Birth Story
Written August 30, 2011
I don’t remember a lot of the birth. Childbirth, to me, is a harrowing event that we’re not meant to fully preserve in our minds, for fear of never, ever, ever entertaining the idea of ever having more children, EVER again. So, no. I haven’t sterilized, canned, and shelved the early morning hours when Bastian Wilde entered this world, headstrong and all ours. But what I have been able to conserve is recollected in outlying snapshots, vigorous little rushes, real and phantom pains. And what that night meant for my body, my mind, and my family – in itself – is not so much a memory, but a future.
Be that as it may, I started The Long Bonds in hopes of sharing our lives – our future. And that wouldn’t be complete without a past; some form of a Birth Story. How Bastian Wilde came to be. So, here I am, seven months and some twenty or so days since giving birth to our baby, and finally telling the story. The story of how, on that nebulous and surreal night, I gave birth to our first son.
It’s not my style to document time in minutes and hours, I don’t even know that I have the capacity to do so, or that it all interests a reader. When dealing in memory, I deal in impressionism. If you squint enough and pour some of your own heart into it, some abstract details should emerge. I feel strongly that this is so.
I woke up the morning of Saturday, January 8, 2011, as I had the previous couple of weeks; hugely pregnant, refreshed, so in love with living, and gently eager. I think we played Scrabble, maybe not. I was a week past my due date, so it was time for the “Non-Stress Test.” They shouldn’t call it that. I remember little about this process because it’s hugely overshadowed by what happened later that night, but what I do remember is that my yet-to-be-named baby boy was as cool as a cucumber, perfectly fine in there. So we left the hospital. Just another routine check-up.
At some point in the day, we ended up in a vintage furniture store – Vintage Pink on Hawthorne Boulevard. Adam had been monitoring the wee little contractions on his phone and it was there that we became pretty sure something was gathering force. We thought it best to keep walking. I think we wandered Safeway and Ross. I even bought the shawl that I later wore to the hospital, before I realized that it was time to be in one place.
Back at home, I bounced on the birth ball and tried to watch Lost. We had been powering through the entire series in the last trimester and were nearing the end. Needless to say, I couldn’t watch Lost.
I remember gaps in time where I’d lose all concentration to a buzzing feeling of energy that swelled with each lasting spasm of my giant, ephemeral belly. And I also remember when the reassuring tightening transitioned into the reality of the situation – when it began to hurt.
We had moved downstairs by this point, and I was lying on the couch, my face buried in pillows. Adam ran outside to hand our keys over to Sam and Emily, dear friends who were going to babysit Digby, our dog, while we were at the hospital. When he got back up, he told me something sweet Emily had said. I don’t even remember what it was exactly, but it left me reeling. I was suddenly crying and pacing the entire length of our apartment, back and forth, back and forth, murmuring that “this was really happening” in a thousand different ways. That we were really going to have a baby. Tonight. This must have been when Adam called my mother and told her that we were most definitely going to be leaving for the hospital very soon.
I had been phoning the on-call midwife periodically throughout the night, and something she said had me waiting for some absolute, blood-curdling, horrible, terrible worst before we went in. I didn’t think I had reached that yet. When I told Adam that I didn’t think it was time yet, that we couldn’t yet be to the absolute, blood-curdling, horrible, terrible worst, that they would just send us home, he said, “You were just anxiously pacing the apartment, getting really emotional. I think it’s time.”
Once my mom got there, we left for the hospital. Quickly. Despite the intense pain, that I couldn’t describe now if you paid me a million dollars, I still felt like they were going to send us home. When we finally got there, and I could barely change into my hospital gown because I was in so much writhing, debilitating pain, the nurse told me I was about six centimeters dilated. And still, I asked, “Are you going to send us home?” She laughed.
What followed was a naked, ferocious, sweaty, throbbing, laborious, agonizing hallucination. In my mind’s eye, there are long, vapid gaps in time. And there are some intact moments, like when my contractions were suddenly on top of each other and I was leaning over a sink spitting out ice chips, screaming “Why isn’t there any time between them anymore?!” Cursing the lack of predictability in my wily contractions because they were supposed to be very hardcore, yet thankfully predictable freaks of nature. Yeah, not so much.
At some point in time, it was discovered that the temperature of the water coming out of the hospital room sink and going into my aqua doula tub was not hot enough. It has to be a certain temperature for the baby to be born in the water, which was my plan. Though I didn’t say anything that night, I think it was pretty well understood that I was going to have my baby in the water. As a side note, I will never, ever understand how women labor, without pain intervention, on land. So the nurses began an emergency procession, ushering hot water from elsewhere, by bucket, into my tub. It was incredible. Thanks to that assembly line of diehard nurses, Bastian Wilde was born in the water at 5:15 am on Sunday morning, January 9, 2011.
I don’t remember ever considering an epidural. I was there to have a water birth, nasty and natural, and that is what I was going to have. I should probably thank my midwife, Caroline, for facilitating this. Though I’m quite aware that I did the hard work, she never mentioned pain intervention, so I guess I never thought it a possibility, and that’s pretty powerful stuff. Your mind and body will absolutely power you through what you think is perfectly possible. And though I know that extraordinary complications do reveal themselves in the birth process, part of me believes that my naiveté and trust are what gifted Bastian Wilde and I a complication-free, raw and primal birth.
It was something like thirteen hours in total, probably around seven hours of real deal labor. An hour and a half-ish of that burning and arduous climax that didn’t at all feel like a relief to me – pushing – which actually felt more like five minutes, max. When I heard how long it had been, I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe that I held my ankles and pushed that perfectly round, 90th percentile head, plus eight pounds and eleven ounces of baby boy body, out of my body for an hour and a half. But I guess I did.
This is where is gets especially fuzzy, which will forever sadden me, but also reminds me that what I went through was both traumatic and fatiguing. I trudged through several hours of mind blowing labor on coconut water and ice chips alone, a giant baby was released from my small body, and I was a mother. Adam was a father. My mother was a grandmother. That’s a lot for one tired and stunned mind to process.
I was so shocked that I couldn’t really focus on Adam’s reaction to seeing our new baby. All important and mind-altering realizations on motherhood – parenthood – have since sidelined me frequently, but just not right then. I heard a nurse ask if she should help, and before she knew it, I was up, out of the water, and on the bed. “She’s tough,” I heard Caroline say. These are the details we remember when we’re realizing that yes, we are tough.
Remember, the water wasn’t quite warm enough to keep Bastian and I safely bonding for as long as we wanted. And truthfully, I just wanted to get the hell out of that lukewarm cesspool, as beautiful and pain-relieving a vessel as it had been just moments ago.
As soon as the little guy and I became two, Adam cut the cord and I was starting a long recovery. And to be quite honest, my postpartum experience has put those thirteen wild hours to shame. Before I knew it, a third degree tear was being stitched up by a pinch-hitter OB who I had never met before. Those thoughtful, lovely nurses turned cruel and were prodding my empty belly – they call it massaging your uterus, but it feels like death, so no – not massaging, prodding. And I was being bothered to take something to relax, Fentanyl by IV. This still upsets me. All it did was make me sleepy, but I had just had a baby; sleep was not on my list of things to accomplish in the next five minutes. I needed to be present. I needed to be able to feed my baby colostrum, not narcotics, but I was too exhausted to resist.
On that Sunday morning, I had no idea that as soon as I was somewhat coherent and almost able to comprehend the fact that we had a living, breathing, healthy child who was all ours, that I would also be born a gaping wound – an exposed, vulnerable mother whose love was swaddled and human in her arms. Nothing can prepare a woman for this metamorphosis, for this sweet severance.
Seven months and some twenty days later, I am still learning how to function and trust with my bodily love, my beating heart on the outside – crawling around and bumping his head, babbling and giggling, wanting and needing. I knew love before, but I wasn’t responsible for it, I wasn’t instrumental to its existence. Before I became a mother, love happened to me, I happened to love – but now, I created love from love.
This will be a long, full life of my son, his father, and I teaching each other how to exist in love, how to trust in the parts of our love that are outside of us – open to the elements – and how to live, because of love.
