Nancy's Birth Story

So I am woefully late writing down my birth story and pregnancy seems blissfully long ago now, but I wanted to share it anyway. We took a Hypnobirthing class in January and were the only ones in the class who were NOT birthing in a hospital (we went to a birth center), and I remember being a little freaked out by that, but the class gave me so much confidence in my baby's ability to be born and my body's ability to have a natural birth (though it was much tougher than I realized).

My last pregnant picture (38 weeks, I think):

I was 39 weeks pregnant on the dot when I woke up March 17 at 7 am with "gas pains," and they kept waking me up every hour to poop. I ended up staying home from work but felt very well-rested and was able to nap and eat and relax the whole day in between the cramps (which I thought could be Braxton Hicks since I hadn't experienced them yet). We had a baby appointment at 5:30 pm, where they checked me and said I was 90% effaced, 1 cm dilated, and the baby's head was "right there" (but she had been low down and engaged for a long time). The midwife told me, "Girlfriend, you look like you're in early labor!" However, I didn't get excited because I was in denial--I had mentally prepared myself for a 42 week pregnancy, ha ha. After we got home, the contractions got more intense. I still had good energy and had made it through most of the day just fine with slow dancing/low moaning/very little discomfort at all, but around 7 pm I began needing Matthew to do hip counter-pressure on me to help me through each one. We timed them, but they were pretty sporadic. I had tried eating a little bit in the evening but threw it up. Believe it or not, I still wasn't 100% convinced this was true labor until about 11:15 pm and I went from moaning to screaming (I was trying to muffle it by screaming into pillows, but our landlady told us later she could hear me and was glad to see when our car disappeared, oops) and feeling overwhelming pressure. We called our midwives - in between screams/groans, I was trying to tell them that we hadn't really effectively timed the contractions (because we were both focused on me and not on the timer), but the midwife said, "I'm timing you now and you've had two a minute apart, so you should come in!" Ha!) and after the phone call I started to get bloody mucus, which excited/panicked me, because it finally seemed like proof with a capital P, I guess, that something was actually happening (no duh). 

We drove to the birth center, which in spite of being 5 min away from our apartment, felt like an alarmingly long way to go. I had to do one contraction in the car by myself without any help from Matthew, and I remember yelling as loud as I could and nearly fainting from pain because I had no one to do counter-pressure on my hips. When we got there, I tried to talk but had a contraction in the middle of the front door and just doubled over. A midwife immediately came and started rubbing my hips and it felt SO good. They checked me and I was dilated to a 6, so they told me to get into the tub, which was warm (not scalding hot, like I would have wished), but at that point, I was too far gone to feel helped out by anything other than counter-pressure.

In the tub, I really wished there were a chain hanging from the ceiling I could yank on while squatting. My mind was very frustrated that no one had thought to supply this - it seemed so reasonable, so doable, so simple, and yet it was not there. It seemed like just a few minutes but was actually an hour that I labored in the tub--I remember the midwives scurrying around a lot, trying to get me the GBS antibiotics, but as it turned out I barely got an hour's worth because we arrived at midnight and Nancy was born at 1:49 am. One of the midwives told me I had beaten her record by giving birth less than two hours after arriving at the birth center. So it was a rather quick labor, but those almost two hours sure felt like a long while.  

Every contraction was intense and frightening but the rest periods and the midwives' encouragement combined with the fact that I did not feel tired at all (in sharp contrast to the miscarriage, when I was completely exhausted and just wanted to sleep) let me keep going. Among all the thoughts that went through my head what helped me the most was remembering from class the affirmation of "Yes" instead of "Oh no" when each contraction started, accepting that we were having a baby tonight and that "the only way out of this is THROUGH," and complete confidence that my body was taking care of my baby and I did not need to worry about Baby at all. 

I wanted them to check me but didn't want to have not made any progress, so I was so grateful that when they checked me again I was dilated "all the way" and just had a cervical lip to get Baby's head past. Picturing the toy baby in the pelvis from our class and the way the teacher curled her body around to breathe it under the pelvis helped me envision what I needed to do with my body--things got more intense when I focused on pushing this way but the midwives said I was making amazing progress and I finally reached in and felt her head, which gave me a huge boost of excitement and much needed reaffirmation that things were progressing. By then I was feeling "ripping" and "burning" and was definitely screaming (I was hoarse the next day) through the contractions but the progress and my energy helped me through. My water broke with a big pop and I remember screaming to everybody, "My water broke!" and looking at Matthew like "oh wow this is really happening" when Baby's head was just a hand's length away. It was only 2-3 contractions later that Nancy Louisa came out all in one whooshing surge. She looked very roly-poly - like a Mr. Potato Head-sized doll, I remember thinking, but then she uncurled and my goodness, limbs everywhere! I knew I was torn up pretty bad (2nd degree... yay...), and it still hurt, but everything afterwards was much, much easier to bear. The placenta came out SO easily with the slightest push from me and I felt nothing. Peeing was harder - it took me maybe 15 min and I was shaking like crazy from adrenaline but that was it. Being stitched up for 45 min for vaginal tearing was NOT fun at all but they gave me laughing gas and I was still on an oxytocin kick from the 2 hours they gave me to recover and bond with Nancy and Matthew first) and I was SO HAPPY to no longer be pregnant and that Nancy was healthy. I never questioned that she would be, which I know was a tremendous blessing. 

Nancy weighed 7 lbs 9 oz, was 20 inches long, and was (and is) absolutely perfect.

Me the day after giving birth (I sweat off about 20 pounds over that weekend--crazy!):

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Why I Want to Have a Natural Childbirth

When I was little, I never questioned that I would go for a natural childbirth. My mom had done it with all of her children (except maybe the twins? I can’t remember if she had an epidural or not), and had gone through epidurals/C-sections with some stillbirths, and my memory is that she always spoke most negatively about those times. She didn’t like not feeling in control of her body; she didn’t like having a long, painful, slow recovery; and in all these cases, it seemed as if all decisions had been made by the doctors and she had had no say in the matter. She never held back in describing how painful her natural childbirths were, but she also talked very positively about how smooth and wonderful the recoveries were, in contrast to the times when she had a C-section or an epidural.

So it was natural for me, all the way, with my hypothetical six children, until I actually got married and began seriously reevaluating the size of the cervix and the size of a baby’s head. Then, for a while, I did a 180. Drugs. Definitely drugs. All the way. I would take an epidural, feel nothing, and sleep until it was time to push (for an hour or two) the baby out. Isn’t science the greatest?

This positive, cheery mindset lasted roughly up until the moment when we actually decided to start trying to get pregnant. By this point, a lot of my friends had gone through a lot of childbirth. Some had epidurals; some went all natural. Some went somewhere in between. No one’s story was the same. Every woman had a unique experience, and what surprised me the most was how every story had hallmarks of pain, fear, and uncertainty. There were still the seemingly perfect “I had an epidural and it was wonderful!” stories and the “I went all natural and it was the best experience of my life!” stories, but the ones that really made an impression on me were the hard-hitting, no punches pulled, “I had a BABY and it was crazy and insane and HARD HARD HARD and I didn’t know what I was doing but everything worked out and we’re both okay” stories. And these came from both epidural mamas and natural childbirthing mamas.

So now I was in a pickle. It seemed as though complications could still exist with epidurals. It even seemed like epidurals were more likely to create scenarios where perfectly healthy women with perfectly healthy babies ended up getting C-sections, as if it were a simple procedure and not major surgery that is difficult to recover from.

I was gradually starting to come back to the natural birth method. Why? First, epidurals and hospital births in general are expensive—much more so than giving birth at a birth center or doing a home birth. Second, the best childbirth stories I heard—the ones that came closest to my best-case scenario vision of low pain, swift recovery, and positive experience—were, without exception, natural childbirths. Surprisingly (to me, anyway), they often came from women who were quick to confess that they were not super tough and had a healthy fear of/respect for pain, and would not tough out circumstances that warranted medical intervention. Third, everything about the hospital scenario repelled me. My mom has spoken often about her disgust with having to be monitored constantly and ordered around by the nurses and doctors into certain positions that worsened the pain. Looking back, it seems she got to enjoy the worst of both worlds—an unfriendly, restrictive hospital environment that prevented her from moving, relaxing, and taking charge of her body during a critical time, without drugs or pain relief or even the necessity of having to be there because the baby was in critical condition (we were all fine at birth). Having relatives for doctors has taught me they are just regular people who make mistakes, like everyone else, and that I usually know my own body’s needs better than anyone else. The best doctors will try not to stand in the way of your body fixing itself, but will defer to the wisdom and natural processes of the body. This has always just made sense to me. I wanted to feel safe, empowered, and in control as much as possible of what was happening to me during childbirth. I wanted to be able to try natural pain relief methods for as long as possible and to move, eat, moan, and be in communication with my body’s needs directly rather than rely blindly on the suggestion of nurses and doctors. I also wanted to be mostly left alone, with people I loved and trusted and who wouldn’t make me feel pressured to cater to their needs or their schedule. And the more I read and researched natural childbirthing methods and stories, the more I resonated with women who felt the exact same way. In fact, natural childbirth seemed not only the most natural way, but the optimal way to give birth in any circumstance. I went from fearing it to thinking duh, of course, why isn’t this what every pregnant woman hopes and wishes for? Fourth, I’ll just add that having a water birth has always sounded wonderful to me. My whole life I have been drawn to water. It rejuvenates, comforts, and heals me in a way I don’t fully comprehend. It’s always been a form of physical, mental, and spiritual therapy for me.     

Now, all that being said, I am not anti-epidural or anti-C-section or anti-doctors. Of course there are circumstances in which hospital births are beneficial and necessary for the health of the baby and the mother. If circumstances arise in my pregnancy that necessitate our having to give birth in a hospital or via C-section, I will be disappointed but I will be grateful for that option. I don’t judge any woman for her choice in how to have a baby—that decision is between a woman and her body. I don’t believe in one right way to give birth for every mother. I can only say what I believe right now for me.