Column: Savagemama

A Good Birth

By Jennifer Savage, 7-12-07

On Saturday, Eliza got a new BFF or at least that’s how my friend and I joke about the potential of our daughters’ relationship. (That’s best friend forever for those of you who have forgotten or pushed out of your consciousness middle-school note writing abbreviations.)

Moana was born in the first of a fresh crop of babies on their way into our lives this summer. When I looked at pictures of her, just born, I remembered details about Eliza’s birth 11 months ago on a rainy night. I saw again tiny images I’d tucked away into the crevices of memory. I’d put them there to protect them, to preserve them because they were too fragile, too precious to leave lying around on the edges of everyday conversation. But last week I saw these details again. They were almost tangible.

I remembered Seth holding my hand and breathing with me through every contraction from five centimeters to ten. I remembered the red sheets on the bed where Eliza was born. I remembered being covered with them just a few minutes after our midwife put our daughter on my chest. I remembered the creamy white vernix that covered Eliza from her wrinkled toes to her curly dark hair. It was like glue and she stuck to me in the pre-dawn hours.

We had a good birth.

I had been on bed rest for three weeks as I, huge and miserable, sat upstairs in our house practically in front of a window unit air conditioner.  It was August. It was hot—so hot that I spent my days lying on my left side, watching movies and taking my blood pressure every hour or so. My blood pressure was high. My midwife was worried.

I could tell you that I was watching some heady documentary about corporate greed or the war torn Middle East or the winner of Sundance when the phone rang but I won’t. I was watching Sex and the City reruns. I paused the episode just after Miranda faked a sonogram and answered the phone. It was my mother in law. When I hung up, I pried myself out of a recliner and lay on our bed.

“I don’t feel well,” I said out loud but to myself. The phone range again. I got up to answer it and I felt something warm running down my legs.

I walked to the next room, releasing more liquid with every step. I answered the phone. It was Seth.

“I think my water just broke,” I said.

“I’m on my way,” he said.

He had been predicting this for days. He’d even cut short a day in the mountains the weekend before because he said he just didn’t feel right about being gone that long. As I tried to convince him the week before that I was two and a half weeks away from my due date and that most first babies come late, Seth read the “Signs and Symptoms” handout we’d been given in our birth class and packed for the birth center. So when he arrived home the afternoon my water broke, he was ready. We drove to the birth center so our midwife could confirm that it was, in fact, amniotic fluid squishing in my Chacos, that I had not peed myself and that I was sooner rather than later going to go into labor.

“Well, you’re going to have a baby,” one midwife said, her affect as deadpan as usual.

The other midwife bustled around the room and announced to everyone in the hallway, “This woman has ruptured membranes!”

They sent us home to wait for the contractions to begin. We called our parents and ate fast-food hamburgers in the car on the way home.

When we got there Seth puttered around our little farm milking the goat, feeding the dogs, packing a cooler with food for labor, putting the car seat in the car. He made me an omelet and I ate every bite. Our doula arrived. I lay on the couch. I walked around. I could tell something was going on but I wasn’t having consistent contractions.

Then Seth and I went for a walk in the field and I had to lean on him because a contraction was so strong.

Things were moving forward. And a thunderstorm was brewing off in the distance.

We went inside and started timing contractions. Eight minutes, five minutes, three minutes. I drank water. I walked. I leaned.

When the contractions starting coming regularly we went upstairs with our doula and I sat on my knees with my head on a pillow on the floor. The power flickered. The wind blew. Seth lit candles and the lights went out.

I remember hugging the back of the passenger seat on the drive to the birth center. I remember leaning on the side of our car in a soft rain when we got there. I remember walking into the birthing room and immediately taking off all of my clothes and kicking my pants across the wood floor. I remember the low light, I remember our midwife checking me and telling me I was only four centimeters dilated.

I walked and labored. I sat on a birthing ball. I sat in the tub but I was too hot to stay in it for long.

When I replay the movie of that night in my mind I see frames, snapshots. I can’t recall scenes from beginning to end. Time was slippery and I was convinced the clock on the wall was wrong. Had we really been there for four hours? Hadn’t we just arrived? Hadn’t it been two days since walked through the doors? Had the sun come up and gone down again?

Our midwife checked my progress. I was only at five centimeters. I sat up on my knees on the bed and told anyone who was listening to take me to the hospital.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I have to go to the hospital.”

Our midwife crossed the room.

“You need to get a grip,” she said. “And here’s how you’re going to do it. You are going to hold his hand and breathe together through every contraction.”

She was all business, all track coach. I remember thinking her delivery was a bit harsh for a woman in as much pain as I was in but the thought quickly left me as another contraction came to take me to that place where only women who are birthing a baby can go. I squeezed Seth’s hand, stared into his eyes and we breathed through another contraction. We did this for every contraction that came after. Later, my midwife told me that it took less than an hour for me to get to 10.

Then something primal took over and I don’t have a lot of words for what I felt. Somehow I knew my single purpose in the world was to push my baby out of me and I couldn’t control the guttural, animal-like noises that came out of my mouth with every push. It didn’t seem as though I could control anything, but I could push. In the surging, pulsing, excruciatingness of it all, pushing was the one thing I could hold onto.

I remember the sensation of Eliza’s head moving down. I remember asking Seth to turn off the Emmylou Harris CD he’d put on. I remember telling our doula that the oxygen mask was making me feel claustrophobic. I remember gripping a cold wet washcloth and a pillow with the same hand. I vaguely remember our midwife’s chatter about our baby’s heart rate and her saying she wanted three pushes for every contraction. I remember thinking she was crazy.

I remember reaching down and feeling the top of Eliza’s head. It felt like a wet sponge. I remember our midwife telling me not to push, then to push one more time. I remember hearing Eliza holler. It was over.

I kept asking the nurse if the baby was OK. A little while later I cried hot tears of relief that she was.

It all came back to me last week when I held Moana. Her hands and feet seem so big for her tiny limbs, she is feather-light and new. As I held her I looked over at my baby who was pulling handfuls of hair off my friend’s dog and pulling up on its back and rolling head first over its large body chattering the whole time.

I have a few other friends who will birth babies this summer. I hope that one day we will sit around and look at them all the way I looked at Eliza last week. She is brave and fearless and through the experience of her birth, she taught me to be too.

Jennifer Savage writes about being a Western mom on her own blog here on NewWest.Net. Read more from “Savagemama” at www.newwest.net/savagemama.

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