August 27th, 9:20 am

I’ve been thinking about writing down my birth story, that is, the story of Gabriel’s birth, for quite a while now. Tomorrow, he’ll be a year old. Some details may have faded (mercifully) into the hazy outlines of hormonal memory. That’s okay. I keep telling myself the story, reciting it in awe and amazement, and it turns out the same every time.

I woke up around 4:30 am on August 27th. My dream leftovers handed me an image of a particularly heavy piece of canvas lawn furniture being snapped open, which didn’t make a lot of sense until I went to the bathroom to pee and discovered after I was done that I was still leaking. I stood up, looked at myself in the mirror and thought, “I’m going to have a baby today.” I did a little waddle dance of joy as yet more amniotic fluid trickled into my slippers. I woke up M and told him,
“My water broke!”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“What should we do now?”
“Go back to bed, I guess.”
I lay back down on a waterproof pad scavenged from the baby’s room. We cuddled up, too excited to sleep, but conscious that this could take a long, long time. I was expecting it to – everyone knows that first babies take forever to travel five inches south.
Five minutes later, the first contraction arrived and I realized I would not be lying down for it. I sat on the edge of the bed, kind of rocking back and forth, feeling nauseated. By golly, it DID feel like a menstrual cramp, but of such magnified intensity that it was the only thing I could think about. It passed. I laid back down. 5 minutes later, right on the nose, another contraction. The dog pranced in, stumping for breakfast in that subtle way of hers. M realized there would be no more sleeping and got up to wrangle the animals. He came back in, took a picture of me peeking out from the quilt I had over my head. Contractions did not mess around after that. Within a couple hours they were arriving one after another, like waves rolling up on the beach. M had the brilliant idea of timing them, and we realized they were indeed about 2 minutes apart, lasting a good minute and a half. M called the midwife. The plan was to labor as long as possible at home, then set out for the birth center, a mere 40 miles down the freeway. Luckily, though, the midwife on call, Sallie, just happened to live in our town, not a mile from our house, so before setting out she came over to check on me.
I had developed a system for dealing with the contractions. I was obsessed with staying upright leaning slightly forward in a seated position. Rocking helped, covering my eyes helped, breathing audibly like they teach in yoga class helped. I have no idea why. Sallie arrived and the first thing I remembered her saying is, “I have a class this morning. I told them not to put me on-call.” The normal part of me wanted to apologize for the horrible inconvenience I’d put her to, but another voice spoke up and said, “That’s stupid. Don’t apologize. What I’m doing is more important than any class.” And I smiled at her and said, “Hi Sallie.” I felt really hazy and warm. It was going to be just fine.
In characterizing labor, I would hesitate to say it’s painful. I mean, it’s easily the most viscerally uncomfortable I’ve been in my entire life, but it wasn’t agony. The only time that contractions seemed unmanageable was when Sallie had me lay on my back so she could listen to the baby’s heart rate as my uterus squooshed the bejezus out of us. It was pretty unpleasant when she performed the internal exam, as well, but I forgave her when she announced I was dilated about 5 cm. Hooray!
“You can stay home a little while longer, or you can leave for the Birth Home, now. Your choice.”
“I guess we can hang out a little longer.”
She looked at me funny and asked, “Did your mom have fast labors?” I replied that I thought she did (and actually, my brother was nearly born before my eyes on the backseat of a ’68 Plymouth Fury hurtling down the dirt road with a cyclone of dust behind, as we raced to the hospital). “Maybe you should head out pretty soon,” she suggested.
We took our time, though, as we gathered our wits, still sure that this labor-thing would be long, drawn out marathon. M made sandwiches, and let the dog out. Then he nearly got into a fight with someone who parked in front of our driveway for our neighbor’s Saturday morning garage sale. This I was aware of only peripherally. “Oh, M’s yelling at someone. How strange,” but I figured it would all work out. He came back in and put on a CD that I’d bugged him to make for just such an occasion, entitled “CMM’s Labor CD.” I yelled at him to turn it off. Too freaking distracting. I brushed my teeth between contractions because that seemed important and then slipped on a sundress and waddled out to see what happened next.
I’d imagined that sitting in the car during labor would be just excruciating, but it wasn’t that bad. I continued with my obsessive keeping upright, leaning forward, covering my face, breathing. M drove pretty smoothly and the 45-minute trip passed incredibly quickly. As we were angling off the freeway, I had a couple pushing contractions in the car that made me grunt and groan. M asked, “Are you okay?” kind of panicky. Oh, sure, doin’ swell! We arrived at the Birth Home in the middle of a contraction. M ran around to open my door, which I snatched back closed. I needed the enclosed space. He carried our bag inside and after the contraction subsided I made my way gingerly through the gate and across the yard and up the stairs into the house.
The back bedroom was open and the lights were soft. I sat on a chux pad on the bed and breathed through another contraction. Sallie was there. She took my blood pressure. She and M were just watching me as if waiting for the baby to come shooting out of my eye. I said, “Tub?” “It’s all ready,” said Sallie. And it was! I pulled my dress up over my head and walked up the step every so carefully and submerged myself in the deep warm water. It was heavenly. And it seemed to loosen everything up. I felt the baby move down through my bones and the next contraction was another pusher. I had a couple more like that and then felt down between my legs, expecting a baby’s head to be there. I could feel a wrinkled piece of scalp inside and realized that I would tear. I wanted to stay in the water, but Sallie was fussing about the temperature and I could tell she wanted me to get out. I should have stayed, but I stepped out, awfully gracefully, I thought, and got wrapped in a towel. I got up on the bed but wasn’t sure how I could best stay upright to push out the baby. No way was I lying down, and I there was nothing to brace against or pull on. I opted for hands and knees. I was just following the contractions, not pushing consciously, just letting my body tell me what to do. I yelled. I bellowed. Sallie suggested I push. I did and, wow, that hurt. The skin stretching and threatening to tear was an entirely different sensation from labor pain. No way to move that to the side. I think I just decided to hell with it, let’s get this over with. I pushed and pushed. I said, “I don’t think I can do this.” M said, “You’re doing this!” Another push and “The head, they head,” they said. Another push and out plopped the body, tumbling right onto the bed. A boy! I knew it. The whole time I was pregnant, I was sure it was a boy. I moved so I could see him as he breathed and cried. I just remember saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” I have never been so happy, so ecstatic, so amazed by life. He was in my arms immediately, still wet and waxy and warm. We just looked and touched and were amazed. Gabriel. We were so amazed.