A Quick Break for Polka Dots

Birth Story Part 2

Friday, 9AM. Morning. One thing about birth is that it exists completely out of time. Anything out of arm's reach was also out of my mind's. It was almost like I was in my own little sack, just like Margot, with everything on the outside muffled and distant. This became more and more the case as the day wore on, and it was a very handy tool, blocking out pretty much anything that got in the way. 

By 10, after confirming I was 4cm dilated, the midwife gave me the go-ahead to get in the tub, which is really what I'd been waiting for this whole time. I am, in general, a fairly dedicated taker of baths so I knew that the birthing tub was right up my alley. We'd rearranged the bedroom to make room for it, bulky and blue, like a kiddie pool for giants. Adam had taken great care to purchase the right attachments in advance so that we could run a hose from the regular tub to this special tub, providing an abundance of dreamy, warm water. 

I was in that tub pretty much straight from 10:05AM to 2:37PM. (Gotta love this kind of detail.) This was the glory period. I loved it so very much. We started listening to the CD that my pre-natal yoga teacher had made for me, a series of chanty kind of songs that really put a person in a baby-having kind of mood. The water was comfortable and warm and eased a lot of the pain for me. I ate watermelon in the tub. Slept a bit. Oh! And the tub had handles on the edges, which were perfect for gripping with all of your might during contractions.

There is a video, actually, of me in the tub. I asked my friend A to record me having a contraction. None of you will ever, ever see this, of course. But I find this little factoid to be descriptive of how excited I remained for big chunks of my labor. The pain was incredibly intense, but intermittent, and I found the whole thing so...I don't know...cool. Also, at noon, the midwife had checked again and I was at 6-7cm. I was just amazed that things seemed to be going so well. At another point, she suggested I try and touch the baby's head, which I could do! I think that at that point, we all thought that pushing was imminent. 

2:37 PM. The note just says, "Out of birth tub". Then at 2:42 it reads: "Hanging by sheet over door." This is maybe the point where a home birth really does look pretty different from a hospital one. Maybe not? I do wonder what comes to mind for people when they read "hanging by sheet over door." It doesn't sound good, does it? Newsflash: It isn't!

Adam helped the midwife rig a sling, more or less, with a brown sheet gathered up like rope and tossed over the bathroom door with a loop on the front. Then they closed the door so the loop could withstand my full body weight. I put my arms through, my back to the door, and during contractions, hung there by my armpits. This is some old school midwife style, designed to help the baby come on down already. My midwife never said this to me explicitly, but the notes confirm Margot was sneakily moving the wrong direction, back up to her original, cozy location. 

I was only in that position for fifteen minutes or so, before we moved to the birthing stool. Did I mention this is a home birth? There are stools. I spent an hour there. I ate three spoonfuls of yogurt. And I told my midwife I felt the baby moving down. The rest is a blur. But then my midwife suggested I try to push a bit. I was elated. I had done it! This whole thing was going to work! There would be a baby soon, born in my house. This is my favorite note from her journal: "Pushed a little. Said it felt 'neat'!" What? Neat? That is crazy. But seriously I was on cloud nine. This was the best thing ever. 

I'm building this up, I know. What happened next is that my midwife checked my cervix, and discovered I was still just 6cm dilated, same as I was at noon, and that Margot was higher up even that when we began the night before. It was a serious let down, to say the least. This was around 4:30PM, and thus began a major shift in my mood, and the mood of the house.

The midwife was having me walk up and down the stairs, which was fairly excruciating. Also, everyone on the team got hungry. What? That was weird. Who eats food? Someone ran to the little coffee shop by our house for sandwiches and salads. I remember wandering around the downstairs while they ate, feeling blue, and fighting a bout with hopelessness -- my first creeping thoughts of, maybe we should just give up and go the hospital already. Adam and I convened briefly on the back porch. It was so strange to go outside, to breathe regular earth air, to imagine the rest of the world still cruising right along. He told me it would be OK to change plans if I wanted, and I felt deeply grateful to him for saying so, but also instantly certain that I wasn't ready to go there. 

That said, my midwife was protecting me from some detailed information about the setback, and I could feel it. Different people have different needs in these kinds of situations. I can get why some women might not want to hear every detail of what might be slowing things down, but that's not me. I needed data. Without it I was a little lost. For me, the "pain of childbirth" fell into two categories: pain with a purpose, and just plain old pain. The former is a hurdle, but a necessary step on the way to something awesome. The latter just hurts, a lot. And I lost my purpose. I couldn't imagine how this would ever end. 

I powered forward sort of in and out of this tough brain space. I did, eventually figure out to tell my midwife I needed to know what I was pushing for. I needed a short term goal. She told me the baby needed to turn, and drop, which was more or less enough information. She gave me a lot of homeopathics to try and get labor going. I toiled. I hung on the door some more. It's crazy to see how much time passed in this phase. At 8:45 PM she checked me again, and I was still at 6cm, but Margot had indeed dropped. I was temporarily re-energized, convinced anew that a baby might actually get born somehow. But by 10PM things were stalled again. We decided to go ahead and rupture the bag of waters to try and get things moving. There was meconium, a sign that Margot was in distress. The midwife reassured me it was light; we were still in the clear. Twenty minutes later, things changed. Just in the middle of a sentence, like it was no big thing, she said, "Yep, we need to go ahead and transfer." To the hospital. A wave a disappointment started to rush over me, but then it just stopped. "Ok," I said, and began working on a major downshift to the next phase. 

Wow. This is long. But it was long! Part 3 coming soon

Birth Story Part 1

I began a couple of posts ago with the end. Margot was born and I, totally not self-centered at all, couldn't believe that I had not given birth to myself. What should probably be taken into account is how completely zonked out tired I was by the time she finally showed up. Giving birth to that awesome little poopster was, no doubt, no exaggeration, no hyperbole, hard. I still remember, though, in the days that followed as I began to recover, how good and proud I felt about the whole thing. Adam and I kept telling the story to each other back and forth. So, I just want to say to all you pregnant ladies out there -- hard is ok. Hard you can do. Hard is part of what makes it awesome.  

So! We had planned a home birth. I won't get into all of my reasons for this, but it was something I was pretty attached to and excited about. Everyone told me not to get too attached to my birth plan, but I did anyway. I'm still fine with this. It worked for me. 

In my memory, Margot was a full week late. But I checked Google calendar (gotta love that thing), and actually things got rolling just two days after her due date. I was just super impatient. It just felt like a week late.

We had a pretty awesome start to the birth. Adam and I had, years before, lost track of several CDs of photographs of our big travels, our honeymoon, whole chunks of our life together. It was something that would make me unbearably sad if I thought about it too hard. I can't remember how exactly, but I found them all -- JACKPOT! -- that evening, so we spent several hours on the couch pouring over them and rehashing all of our favorite old stories. By the time we'd finished the last of them, it was clear that the little aches and squeezes I'd been feeling for the last half hour and trying not to get excited about were actually contractions. It's gonna sound cheesy, because it is, but our house had a good vibe going on that night, which was totally the luck of the draw. Plenty of other days we'd have been watching Bones reruns and eating breakfast for dinner -- and that would be been OK too -- but this was an especially romantic beginning to the whole process. 

The next part is a little blurry in my memory. I put on my comfy nightgown; we took some last belly photos, me sporting a goofy, excited grin. Also we updated the contraction aps on our phones, because we are super cool. And then we started calling the team to tell them it seemed like tonight might be the night. This was around 9PM. The team would be: midwife, midwife's assistant, friend A who would be sort of like a doula, and Adam. Oh, and me.

A few weeks after the birth, my midwife gave me a copy of her super-detailed account the whole process. Not just the reports of dilation, but every time I peed, every time I sipped water. There is one entry that reads: "Ate two spoonfuls of yogurt." I am so grateful for this. Each time I read it (three times total, probably) I learn something new about what went down. 

From this account, I know that I called the midwife came over at 1:30 in the morning. At that point, my contractions were six minutes apart. I really thought things were moving fast! Also: OUCH. I remember I spent most of this time on the floor outside our bathroom upstairs, which is carpeted and cushy. Adam made me a little pillow bed, and we lay there together, hunkered down and thinking we were really in the shit now. 

When Adam talks about this overnight period, he talks about my crazy and unending levels of energy. As he, the midwife and my friend A all fought sleep, I sat in my little pile of pillows chatter boxing with whoever would listen about whatever random thing I was talking about. Every 4-6 minutes I'd have another contraction, and then I'd get back to the conversation. I was excited, feeling good. The contractions were rough, but they seemed appropriately so, a nice sign that things were moving forward. 

That seems like a good spot for a pause. Coming in part two: me hanging from a sheet. What does it all mean? You'll have to check back tomorrow!

The Return of Polkie Dot Monday

We haven't been the best observers lately, largely due to wardrobe limitations. (Read: failure to do laundry.)

Birth Story/First Words

I still haven't sat down and written a full account of Margot's birth. I had planned to get this done in the first weeks afterwards, but, well, then there was a baby in my house. I don't know if you've heard, but they require both hands. 

I'm not going to write it all down today, either. But lately I keep thinking about the first time I saw her, about the moment of her birth. I've been thinking about it since she, very recently, started saying words.

Everyone makes a big deal out of a kid's first word. And it is a big deal, but I'm not sure what will go down in history as Margot's first. So far she seems to favor the hard consonants. We've heard "block" and "book" -- but of course we are also very much wanting to hear this, willing to take her chatter and bend it into whatever fits the narrative we're going for. (Genius baby! Kidding. Sort of.) But, whatever she has said, she is clearly working on language and it is, in a word, neat. 

Then this weekend, she picked up a book, brought it over to her grandmother and said, "Read it." I actually missed the first one, but she kept repeating herself, always accompanied with the handover of a book: "Read it." And that's when I felt a strong wave of the feeling I felt when I first laid eyes on her, a feeling which I can only sort of feebly desribe as surprise.

So, of course before I myself gave birth, I'd seen dramatizations on countless TV shows and movies, plus I watched a lot of birth videos during my pregnancy, plus I had actually been in the room when a friend's baby was born. I had, I thought, a pretty good idea of what it would be like to finally meet my little girl. A rush of emotion, tears, love bigger than the sun, moon and stars, etc etc, blah blah.

The reality was a little bit different. And it was something I felt strange about for a while. Maybe it's why I haven't written the birth story yet. I felt, as I said, surprise -- not, like, a little taken off guard. Surprise, shock, even, was the primary feeling for me in that moment. At first it in my mind, it seemed related to the fact that she didn't have dark hair. Adam and I both remarked later that we'd both just assumed she would be born with the same thick head of dark hair I was born with. Margot's hair was thinner, and light brown, a bit reddish. But that was a weird explanation for the feeling -- like I had some major stake in color of my healthy newborn's hair. 

With "read it," it finally became clear. It was because I did not recognize her. It was because she was a brand new person, made from parts I know well, but someone I had never met before. It seems bizarre to say it, but: a stranger. This is obvious, but then it isn't. I lose track of it sometimes, meld the two of us into one. We're tight, but we aren't one. Margot is her own dog. (Raised, in part, by dogs, as it turns out.)

I know other parents experience versions of this. (Some play it out for the whole of their kid's life, hoping that young person will live a happier remount of their own youth.) It seems especially easy in this pre-language phase, when you are operating full-time on your best guess of your child's needs. I don't see how you could avoid projecting yourself onto them a least a litte bit here and there. 

But then she reminds me. She says, "read it," and I am again smacked in the face with how she is Margot, this person I am still getting to know. Below is some excellent photographic evidence of this principal, taken on Mardi Gras Day. I would really love to know what is going on in her mind here...