Mantras say the darndest things

Before I tell the birth story of my son let me just say that in the end all anyone wants out of a birth is a baby who is ok and that this is how my birth story ends. I say that in case you’re pregnant right now and reading this story. (Doesn’t it annoy you how you continually stumble upon scary birth stories while you’re pregnant?) Also, this story is loooong. (And badly written and really, probably only interesting to immediate family).

My daughter’s birth story also ended with a healthy baby, one who slept blissfully through her own birth, but I otherwise found the birth experience quite traumatic, in fact so traumatic that in the lead up to this birth, my son’s birth, I was going a little crazy with fear. Consequently I did a lot of reading about happy birth experiences and decided upon the kind of birth I wanted.

Like my first birth I wanted to birth vaginally and without intervention, including without drugs. Unlike my first birth I wanted the pain to be manageable; I wanted to birth relatively quickly and easily. Mostly I wanted to birth without fear. In order to do this I decided that I needed to spend the bulk of my labour at home. I wanted to be in the semi-dark and quiet and above all I wanted privacy – no-one would know about the labour until they absolutely had to know. I would labour almost secretly, with my daughter in the house asleep. I would be calm and confident. There would be no complications.  So, I did things I had never done before. I practiced visualisations, whispered affirmations, and attempted meditation.

But for some reason birth must be a learning experience, and I hadn’t realised that with all my preparation for birth I had made a fatal error – I had begun to incorporate a lot of factors that weren’t under my control.

So, this is how my son’s birth actually happened. Very, very late. Late enough for everyone to know my date of induction and for everyone to be watching me uncomfortably for signs of birth. In fact, even under induction labour didn’t commence until after a few goes so there was an extra twenty-four hours to allow the final stragglers to join my labour gallery, while I holed up in my hospital room wishing I was back in my bedroom – quiet and alone. My confidence began to wane over the days (my mantras were sounding positively farcical – I trust my body; this baby knows when to be born; my body is able to birth this baby) and my daughter didn’t like all the waiting either; it made her anxious and she didn’t cope well.

After all that waiting it took me by surprise  when the second attempt at induction worked so fast. It must have taken my partner by surprise too because we were back in our tiny little hospital room packing what we needed for the birth suite when I stopped to steady myself through a breath-taking contraction, and he not realising what was happening got irritated with me for ignoring him.  But something else surprised me too – my visualisations and affirmations actually worked, the contractions were coming on strong but they were manageable and I was able to sigh my way through them instead of howling, which frankly impressed the pants off he and I both after my first birth (which was noisy).

In the final days of pregnancy I stumbled upon a particularly beautiful birth story on the Internet. A woman who lived on a hill in the woods with her partner and young daughter. I read with fascination how she waited until dawn until the last possible moment to wake her partner; how she sent him off hours down the road to collect her midwife; how in the meantime she laboured outside and alone with only her little girl by her side; how she noticed the birds and the insects and the dappled morning light while she laboured. Her confidence in her labour was incredibly inspiring. And the photographs that accompanied her story had a dream-like loveliness. During my own contractions she hovered into view and I found myself thinking not about my semi-well-prepared visualisations but about this woman in the woods.

We moved to the birth suite and it was there that things began to unravel. The midwife assigned to us blustered through the room in a cloud of hospital policy bellowing over our whispers and drowning out our meditation CD. The lavender oil burner was snuffed, the lights were turned on, the door was left open, the birthing ball was not to be moved around the room, and don’t even think about using the birthing bath (new hospital policy). I looked at my partner hopelessly. Under my instruction this midwife had already been called away once by the shift manager to discuss being in tune with our birthing plan. For godsake, this  was her trying, really trying to be the midwife that we wanted. It wasn’t going to get any better than this.

So we moved to the shower, it was where I had found the most relief during my first birth – a long, painful posterior labour and it offered a modicum of quiet and privacy now. In there the contractions came on stronger and stronger until they were crashing through my body. I stretched through each contraction – as though either end of my torso was trying to get as  far  away as  possible from my pelvis and all its pain. With the increase in both duration and level of pain I began to find it difficult to catch my breath between contractions. I was either doggedly pursuing my visualisation through the intensity of the contraction or madly trying to relax back into my body in preparation for the next contraction.

I tried to stay on that hill in the woods with that woman. I thought about her – how she’d decided to face the hardest part of labour all but alone; how brave she was making that decision before she’d even known what her labour would be like; and how she’d left herself no escape route. But our midwife returned and she busied herself in the shower, for some reason, and my partner began to say reassuring things which meant that fear must have at long last begun to show in my face. This time wasn’t like the last birth and we weren’t really co-ordinated as a team, he and I. In the lead up I had wanted him to prepare for labour with me but he was exhausted with parenting, work, university, and by then also the bulk of the housework, and he had never found the time I had wanted for talking and reading and reflecting together. Instead, when the contractions escalated in pain I found myself adrift. The pain closed in around me – reaching a terrifying level – and bringing with it memories of my last birth. I remembered the trauma and I remembered that I had wanted to birth this time without fear. On the peak of each contraction I started thinking not relax, let your body do this but instead and she was very happy with her epidural, and she was very happy with her epidural.

While I was labouring in the shower and feeling hopeless just like last time I also started wondering. What if? What if I had an epidural and it worked? What if I had an epidural and there were no complications, no further intervention was required? What if none of the things I feared about epidural happened to me? It was a gamble but for me it seemed worth the chance. The midwife was surprised by my change of heart or at least had the diplomacy to appear surprised. (She later confessed that epidurals were her favourite type of births). She reported that I was now fully effaced but barely progressed with dilation – an eerily similar low point to my first birth story. I found the conviction I was looking for to proceed with an epidural, which all sounds so civilized when really I was dripping wet and shaking and rapidly falling into an abyss of pain and terror.

An anaesthetist appeared quickly. He was young but calm, and friends with some of the anaesthetists in my circle of friends. Surely a good sign before someone sticks a needle in your spine? By then my contractions  were coming so fast and furiously that he couldn’t get good access to my spine. So we opted for a spinal block instead while I sucked on gas. And we all held our breath while he inserted the needle and then.. calm descended, the world righted itself, I could  see again. And what I saw was that the midwife had left to the far corner of the room to fill out paper work – no doubt rejoicing that yet again use of the birthing bath had been successfully adverted for a labour – and that my partner was wandering around the room too, packing up our labour bag like it was all but over.

When I had been making the decision to have an epidural he had leant over me in the shower and gently warned me that the hospital would take over should I go down that path and that frankly, we’d need to let them. We didn’t have the expertise to do otherwise. He was right – because once I decided to have an epidural monitors were attached to the baby and I, and doctors and nurses now buzzed in and out of the room without hesitation. There was no part of ‘clearing in the woods’ left in my experience. One doctor swooped into the room announcing I hear we’re expecting a very big baby in here, let’s get things sped up, get the drip happening. I rolled my eyes, must we, must we talk about very big babies when I am trying to find the confidence to birth without fear? No-one much noticed what I thought. But I retained a small measure of autonomy and was able to insist upon another internal examination before we made any decisions. And a good thing too because I was now fully dilated. From three to ten centimetres in less than thirty minutes.

Mostly I loved the epidural. For one thing, I couldn’t believe how ‘present’ I was for this birth. How the pain relief allowed me the head space to think about my baby coming.  How I had the room to get excited and emotional, and to also feel the pressure of my baby’s descent without the overwhelming sensations of pain. The anaethetist had arranged to start the epidural when the spinal block wore off but it was becoming too late for that, particularly as I wanted enough sensation to be able to push. And let me just admit this to myself – I will be forever thankful for that first drug-free birth with my daughter, however traumatic I found it at the time. Because it equipped me with knowledge on how to push a baby out of my body and how to do it quickly and carefully. In contrast, with this second birth and the epidural it felt a lot like pushing into empty space without a body to push with – an epidural is akin to some twisted exercise in lateral thinking. Without some prior experience I would have been lost. And as it turned out, that ability to push efficiently became crucial for our baby.

Because within moments an urgency took hold of the room. Things had started going badly for the baby. He was being strangled with each contraction and his heart rate plummeted to terrifying lows. And then stayed down.. before finally recovering in time for the slam of the next contraction. The midwives looked concerned, the obstetrician looked concerned. They told me I had to get this baby out NOW. The room filled with even more doctors. And I pushed one more good hard time while thinking of birthing my daughter. He slipped out fast, beached like a breathless fish. They announced in staccato - blue floppy baby. And so he was, my poor little fish of a baby. Always so reassuring to me in utero with his constant happy movements, now reduced to this sad floppy little thing, hoisted above me and rushed away by pediatricians. In some dreadful act of compulsive mother-guilt I wondered if I had made some Faustian pact. My daughter’s birth had been an act of torture that I had pretty much endured for her sake, maybe this time I had unknowingly exchanged his wellbeing for mine during the labour*.

Tears rolled down my cheek. Someone left the room to check on the progress of the ‘blue floppy baby’. My partner and I exchanged ‘oh fuck’ looks and then ‘don’t think about how bad this could be, it will be ok’ and then ‘oh who are we kidding, fuck, fuck, FUCK’. And then someone returned with good news. The baby is talking to the pediatricians she said, which meant that he was crying, which also meant that he had to be breathing air. And in the next moment, unbelievably, they were returning him to me. I held him for the first time and felt that rush of exhilaration that shatters and re-builds you all in an instant. He was still crying and I tried to reassure him. I wondered if I could comfort him after he had experienced a birth so frightening. But he stopped crying and his eyes were watching. His hands were still blue. I was politely warned not to be disappointed. He wouldn’t be well enough to breastfeed for a few hours, they told me. But I saw him gnaw his fist and I knew what that had to mean. So I put him to my breast and he latched on and quietly fed.

* I asked one of my anaesthetist friends about my fears and he assured me that the epidural was not related to our baby’s distress.