Organic

A Birth Story

This is not a birth story. I don’t tell birth stories. For various reasons. (One is that I am a middle child. Another is that I am not a follower of the “pool of blood” philosophy of womanhood. I feel that womanhood is properly spiritual and emotional and that over emphasizing the physical aspects distorts the true depth of motherhood. The essence of being a woman is not bodily fluids. Not pools of blood, or magical milk, or anything else.)

It’s not a birth story. It’s an attempt to describe a moment in time that I can sometimes access and plug into.

When our third-to-youngest child was born, I was prepared to give birth in a hospital near our home. My midwife at the time delivered out of two hospitals, one closer to our house, and one further away.

When the time came and I called the practice to tell them that I was in active labor, they informed me that the midwife on call threw her back out and that consequently, my only option was to give birth in the further hospital with the covering midwife, who I never met. The covering midwife only had privileges at the further hospital, the midwife on call had privileges at both.

My husband and I went to a hospital I never intended to be at to meet the woman to help me in my birth for the first time.

The midwife was excellent. She said that she knew a way that a laboring woman could squeeze her hand as tight as she wanted without breaking it.

She set me up on the crisp, clean, someone else washes them, hospital sheets in that unnatural hospital quiet, probably more the hum of machines than actual quiet, and she gave me a darkest purple vinyl inflated peanut with horizontal indented lines to put between my knees as I lay on my side.

She said, “We will just wait for the baby to come down.”

There is this moment, when I would find myself inside a hospital room after going to the hospital in labor, or under strict orders (I haggled over to delay) to be induced, where I would settle with my husband and my suitcase and my pillow in the dark grey pillow case with black oversized abstract flowers, where I would think, I sit here now in the quiet, but between me and leaving this incredibly unnaturally quiet and calm room, there is noise and tension and fear and messiness and quite a bit of pain. Such a strange feeling.

So in this instance, my labor had progressed, I got an epidural, and this time, the only time, I experienced full relief of pain. Usually, the pain pokes through, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, sometimes so much I don’t know why I bothered sitting through a long needle in my back that requires sitting perfectly still, squeezing a pillow, through a contraction.

I lay there, shedding the discomfort and anxiety of the ninth month, basking in relief. I expected pain, I expected an impossible pressure to speed things forward, the pressure to push when I felt like I can’t, the general pressure of so many people standing around waiting for something to happen that I can’t make happen any faster. The fear, the pain, the anxiety.

None of it.

We just waited.

Calm, quiet, evenness.

The baby will come down by itself.

I try to channel that feeling sometimes. That feeling that everything will be ok. The feeling that the best outcome is inevitable, that just being calm and patient and waiting and open will bring every good that G-d is willing to provide.

The post script is that a while later, a beautiful baby girl was born. It was one of my hardest deliveries and a more complicated recovery, but that moment of feeling that everything will be ok, that everything is taken care of, carried me through the birth, the recovery and still grounds me today, six years later, when I think of it.