Birth, Baby, and Me
This piece isn’t for the faint-hearted. But as I write my way into motherhood, I realized that I ought to write about birth, for without it, I would not have become a mother.
Perhaps your birth story, or someone else’s you know, is different.
But here is my attempt at sharing something that is at once personal, and yet universal and powerful.
Take from it what you will at the end — the beauty and pain involved in delivering a child into the world. This piece is for every mother — or rather, for everyone, for we are all here because of birth.
My tale begins early on a Sunday morning, when a trip to the toilet (one of many, now that baby was low, pushing against my bladder) showed me that my mucus plug had fallen out.
The mucus plug is a kind of stopper, made of blood and mucus. It separates baby from the rest of the world, protecting him and his home from germs and other harmful invaders. When it falls out, it is a sign that baby, and a woman’s body, are getting ready for the big event.
I phoned my hospital as instructed and got an “Oh, that’s wonderful! Your body is getting ready for delivery. But you must stay home for the time being.”
By late Sunday evening, I began to feel the difference between Braxton Hicks and real contractions. I could still breathe through both with my knowledge of yoga. Twelve to fifteen minutes stood between each muscular convulsion.
This went on and off as darkness deepened, and on into the next day. And somewhere between the wee hours of Sunday and Monday afternoon, I learned about letting go of the other things I wanted to do — like the article I had slated for Roots and Wings, the Euro-Filipino magazine for which I wrote. It was time to put Birth and Baby first. Everything else had to be shelved. I told my editor I was in early labor and that my article had to arrive at another time. I cancelled a meeting with a friend.
In the wee hours of Monday morning, I phoned the hospital again. The contractions were waking me every ten minutes from 2am-4am. Bloody bits were coming out of me in the toilet every now and again. The sight of red made me nervous, but I kept that to myself. The nurse suggested a warm bath and hot compresses. Hubby obliged with anything I needed.
He and I went to off to dreamland in separate rooms late Monday night — he to our massive bed and me to my new nursing chair. He helped me put my feet up and I let the arms of the turquoise cushions embrace me.
It had become impossible to sleep through another night on our mattress while waves of convulsions woke me. They got more intense as the night progressed, and by half past midnight, I started the contraction timer again — less than five minutes apart this time!
Tuesday had morning arrived. My uterus tightening had become so intense that moans escaped my lips. My timer showed four minutes apart, three, two minutes, five minutes. An hour like this and I roused hubby awake. We phoned the hospital. They could inspect me, they said, and I would either be sent home or admitted for birth.
* * *
The midwife buzzed us in — the main entrance was otherwise locked as it was the wee hours. By 2am, my cervix was dilated to four centimeters. The midwife performed a CTG of baby for twenty minutes. Hubby and I had a quiet moment alone, with contractions for company. Later, the midwife came back to ask what my requests were for birth. I told her about my wish for a birthing pool, laughing gas, a muscle relaxant, and a mild painkiller I had researched. She shook her head at the latter — too late for that now, she said. It will affect baby, and we can’t have that. We stick with the other wishes and the rest, hubby knew — my wish for dim lighting, my own music playlist, for hubby to hold my hand.
Soon, I disrobed and slipped into a warm bath with a waterproof C Pillow. The midwife had prepared bottles and cups of water with bendy straws. These small details made me feel loved. Hubby handed me water every now and again and I hung onto my blue beads from my baby shower blessings, each with a prayer said from each friend for birth, baby, and me.
The contractions became so painful that no amount of preparation I had done could have gotten me to take deep breaths. It felt like the entire campus of The University of the Philippines were erupting out of my hips.
The midwife entered and asked — this pressure you are feeling is different from earlier, isn’t it? I nodded. My goodness, how did she know? She was good at this — reading women in labor. She said that what I was feeling was the pressure from the amniotic sac.
What he says
To build the rest of my story, I needed to get hubby’s perspective. He had been there in the room, and all that pain may have clouded the way I saw the world at the time.
He said that what put off most men from entering the delivery room wasn’t the blood and gore. That he could handle. A little red wasn’t going to make him woozy. The worst part was seeing someone in such pain and not being able to do anything about it. He couldn’t take any of that agony away, couldn’t carry it for me.
He said that, like what he’d researched, I had lost sense of time while going through labor. He remained aware of the clock ticking. He also observed a monitor that showed baby’s heart rate and how much pressure I was feeling. I had not noticed any of these.
And yes, indeed, I had no sense of time. It could have been eighty minutes, eight hours, I don’t know. Life for me in that birthing pool was divided into times of rest when I could lapse back onto that floating pillow and squeeze my hubby’s hand for comfort and times of surviving the throes of labor. Once, the midwife came in to say that I was doing an excellent job, that resting between contractions was a smart way to go. Her words gave me a boost of strength.
But those contractions felt like a motherf*cker. It felt like no pain I had ever felt before in my life. All the breathing techniques I had learned at prenatal yoga and birth prep course went out the window — I could inhale and exhale through early labor, when the sensation wasn’t as acute. But this level of pain was like a football field being excavated out of my back. I kept thinking — why did I not ask for an epidural again?!
The menstrual-like convulsions were like power drills cutting through me. It made me double over, and I writhed like a dying fish in that birthing pool. I tried to breathe slowly as the midwife and my hubby were encouraging me to do. Hubby would even count with me, but I could not keep the breathing long and deep and I gasped in short bursts of laughing gas instead.
Hubby did note that I built up resistance to the pain over time. A spasm that measured twenty on the monitor he was watching at first left me gasping for breath. But later, once a level fifty or sixty had stormed through my body, he noticed that the next level twenty contraction seemed like a breeze to me.
SCUBA divers might understand a bit of what this felt like — the pressure that enters one’s head while struggling to equalize during an underwater dive is not far from birthing pains. Only multiply that intensity by two hundred then put it in your belly and your lower back instead. Waves of magnet belts throb through you again and again, wanting to break out of you. Even my butthole was painful — it felt like a tennis ball wanted to burst free.
Three hours in the birthing pool and the midwife returned to the room. She pressed a few times on the belt that monitored the baby’s heart beat on my belly. Her eyes studied the screen that showed the heart rate. She frowned in concentration. Baby was stressed, she said. We needed to get out of the pool and coax him out of me.
I stood up and felt a wetness in between my legs. Much later, my hubby would tell me that the amniotic sac was peeking out from me, hanging like a gray pendulum between my legs. They helped me to the delivery bed. The midwife pierced the amniotic sac with a sharp instrument, breaking my water for me. It gushed, sticky, over my husband’s shoes, and the midwife apologized. I don’t recall that.
What I do remember was how screams had ripped out of my throat, just to deal with the contractions. If the pain didn’t escape through my vocal cords, I wouldn’t have known what to do with it. I remember hubby offering me more laughing gas once I was on the bed. But I turned away from him, doubled over in agony. I had lived on that gas in the birthing pool, gasping and breathing it in, biting on the mouth apparatus as if that would save me, holding on to a shaft by the wall for dear life.
But once on the flat bed, I found solace from another pole to grip. I held on, as if each wave that overpowered me was a surge that could sweep me out of the room, as if I were hanging onto a life raft. A storm had come, and it was coursing through me.
I felt as if a leviathan were trying to tear out of me, forcing itself against my lower back. The midwife gently but firmly told me to keep my legs spread for this monster who was willing to rip through me, to wait for the contractions that were powerful enough to bring him out of me and into the world.
She took my right leg to her hip and let me press against her at every push. The doctor required to be present at the moment of birth had joined us. She held out my other leg.
I had closed my eyes, I could not watch. I could hear everything around me, but the most important sense for me at that moment was touch. I needed to focus on bearing down, had to ride the ebb and tide, to harness each wave to help me bring this baby out. The uterine muscles were a mighty thing, involuntarily urging this child forward with each spasm. My voluntary efforts alone would not have done the job. My birth prep teacher, a midwife, had said that most women reported feeling greater pain during the cervix transitioning from six to ten centimeters. The cervix widening was a throbbing ache, waves of magnetized rings coursing through hips and belly and back. There was no retreating from any of this, no escaping from it. The only way to survive it was to embrace it. And so I did.
Baby’s head tore through me. My body made way, stretched beyond belief, to let this life through. The baby’s head emerged — a burning, excruciating moment, worse than what my birth preparation teacher had warned me it would be. Relief washed over me for a few seconds when I could catch my breath. But it wasn’t over yet. I felt the baby’s shoulders, and later on, his belly and hands together, tearing through me. And then it was over, the greatest work of my life so far.
I had had to do it with closed eyes as I listened to the midwife, who had instructed me to hold back my scream, to use that pain to push.
Out he slipped. Hubby saw our little one from the corner of his eye, for we had decided he would stay by my shoulder and hold my hand.
I opened my eyes when it was over, turned to the center of the delivery bed, let go of the handlebar I had been gripping.
* * *
I look at my baby, purple from all that squeezing. Blood and amniotic fluid streak over him as the midwives wipe him down. He gurgles, coughs out liquid trapped in his throat. Air rushes into his little body and his cries fill the air. The shock of having to use his lungs for the first time and he is separated from me so suddenly. They bring him to me and as soon as he lands on my chest, he is quiet. Skin to skin we are, and he burrows into the curves of me where he feels safe. I hold him, breathe him in, and he is a wonder. I love him immediately, without question.
They set my legs on stirrups and the doctor who helped me push comes into focus. Sandy brown curls are bright under operating lights and dark-rimmed glasses frame her pale face. She hunkers down to work. Muscle and skin have torn and she needs to sew me back together. She gives me some local anesthesia for it, the needle is a momentary sting when it comes into contact with my torn flesh. In the corner of my eye, her hand glides up and down as she sews. She is using thread that will dissolve in a few weeks, but will hold me together until then.
Baby is a wonderful distraction. And hubby is there, a part of us.
* * *
After I had pushed the baby out, I remember turning to him, looking into his eyes the color of the sea. They had lent me strength when all my energy was sapped. He squeezed my shoulder, ran a finger through my hair. It was just a moment, but one with the weight of decades, a tender one between husband and wife. The ordeal was over and he was there to meet my gaze when I got to the finish line. I was back in the world of sight and my eyes could meet his.
And he said, you did well. You did very, very well.