About a week after we got home from the hospital, I wrote down the story of my daughter’s birth. It was 13 pages, and it took me six days. I wanted to remember every little detail and yet even after 13 pages, I still think I missed things. There are parts of that day that I feel I could never ever forget, but we know that memory is fickle and time warps even the sharpest of memories.
It is truly a miracle, when one moment you are you, sweating and struggling and gasping, and the next moment, you are two, and there is another person in the room, a tiny, wriggling, naked, slippery little thing who didn’t exist in the world before that minute.
No matter how commonplace birth is, no matter that women for thousands and thousands of years have been doing it, no matter that the preparation for birth is all fairly similar, I’ve come to learn that birth experiences and birth stories all differ so greatly. They deserve to be told. Women who experience this miracle of creating a tiny human deserve to tell their stories in whatever way they want to.
My story may not seem unique, but maybe the way I tell it is.
I am blessed to have a story with a happy ending. I am fortunate that I had the experience that I wanted. I wrote 13 pages, over 8,500 words, detailing the experience of my daughter’s birth. But how do you narrow that down to just the words that are meaningful? How do you tell such an intimate story on the internet? How do you explain the labor, the pain, the sensations, the exhilaration, the dread, the longing, the relief that is birth? How do you do all of that without giving away a part of yourself? How do you also not scare people and not sound like a gory horror film? Because let’s be honest, sometimes, that’s what it is.
I started by copying and pasting my 8,500+ words here and I spent an hour or so going through, taking out sentences and paragraphs. I changed every instance of my daughter’s name to “my daughter.” I don’t want her name on the internet right now. Maybe not ever. I’ll just call her N. I feel that I need to protect her and her privacy and the person whom she has yet to grow up to be. I need to protect the story that she will someday tell.
I decided I couldn’t just edit my memories. I need to tell you a new story, a revised version that is filled with the emotions and highlights that I remember best, with the creative flourish that somehow pours forth when I write blog posts and not when I’m writing a daily journal entry.
So this is how my daughter came into the world:
I was 41 weeks and 1 day, and I had a scheduled induction. This was not in my “birth plan.” I did not want to be induced. I did not want Pitocin. This is not the way I thought it would go. But so it went and if this was the part that had to go off-course then it was the least of my worries. They say to write your birth plan and then tear it up. Or at the very least title it “birth preferences.”
When we went in to the hospital at 12:30 a.m. I expected everything to proceed pretty immediately. This was a scheduled induction after all. But nothing about birth is quick and I guess they had some other not-so-quick births going on at the time. So after we got to the Labor and Delivery Room at about 1:15 a.m., we then waited another four hours before a doctor even saw me. Luckily I got to sleep a bit and eat the worst sandwich of my life during that time.
Once the doctor determined that I was far enough along to get started on Pitocin “right away,” I then had to wait another hour before the nurses came along to hook it up. All this waiting is pretty par for the course during an induction, I suppose, except that my arm was hurting because it took three nurses and five sticks to get my IV in. And then when the nurse leader came to make sure I was having a good hospital experience, she was disappointed to hear about my wait times and said that their goal is 30 minutes. Well, I brought up their average.
But after those initial hiccups, everything went pretty smoothly. They hooked me up to the antibiotics I needed for Group B Strep. I had enough time to get all the doses in before N was born, but no one told me how much it would burn. Except the nurse, who warned me five seconds before she started the second round, when she said, this one is more concentrated, the ice packs are in this drawer. The ice packs helped, but the pain was worse than those initial contractions.
In the beginning, everything was pretty chill. My nurse’s name was the same as my daughter’s which was awesome. I talked to my husband, I bounced on an exercise ball, did a few squats, walked around, went to the bathroom a bunch of times. I didn’t feel the contractions really pick up for a few hours. We put on Jurassic Park on TV, because there was nothing else on. Jurassic Park, birthing a baby…these go together obviously.
I was surprised to find during my labor that I was pretty adamant about standing up. I had taken the prenatal childbirth class and learned all the laboring positions and ways of calming yourself but when it came down to it, I just wanted to stand next to the bed and hold onto the rail. Luckily my doctor was cool with that. I had a wireless heart rate monitor strapped across my belly and my doctor checked my dilation while I was standing at one point.
Around lunch time, I felt like things were starting to get serious. The anesthesiology team came in and I signed the consent forms for nitrous oxide and an epidural in case I wanted it, but an epidural was not in my plan. I also was not ready for the nitrous oxide, but I figured I’d want it quickly when I was. You couldn’t use it standing, and like I said, I wanted to be standing.
I then decided Jurassic Park was not the movie I wanted on when my daughter came into this world. I changed it to the Golf Channel. I even turned up the volume. You can’t deny that the announcer has a deep, calming voice. Much of it was weirdly in Spanish, because it was the Mexican Open, I think? Please know that I don’t play or watch golf. Ever. This will forever make N’s birth story hilarious.
Then my water broke. One second, I was standing next to the bed, feeling like I needed to use the bathroom, the next second, fluid was gushing onto the floor and I was like, What was that?! It was way more gross than I had pictured so I’m super glad it didn’t happen while I was at work.
After that, things moved pretty rapidly I guess. For an induction, I suppose I had a pretty quick labor and delivery. I’ve heard many inductions can be 24 – 36 hours, depending on the type of induction methods needed and the pain management used. So I credit my 10 hour labor and delivery to being partially dilated from the start and choosing not to use an epidural. But we’ll never truly know.
I did want the nitrous oxide though, so eventually I had to lay down in the bed. I still did not like the laying-down position but focusing on breathing the gas was calming. I concentrated on breathing in and out with that mask on my face like I have never concentrated on anything before. I didn’t even think I had practiced the breathing techniques that much, but when you’re in the moment, you’ll do anything to take your mind off the pain. And for the record, the gas did not dull the pain. Nope, I felt every bit of that. But I was able to cope and that’s all I had expected. That was all I needed.
I was at 7 cm for awhile, then at 9 cm. I kept feeling like I wanted to push, like the pain had to be at the point where I was at the end. But when the doctor came in and told me I wasn’t ready yet, I almost screamed at her. I probably did.
I was super panicky that the doctor and nurses kept leaving me. I felt that at 9 cm they should be on standby, arms ready, bedside. But they smiled and waved and walked away. The smile and wave was in my mind, but still. I couldn’t understand why they left when I felt like things were happening.
So five minutes later (I think. I swear.) I told my husband to call them back in. To my surprise the doctor said, yep, you can push. And then I was like, “Wait, are you sure?!” and then I said, “I don’t know how!” Don’t worry, I figured it out, because clearly, we’re here now.
The doctor and nurses tried the whole counting thing, but I guess I so obviously ignored them that they stopped. I felt better and more in control pushing on my own, sometimes short, sometimes long, sometimes a few times per contraction, sometimes just once. But I quickly realized that if I only pushed once during the contraction then I felt like I’d “wasted” that contraction.
I was told later that I pushed for about fifteen minutes. The doctor credited that to my ability to exercise throughout my entire pregnancy.
I don’t know what it’s like to get an epidural, but I’ve heard that it can be confusing because you can’t feel anything and you don’t really know if or when you should push. Let me tell you, I felt everything and it was painful and I’ll leave it at that. I might have regretted not getting an epidural, and I also might have said out loud that N would be an only child. But I was told that you say things you don’t mean when you’re in labor.
When my doctor told me she thought I could do it in six more pushes, I buckled down. I’ve been an athlete all my life, I appreciate good, motivational coaching. I knew there was an end to this, it was pain with a purpose, and I was almost at the finish line. I remember feeling her head finally break free, and then I just kept going, and I felt the rest of her long slippery body come next in an easy, slippery second. She was born at 4:37 p.m. and she was perfect.
Within seconds, they placed her in my arms, and I was so tired I hardly knew what to do. I held her little, seven-pound body but I felt like I might drop her, like she might just slip out of my grasp. She looked blueish, but not in a bad way, just in an emerged-from-the-womb way. I was in such shock and disbelief. I remember thinking that she was so big (she wasn’t) I couldn’t believe that she just came out of me. I remember I felt like I couldn’t find the right emotion or facial expression for what I was feeling. The pictures from that moment just show me looking tired and somewhat confused.
I think the mix of what I was feeling was some melting pot of relief and pride and elation and exhaustion and disbelief and incredulity and love. It was a mix of emotions that I could never have planned for and may never experience again. The emotion of birthing your first child, the moment you become a mom and that child is placed in your arms on your chest. There is no single word for that. There is nothing to prepare you for that moment and no real way to describe it to anyone afterwards anyway.
They took her away to clean her off a bit and check her out. I had elected to donate cord blood so they got that all sorted out. The doctor stitched me up, which was way more painful than I anticipated but I guess that’s because I had forgone the epidural.
Then they placed this naked baby girl face down on my chest, with her little pink hat on and her ID bracelets and they covered her up with warm blankets so we could snuggle. It was so surreal to have this little baby that I’d pictured and prayed for and prepared for for so long laying right there on my chest.
She was so perfect and cute, perfect little features, perfect skin (minus it being a bit yellow from jaundice), perfect little facial expressions. I couldn’t stop looking at her, incredulous. This tiny perfect human that I had made. Her ears and her nose and her fluttering eyelids with whispers of eyelashes. She could breathe and blink and curl her hand around my finger. I made her.
For the next week, all I could do was stare at her, too overwhelmed with everything I didn’t know and too in love to do anything else.
I found that I was stronger than I’d ever thought I could be. It doesn’t matter what anyone tells you, you can’t know this feeling, you can’t know what this is like, until you’re in this moment. Until you’re doing it. Until you’ve done it.
This is the beginning of an epic adventure – parenthood.