If you ever want to get a mom talking, ask her to tell you about when she had her babies.
I don't think I have ever met a woman who did not love to tell her birth story over and over, gory detail for gory detail, from first cramp to final stitch.
Now, I happen to be someone who likes to be as prepared as humanly possibly for everything I get myself into. I’m a planner -- a virtual poster-child of Type-A’ness, with possibly a bit of ocd thrown in for good measure. So around the time I began warming up to the idea of someday getting pregnant, I wandered into a coworker’s office, the mother of a then toddler, and said, “Tell me everything about your daughter’s birth from beginning to end and don’t leave anything out.”
Her eyes lit up and I could swear I heard her stifle an evil snicker. She propped her feet up on her desk and started talking. This was where I learned that contractions feel like menstrual cramps, at least in the beginning. That the epidural doesn’t hurt. That some women poop during pushing.
Needless to say, I was fairly horrified.
So I did what I always do when I'm fearing the unknown. I started reading and I didn't stop. I devoured every pregnancy website, magazine, and book I could find and spent way too much time watching marathons of birthing shows on the Discovery Channel.
Shortly after my conversation with the first coworker, another got pregnant. She was my guinea pig and I took nine months of mental notes. I asked her what it all felt like, how it all worked. I saw ultrasound pictures, learned about prenatal visits and maternity clothes and read the daily “What’s happening to your baby today!” updates with her. I made her fill me in when she came back from maternity leave. This time, I learned about mucus plugs and water breaking. That amniotic fluid can sometimes smell a little strange and that obstetricians will often massage “down there” to try to prevent tearing. (?!) I also learned about tearing. And stitches. And mesh underwear. And icepacks disguised as maxi pads.
Needless to say, I was fairly horrified.
After HER, yet another coworker drank the water. I watched HER even more closely than the previous one because, at this point, the baby discussions at our house had gotten serious. I asked more questions. I did some more reading. I watched in a combination of amazement and horror as her belly jumped back and forth during meetings. I finally mustered up the courage to put my hand on it once when she nine months pregnant. I was surprised at how HARD it felt. “How is that even comfortable?!” “How do you breathe?!” “Where are your organs?” I wondered aloud. From her, I learned about epidurals and dead legs. I learned about how you are supposed to push. I learned if you do it right, you really DO sometimes poop on the table. I learned about breastpumps.
Needless to say, I was fairly horrified.
Then, one morning, after a night of feeling sick and crampy, I took a pregnancy test. I remember instinctively putting my hand to my abdomen when I saw the two lines. I carried that stick into the bedroom where, still completely shell-shocked, I said something to the effect of, “Two lines... it’s two lines... “ over and over again to my very confused husband. Finally I managed to sputter, “I’m pregnant.” And yes. It was definitely said with a period and NOT an exclamation point. I was still too shocked for exclamation points then.
I will confess that I was a trainwreck of a pregnant woman the first time around. First off, I read entirely too much. In fact, I read all of What to Expect When You’re Expecting in a day and a half. I was six weeks pregnant at the time.
While this may seem like something an intelligent, responsible woman who is proactive about her health might do, I can also add “slightly paranoid” to that list of descriptions of me. I can assure you that the level of research I did really only served to make a slightly paranoid pregnant woman exponentially MORE paranoid.
In addition to knowing way more than was necessary, I whined endlessly to anyone who would listen. Eventually, the only people who would listen were my mom, my husband and my obstetrician -- and that was probably only because it was her job.
I whined about throwing up. I whined about gaining weight. I whined about being uncomfortable. I ACTUALLY whined when I found out I was having a completely healthy baby boy instead of a girl because, naturally, “I wanted the girl first” and “What was I going to do with a boy?!” While this seemed perfectly reasonable to me then, trust me, I cringe inside and out when I relive it now. How my doctor kept herself from grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking me right then and there, I will never know. Instead, she laughed, handed me tissues to wipe the doppler goo off of my growing bump, and told me her first baby had been a boy too, and, for that matter, so had her second. She added, “I promise, you won’t care that he’s not a girl when he’s born.” I furrowed my brow at her. I had my doubts.
One appointment near my due date, I was the recipient of the, shall we say, ultra-invasive exam. To this day, I secretly think this was her revenge for having to listen to nine months of my incessant whining. It left me crampy all day and I was SURE I was headed into labor by evening. Of course, I wasn’t. And, big surprise, I whined about it.
A week later, after my blood pressure was high for the third week in a row, the doctor burst into the room with my chart in her hand and very matter-of-factly announced, "So I think it's time to get this baby out, when do you want to do it?"
That moment is frozen in time for me, as I recall thinking I was wholly unqualified to make this decision. After exchanging a deer in the headlights glance with my husband, (since it was our first baby, he actually came to all of my appointments, God bless him.) my very intelligent response was, and I quote, “Uhhhhh....”
Like most first-time moms, I think I had actually been hoping on some level that the “baby coming out” part would never actually have to happen. My husband chimed in, “How about tomorrow?” I eventually recovered my ability to speak and offered, “Friday?” My doctor suggested Wednesday or Thursday. Wednesday it became. And, suddenly, my baby had a birthday. A nurse poked her head in to say another woman was ready to push and, just like that, the doctor disappeared out the door in a blur. And so, there we were, my husband and I, left to realize we had exactly two days to wrap our heads around this parenting thing.
Wednesday, March 24th, 2004 arrived uneventfully. Tom and I gathered our things and left our home for the last time as “just the two of us.” Having done this two more times since then, I can tell you that this part, realizing that you are are leaving your house as one kind of family and will be returning as an entirely new one, does not get any less profound. I remember pausing to take it all in, burning that last moment of “just us” into my brain forever.
At the hospital, the nurses wasted no time. They gave me a stylish, breezy little gown to wear and started an iv in my arm. They immediately began pumping me with enough fluid to fill a pool. Trying to take my mind off of the butterflies in my stomach (or maybe it was hunger since they hadn’t let me eat since midnight), I mindlessly flipped through the channels on the tv. The Today Show, Baby Care 101, hospital chapel channel. I stopped on one of those reality baby shows on The Learning Channel. Simultaneously watching it and living it was surreal, to say the least.
The nurses were in and out fiddling with monitors and various other things. They started the baby eviction drip at 7:45, and by 8:30, I started to feel crampy. It felt just like everyone told me it would. Visitors came and went, I talked through my “contractions”, proud of what a trooper I was being what with no epidural yet and all.
As for the epidural, my doctor arrived on the scene around 9:30 and told me I could have it whenever I wanted it. She also broke my water, which, in case you have never experienced this event for yourself, is one of the strangest and most disgusting feelings ever. People always talk about what a beautiful miracle childbirth is, but I am here to tell you that nothing about childbirth is beautiful, at least in the traditional sense.
By 11:30, the contractions were two minutes apart and I was no longer smiling. I asked for the epidural. Once it took effect, I iinstantly became the world’s biggest proponent of giant needles in the spine.
The rest of the day was spent talking to visitors, reminding said visitors to please not step on the catheter bag, munching on ice chips, yelling at my husband for sneaking out of the room to eat (how dare he?!), and enlisting people to pick my completely dead legs up and put them back on the bed. All was moving along nicely and just as people had told me things would and frankly, I was still feeling pretty pleased with myself.
This went on all day long, however, and by dinnertime, the novelty of it all was wearing off QUICKLY.
Around 7:00p.m., the nurse checked me. I was nine centimeters and feeling the pressure I had heard so much about. They let me try some practice pushes, during which I made the nurse swear she would tell me if I pooped on the table. She laughed. I wasn’t kidding.
My doctor showed up around 8:00p.m. and the nurses changed shifts. The new nurse was all business. She had my epidural cranked up because I was feeling a lot of pain on one side all of a sudden. She asked me if I felt the urge to push and I said, annoyed, "I don’t know. I can't feel ANYthing."
(Three babies later, experience and hindsight being what they are, I now know the answer to that question should have been an emphatic YES. The whole ordeal could have been over two hours sooner.)
As it was, the dogs were called off, so to speak, and my doctor left to go pick up her son at a soccer game. She returned around 9:30, which is when we started the REAL pushing. The Survivor finale was on in the background. I found this bit of normalcy oddly comforting.
Lots of pushing and counting and leg holding continued. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I was slammed with the most intense pain I have ever felt. To this day, if I concentrate hard enough, I can still imagine that pain, even through the pregnancy and labor amnesia goggles.
Contractions came one on top of the other and I had no time to recover. I saw stars. I prayed. I white-knuckle clutched the bed. "I can't do this. I can't do this. Please don't make me do this." I remember sobbing to my husband, the doctor, the nurse and my poor mother who stood quietly in the far corner of the room, helpless to do anything to take the pain away. At one point, I recall my doctor looking around the room at everyone and saying, “She should definitely NOT be in this much pain.” Another hour passed. It was my husband who noticed that part of the epidural was laying on the bed beside me and the bed was soaked. I will always remember the way he said, so quietly, so calmly, "Um... shouldn't this be connected to her?"
The anestheseologist who came in to reconnect it was quite grumpy about the it all even though I was the one writhing in pain. I’m also fairly sure he somehow blamed me for the whole incident. Finally though, it was fixed and, while I was still feeling an unbearable amount of pressure, I could at least rest between contractions.
Worn out from what was now closing in on 15 hours of labor, I felt ready to quit. Funny thing about childbirth though-- you kind of have to finish the job one way or another. At one point, my doctor stopped what she was doing, looked me directly in the eye and asked if I wanted her to do a c-section. I had a moment of clarity amidst all the chaos. I mentally calculated how quickly she could get me to the operating room and out of pain versus how quickly I could just buckle down and do the pushing I needed to do. Pushing won.
I pushed harder than ever. Now, looking back, I suspect she knew mentioning the word "c-section" would have that effect. At this point, I have a vague memory of yelling something between pushes about not understanding how people do this more than once and couldn’t she please just pull him out?
My prayers were answered when, at 10:55, she got out the vacuum extractor. I pushed one final time and felt like I was being ripped open from top to bottom, inside out. (not an altogether inaccurate interpretation of what was happening, actually... ) at exactly 11p.m., out came Ben. He was born exactly one hour before his official due date, and emerged with a giant vacuum-shaped dome on the top of his head, which everyone was quick to assure me was not going to be a permanent feature.
As I held him against my chest, I first touched his little fingers, then stroked his face, swollen from the long labor, but in whose features I could see already reflections of myself and my husband. I reached down and found my hand on a tiny knee and realized it was completely familiar to me -- the very same knee that I had been feeling poking out from inside for months.
The pain, which, only moments before, had been so blindingly intense, completely dissolved into the background. I was blissfully unaware of anyone or anything else in the room. My doctor apparently spent at least a half hour putting everything back together again, a detail I only know because my husband still talks about it with a look of horror on his face. Me? I heard nothing, felt nothing, worried about nothing...
I was busy realizing that this? In my arms? This was for real -- I was someone’s mother.
It occurred to me that almost none of the advice from other moms or books I read had been particularly useful in preparing me for the overwhelming mental bombardment of love, fear, responsibility, gratefulness, euphoria and pride I was feeling at that very moment. In fact, the only words of wisdom I could still hear echoing in my mind in that moment were the words my doctor had said to me months earlier, “I promise. You won’t care that he’s not a girl...” Nothing could possibly have been more true and I felt amazingly foolish for ever thinking I would have wanted anything different than this beautiful baby boy.
Isn’t that how it always seems to go with the most of the important things in life? The details you think matter turn out to not really matter at all.
If you have ever had a baby, I probably don’t have to tell you that the next few weeks, of course, were an exhausting amount of adjustment and upheaval in every different way imaginable. Like all new parents though, we eventually found our new normal as a family of three.
It was a surprisingly short amount of time before I found myself talking about doing it all over again someday...
...needless to say, my husband was fairly horrified.
