right that it gave me a bullseye for my pushing.
The pushing. I did it on and off for hours. And hours. The whole time I felt like I was pushing nothing, like I was pushing into a void, pushing against air. I met no resistance; it was an empty push. My baby sat above my pubic bone all those hours.
“At my birth, my doula told me to push to your limit and then push past it,” my second doula and birth photographer, Jess, said. On my next push, I tried it. I pushed as hard as I could and then HARDER and felt not a thing changing. I didn’t feel like I was pushing anything at all. Was there even a baby in there?
“Trying a low squat with the rebozo can be really effective,” Susan said. So I grabbed the long cloth tightly in my hands and wrapped it around my wrists and sank low into the quicksand. I felt like I was finally pushing something out in that position, and I looked at the floor and saw poop. I said, “Oh, I pooped.” “Yep, you did,” Lloyd said, and he got some toilet paper and cleaned it up the same way he would if our dog had made the mess at home.
Is this a bad trip?
My doctor came in to check on me and said it was time to get serious with the pushing. Oh, yes, the last several hours had just been child’s play! “1….2….3….4….5….6….7….8….9….10….” That’s how long I pushed as she counted. Each second was long enough to hold all the molasses-slow syllables of “Mississippi”. I took a quick breath above the surface then I dove back down into pushing. “1….2….3….4….5….6….7….8….9….10….” The counting lasted for a couple hours, with two sets during each contraction.
The contractions slowed and quieted; the waves retreated. I stopped being able to hear my body’s messages. All I could hear was the numbers. I will hear that nurse’s voice in my head forever, though I know not her name.
I found myself moving in a house of mirrors, feeling eyes on me from every direction, and each set of eyes was also my own. “What if they think I’m not progressing…I better keep pushing….can they see my contractions on the monitor… is this the contraction? Why can’t I tell anymore? Do they think I’m faking?… what if I’m just not pushing hard enough?…are they going to tell me ‘time’s up’?…I better keep pushing.”
All of a sudden it felt like a bad trip full of paranoia, anxiety, and fear. These were the hours of exhaustion, of confusion, of private tears. The hours when my Plan C, the c-section, made its way to the top of the list. The “no’s” started to mount in my mind, and they built a fortress around me. The veil of labor was lifted, and I was no longer in that thin place “between this world and the next”. Reality felt very thick and heavy. And I was carrying it all.
A new kind of surrender
One of the birth affirmation flags I had painted said, “Surrender”. I thought this would mean surrendering to the sensations of labor, trusting my body and the process fully. That I did for many hours. But surrendering became letting go of the idea of what I thought my birth would be. I would not push a baby out of my vagina; I would have my baby surgically removed. I would not walk out of the labyrinth; I would be wheeled out of the labyrinth in a hospital bed with no feeling in my legs. It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around the possibility of this shift. My reality changed planes.
I was tired. So tired. I had been awake for two days. In this moment, a c-section felt like the way to say “yes” to birth. This felt like the way to safely bring my baby out of the labyrinth. I felt a sense of relief.
Letting go of one story to give life to another
I could tell my birth story in a hundred ways. The day I lost the medical story from my computer, I let it go. I realized that the medical story is not for me. It’s for others. I have it ready in my head so that when people ask me questions, I can give facts, justifying explanations. It feels like they’re looking for loopholes, looking for the weak point that lead to the c-section, and I’m trying to plug the holes with chewing gum so my boat doesn’t sink.
When my fearful self leads, I want to be able to provide the answers. I want to anticipate the moments of weakness and address them before anyone else points them out. Yes, I had my water broken after I was fully dilated for several hours. Yes, maybe I pushed too soon. Yes, maybe he would have been born vaginally if I had stopped and rested and let the contractions come back on their own. I want to stay ahead of the questions. I want to manage the story.
Our birth stories can be so heavily based in the medical facts, in the physiology of what was happening, in the numbers and the hours. If I tell it with all the medical facts, I can prove that I know what I’m talking about, that I did my research, that this c-section was not decided on a whim.
Does that make me empowered to be able to tell my story that way? To know the language and to be able to describe the birth event the way a medical professional might? Or does it make me domesticated, tied down to the sterile field of birth rather than opening to the sacred passage? The medical story becomes MY story, my dominant story, the story I tell myself, when I let birth become the known destination rather than the journey of mystery.
I left the labyrinth different than when I walked in. I think I did reach that thin place in between this world and the next. The thin place just felt different than I thought it would…a whole lot thinner. So thin I couldn’t perceive it with any of my senses. But I walked out of the labyrinth seeing more, hearing more, feeling more, wondering more, believing more. It thinned me. It took whatever separates me and the rest of the universe and sanded it down. I walked out with my baby. I walked out with myself.
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