another short birth story
or: a long prelude with a brief crescendo
A common side effect of having a baby is developing a fervent interest in birth stories. The arc of the story is always the same— you are pregnant, then you go into labour, then you give birth— but within that framework is infinite and unpredictable variation. Until it happens to you, it’s impossible to predict how it might go. I don’t know if the birth is uniquely mysterious, or if its enduring unfathomability is the result of a scientific and medical industry that remains stubbornly uninterested in the experiences of pregnant people.
That said, the one thing that provides you with some indication of how your particular birth might go is if you’ve done it before. In my case, that meant that the closer I got to the finish line, the more preoccupied I became with the probability that my labour would go very, very fast. Our midwives advised us that as a general rule, second labours are half as long as the first, with half as much time spent pushing; this is not a reassuring guideline if your first labour was shorter than your average Scorcese movie. “You should watch some YouTube videos on how to catch a baby,” I kept telling Luke, a joke that wasn’t really a joke, but actually I was afraid he wouldn’t be there and I would be alone. To assauge this, Luke shadowed me everywhere from 37 weeks on, which was unexpectedly lovely. We went on a lot of leisurely lunch dates where I watched him mentally calculate how long it would take to get to the hospital if we had to leave midway through our pizza.
Along with this premonition of speed was my certainty that the baby would arrive sooner than his older sister. By the due date, definitely. Maybe even earlier! This is the exact same prank I played on myself last time, by the way. My due date rolled past. The baby showed no signs of vacating. He was very comfortable. I was less comfortable; by 37 weeks, he had settled himself into launch position, and some habitual fetal movement would send knives of pain into my pelvis at random intervals. This sensation is called— and I hate typing this— “lighting crotch,” because pregnancy is riddled with cutesy and degrading terminology. Every time I yelped from the shock of it I could see that Luke thought I was having a contraction, and I had to disappoint us both by saying it was just the baby headbutting me in the cervix again. I was also just impatient. Going over the due date was embarrassing, a kind of personal failure, a public display of delinquency. “Is the baby here yet?” my friends and family kept texting, as if I might have forgotten to mention it.
I had a midwife appointment the day after my due date. “You’re already three centimetres,” she told me, “and your cervix is very soft. I think it’ll happen very soon.” She gave me a sweep to hurry things along— if you don’t know what that is, I’ll spare you the description— and I left feeling cheerful.
Then another five days passed.
My mood deflated, then curdled. I saw a headline about a coyote who walked up and bit a woman for no reason and thought, I feel you, coyote. Luke hovered delicately. We had spent nearly every moment of the last three weeks in a perpetual state of readiness, prepared to drop everything and rush to the hospital. I prepared Maeve’s lunch and packed her backpack each evening in case we had to leave overnight; I tidied compulsively, wanting everything to be ready whenever we returned from the hospital. But each day I woke up still pregnant made the eventuality of birth feel, against all logic, less likely to ever occur.
That week felt like a vacation gone on too long, when your flight gets cancelled and you’re left with nothing to do but kill time while you wait for departure. No matter how pleasant it is in that foreign place, you just want to go home. I went for long walks and wrote increasingly deranged tweets. Several friends made impromptu phone calls and FaceTimes, and these generous points of social contact were a guardrail for my waning sanity. I could acknowledge the ridiculousness of this— due dates are just estimates! what was a few more days before the lifetime commitment of having a new baby?— but I couldn’t rationalize it away. I also couldn’t stop thinking about it, and thinking about how this fixation was probably preventing labour from happening, like a watched pot refusing to boil.
On Saturday afternoon, I slipped out for a walk, grimly texting Luke, “I’m going to buy castor oil to make the labour smoothie.” My midwife had mentioned this cocktail of castor oil, fruit juice and almond butter at the last appointment. “We can try that next week, if you’re still pregnant,” she told me, “It’ll probably send you right into labour.” The general idea was that castor oil, a laxative, could make you shit so hard that it would kickstart contractions. “Ha ha, sounds super fun,” I replied, but that was five days ago, before I had lost my mind.
I Googled the recipe and bought castor oil and pineapple juice, though I couldn’t find lemon verbana tea. I decided it didn’t matter; the recipes suggested everything but the oil itself was optional. At home, I blended the oil and juice with a spoonful of peanut butter and some ice cubes., chugged it, and recommenced sulking. Three hours passed. At 7:30pm, as I lay on the couch distractedly reading Alicia Elliott’s novel And Then She Fell (an excellent book you should absolutely not read while pregnant), I felt a distinct and sudden pop from inside my body, like a water balloon bursting. Warm liquid spilled out of me as I barrel-rolled off the white couch. Many condescending paragraphs have been written on pregnancy websites advising people of the difference between amniotic fluid and urine (“Is the fluid yellow and ammonia-scented? You just peed yourself, mama!”) so let me state for the record that it was very unambiguous.
I called Luke, afraid to stand up and drip fluid everywhere. “Can you bring me a towel?” I said, “My water just broke.” Luke has always been very good in stressful situations— calm and organized— and he had been rehearsing this moment for weeks. He sprinted up the stairs with a towel, took Maeve downstairs to my parents, and began gathering our bags together for the hospital. I paged the midwife practice and then climbed into the shower to rinse off the amniotic slime while I waited for someone to call. “My water broke, but I’m not having contractions yet,” I said when my midwife phoned back, and she suggested we meet at the hospital anyway. “If you’re still not contracting, we can try to move things along,” she said, reassuringly. “Sometimes just hooking you up to a breast pump can get things going.” At that moment I felt the first contraction, distant and ominous, just like when the water glass vibrates in Jurassic Park to foreshadow the arrival of the T. Rex.
Luke and I got in the car. I gleefully texted my family and a couple of friends: “My water broke! Off to the hospital!” It was 7:50pm. I was having mild contractions every few minutes at this point. We found parking in front of the labour & delivery entrance and strolled in calmly, unlike my first labour where I was writhing and screaming like a rabid animal by the time we got to the hospital. The nurses looked up from the desk. “What brings you in?” one asked, cheerfully, and I replied, “I’m going to have a baby!”
One of the nurses checked my blood pressure, went through my medical information and the details of my last birth, then brought me into an exam room just as our midwife arrived. A few minutes ago I’d been joking with the nurse but by this point, around 8:15pm, the contractions were too strong and painful to talk through. My midwife explained to the nurse that I’d already consented to have a saline lock put in— an IV port in my arm— because I’d haemorrhaged after my first birth, and the port would make it faster to treat if it happened again. But first, she told us, she would do a quick check to see how dilated I was. “Okay!” she announced after what seemed like a very cursory glance. “You’re seven centimetres already, so maybe let’s just get you up to a delivery suite before we do anything else.” I nodded. I was having contractions almost constantly at this point, agonizing ones with no real break between them, which reminded me that this whole birth process I had been eagerly awaiting was going to hurt. She and the nurse helped me into a wheelchair padded with hospital towels as Luke picked up our bags, and then we were off.
The trip to the delivery suite took a couple minutes— into a giant elevator, down a long, featureless hallway, all three of us talking and laughing. I was trying to pretend I wasn’t panicking from the terrific pain gnawing at my insides, which confirmed that this was going to be another very quick labour, not so much a marathon I was running as a cannon I was being loaded into.
Almost the moment we arrived in the room, I felt like pushing. It’s an unmistakable sensation, like knowing you’re going to throw up or (sorry) have diarrhea. The body is unambiguous about expulsion. I was in so much pain, and I simultaneously wanted it to be over as soon as possible and wished I could put it off for a few minutes. I was scared. I kept saying that: “I’m so scared.” I thought I might start crying. It was worse the second time, knowing what to expect.
My last birth had so many people in the room— at least five doctors and assorted nurses— but this time it was just our midwife and a single nurse, who was so calm and unfazed that she appeared, at times, to be bored. “Stop yelling,” she told me, and while it’s true that you should not waste your breath while pushing, it was still kind of a mean thing to say. “I can see that you’re holding back a little bit,” the midwife told me, which was also true, but can you blame me? Also, it was barely 8:30pm. An hour ago I had been reading on the couch.
I pushed, without yelling, and I could feel the baby moving down, down, down— but not far enough. “He’s stuck,” I said, hysterically. I could feel him lodged in there; I could tell he was bigger than my daughter, and I started to panic because in that moment I was sure he was too big to come out and we were both going to die. “He’s not stuck,” said our midwife, but she kept checking his heartbeat and murmuring to the nurse, and finally she told me she was going to give me another episiotomy because as it turns out he was just a little bit stuck. “But I can do it on top of the last one, so you won’t have a new scar,” she said, which was nice. Still, I didn’t know why she was telling me all this; I didn’t want to participate in decision-making, I was busy. The bored nurse splashed lidocaine on me like she was drizzling oil on a salad, the midwife sliced with the scalpel, and I closed my eyes and pushed as hard as I could, for as long as I could, and I kept my eyes closed until I felt the baby finally, finally slide out, the hot sudden relief washing over the pain. There he was, at last— our Cassidy. I heard his first tiny cry and opened my eyes.
His head was as large and spherical as a softball, covered in downy brown hair. To my complete surprise, he looked nothing like Maeve, which is to say he looked nothing like me. Big round cheeks, a perfect little rosebud mouth, a tiny pointed chin, those hazy-grey newborn eyes. Already, on his face, a quizzical look that I’ve come to think of as his signature expression, like he was surprised but not displeased to find himself in the open air. I held him for a minute, listening to him grunt and squeak and gurgle. Then someone— a nurse, a doctor, I wasn’t paying attention— took him away so that the midwife and I could finish our work. It wasn’t quite 9:00pm yet. We’d only been there for an hour.
Here’s another thing about birth: you think that having the baby is the conclusion. But it’s not! It’s the fourth act. The finale is all the shit they do to you after the baby comes out. For me, that included stitches, oxytocin in the IV to help manage my bleeding, then ergometrine injected into my thigh because I was still bleeding heavily. “Fundal massage,” where a series of medical professionals take turns forcefully kneading your battered abdomen to help your uterus contract. After all that, the midwife put her hand inside me and pulled out some massive blood clots— unlike last time, when I had retained placenta removed by hand, she didn’t have to reach all the way inside my uterus, so it was marginally less painful but still deeply unpleasant. I don’t recommend this! But like every other aspect of this infinitely mysterious process, there’s no way to know whether it’ll happen to you, or prevent it if it does.
Cassidy was gurgling and coughing. His oxygen, a doctor explained, was a little low— probably because he’d been expelled so fast that the amniotic fluid hadn’t gotten squeezed out of his lungs on the way out. “We’re going to take him down the hall and give him some more oxygen,” she told me, which I didn’t realize meant he was going to the NICU. Luke went with him; later, he told me that by the time they got there that Cassidy’s oxygen levels were perfect, and he spent the next 45 minutes watching the nurses bickering over a new computer system that none of them had mastered, trying to figure out how to transfer the baby’s file out of the NICU and back to the regular ward. It gave me some time, anyway, to get my stitches and my crude blood clot extraction and ruminate on how violent birth is. Actually, I spent most of the time texting photos of the baby to friends and reading his birth chart (Gemini sun and Gemini moon!). When it was all done, Luke returned with Cassidy, his robust health confirmed, his face already familiar. I had missed him.
