The pain surged, eased up a bit then surged again. I yelped each time a contraction hit. Adam stood behind me as the pain rose and leaned his full body weight into my sacrum, as though he were trying to close and overly full suitecase. It was the only thing that brought relief. Katie, our Doula, entered through our front door and watched me quietly at first then stated matter-of-factly, “You are in the late stages of labor”.
The contractions came crashing down on me like waves, one after another, and I leaped from the floor every time. She got down on the floor with me and coached me to channel the sound from high in my throat to deep in my pelvis and to be fierce “like a mama bear”. It worked. My voice broke open and became a deep moan. Suddenly I felt a surge of power I had not experienced before.
She whispered something to Adam. I heard him frantically running around the house. (He told me later it was “get the stuff ready for the car, now!”) We all knew what this meant. There was a moment of calm and then a moment of panic as we scrabbled down the steps of our apartment to the car.
Even Katie, despite her calm demeanor, appeared frazzled and accidentally locked her keys in the car just as we were about to leave. She was forced to ride with us, which was a godsend. I got on my hands and knees in the back seat and she pushed on my sacrum while I moaned as Adam drove. The contractions seemed fast and unpredictable.
Normally the hospital is a 20-minute drive from our house. But at 8:15am we found ourselves gridlocked in rush hour traffic. I moaned and breathed as we lurched along. At one point I felt the overwhelming urge to push. “Are you pushing?” Katie asked. She sounded almost accusatory. “Don’t push!” She held my bottom as though to keep the baby inside. Then her voice became composed and she spoke quietly as though to herself “It’s alright. I’ve never delivered a baby by myself before, but if it happens before we get to the hospital, we are going to be alright.” Adam leaned on the horn and I felt the car jump forward.
When we arrived at the hospital the on-call nurse took us into a back room instructed me strip, put on a robe and get on the table and push. I hopped on the bed on my hands and knees and gripped the metal rails. My OBGYN who was also caught in rush hour traffic arrived 2O minutes later and gave me a quick check.
“Fully dilated and I can see the head coming though. He’s got a full head of hair.”
She instructed me to lie on my back and I protested. I did not want to work against gravity. We compromised and I agreed to lie on my side so she could see. For the next hour and a half she and a chorus of nurses encouraged and applauded me while I tried to bear down. Medical staff came in and out of the room, chatting amongst themselves.
“what have we here?”
“A natural birth. She came in fully dilated. Says she doesn’t remember her water breaking. Her underwear was soaked when she got here.”
“Second child? No first, but it’s behaving like a second. Very exciting. Did you record the show last night?”
I felt the slippery head slide out an inch from my body with each push, and then frustratingly, slide back in once the contraction was over.
“Will you guys kindly shut up, I’m trying to concentrate here!” I snapped.
“One more push” My OBGYN whispered over and over again. She addressed my doula “She’s got an incredible amount of control, it’s as if she’s taken Pitocin.”
“She’s a yoga teacher” my doula answered by way of explanation. “She’s been practicing for more than ten years”. I chuckled to myself. Yes, yoga probably helps, but in a sense my whole life had been a practice for this moment: Long walks in the Santa Cruz Mountains, hours of drawing and dancing, authentic movement, years of therapy, and overcoming my fear of singing and speaking in public, and probably most importantly: the ability to trust the process and let the chips fall as they may, regardless of what life has in store for me.
At 10:58 am our baby “Z” emerged from my body and into this world, tiny, red and alarmed. He had the softest cry I had ever heard. They laid his slippery, wet body on my chest and covered him with a blanket. After a minute he grew quiet. His wide, grayish blue eyes surveyed the surroundings: the nurses, me and Adam, the room of bright florescent lights. Then he rested his weary, head back down on my chest and practiced breathing.
I had heard and read enough hospital horror stories about women being pressured to medicate when they might otherwise be fine going natural. Especially as a woman in the “advanced age” category I knew that in the eyes of the medical community I was considered higher risk just by being over the age of 35.
I was determined.
I queried everyone I could think of who had seen or experienced a successful natural birth: my OBGYN, my doula, friends, family members, random women in the grocery store who had babies.
“Did you have a natural birth? If so, what do you think helped make it possible?” Most women I talked to did not have a natural birth, though many had planned on it. I was curious about this and decided to go directly to the professionals
“Of the women who give birth in this hospital, how many actually go on to have a natural birth?” I asked My OBGYN during a pelvic exam.
She scribbled something in my chart, and then peered over her glasses.
“Not many”, she said without blinking. I pressed her for numbers, actual statistics. Surely they track this stuff.
Nope.
“I don’t know, maybe one in ten women.” She seemed bored with my question like she had heard it too many times before. She went on to explain that many women intend to have a natural birth but end up caving when the pain becomes unbearable… Or the baby has other plans.
“You should be open minded.” She cautioned. “A natural birth is not always the positive experience people make it out to be.”
My jaw tightened. I felt a fleeting impulse to wrestle her to the ground.
“You see a lot of women and a lot of births. Can you often predict the kind of birth experience a woman will have, just by talking to her during these exams?”
She looked me in the eye and nodded. “Occasionally people surprise me”.
After that appointment I became obsessed with numbers: Odds, birth statistics, natural birth percentages. This surprised me, as I am just not a numbers person. I have always hated them. I also dislike rulers, graph paper, measuring cups, decimal points, and hash tags. They remind me too much of math, a subject that has troubled me since elementary school.
Suddenly, now numbers had become purveyors of truth, hopefulness and certainty. They signaled how hard (or not hard) it would be to believe in myself, my support system,my baby and the birth professionals surrounding me. Were the chances of having a natural birth really as low as people were telling me? Did I have the audacity to try anyway? Was it true for women who had already planned to have a hospital birth, or was it the case for women who had originally set out to have a home birth, but did not? Let’s measure and see!
I asked my doula for her perspective. Her numbers were better than my OBGYN, but still surprisingly conservative. Roughly, one in five women she worked with went on to have a natural birth. I was shocked. Why were the numbers so low? Haven’t women been giving birth naturally for centuries without medical intervention? Was it really that hard? A male friend of mine reminded me that women and babies have also been dying in labor for centuries, and it was not until the advent of modern medicine that those figures dramatically decreased.
During my third trimester a close friend of mine who was also pregnant, lost her baby at 28 weeks. Another friend of mine lost her baby just days after it was born. The news shook me. I cried often, burring my head in my husband’s shoulder as dark, wet patches formed on his sweaters. I clung to the railing a little tighter as I teetered down the icy steps of our house. Everything in the world seemed precarious and uncertain; especially death and life. As a pregnant women, both are likely possibilities at some point in her productive life. This is the part of pregnancy people don’t often talk about: miscarriages, still births and traumatic births, though they are quite common.
But at no other time in a woman’s life is the dance of death and life so intimately intertwined as during pregnancy. For the first time in my life I felt truly mortal. Not fragile, just soft, tender, vulnerable.
Each time I stepped one foot off the curb of a side walk, was a gamble. Death. Life. Death. Life. The scales could tip either way at any moment. This feeling only increased once my son was born.
At my next prenatal check-up I decided to up my line of questioning.
“On a purely psychological level, assuming that mom and baby are healthy, and both capable of having a natural birth, what do you think enables those few women to have a natural labor?”
My OBGYN: “They are hard headed. Once they set their mind to something they don’t back down”.
This did not sound exactly positive, unless, you’re talking corporate takeovers, or brutal contact sports.
My doula had a softer perspective. “Surrender”, she said.
“You have to be able to surrender the illusion of control. Women who have natural births are not afraid of losing face or looking foolish in front of their husbands, the hospital staff and however else is present for the birth.”
My prenatal yoga teacher was even more specific. “Imagine pooping in front of a room full of people while they watch. If you can do this and stay relaxed enough to not close off your [anal] sphincter then you can have a natural birth. The experience is pretty similar”. The class was silent.
So stubbornness and willingness to be un-apologetically uninhibited; even brazenly antisocial, was what was required to increase your chances of having an natural child birth; to be able to give yourself full permission to put away the ruler, and throw away the mask.
Cool. Child birth was beginning to sound like fun!
