Flashback: John's birth--Part 2

Part 1 here.

We walked into the birthing room and Jeremy followed with the suitcase.  He seemed unsure of himself.  Frantic.  Rushed.  Someone noted the time when we arrived: 9:25am.

As Jeremy rolled that suitcase across the hardwood floor, I stopped him. I put my hand on his shoulder and said, “I need more calm from you.” I probably sounded a bit snippy. But it was a real need, and I had to communicate it. His anxiety was distracting me from this task that needed all my attention.

But you have to imagine his point of view. He goes out to put the carseat into the car, works at it for a while, not realizing what’s going on with me—how fast things are progressing. When he’s finished, he comes inside to find me gone. Not gone physically, but in every other way, I had gone so far inside myself to cope with the intensity of this fast, water-less labor. And he could see it in my face and he couldn’t help me.

All he could do was try to get me to the place where people could help me.

The drive to the birth center was excruciating for him. No, not literally. But he worried for every second of that 12 minute drive that I would need to push our baby out while he was driving, that he’d have to pull over to the side of the road and catch the baby himself. Not something on his bucket list, if you hear what I’m saying. He wanted to drive as fast as he could, but he had to balance safety and legality with his need to rush. He had to focus on driving when all he truly wanted to do was focus on me.

So it’s no wonder that when we arrived at the birth center his nerves were a little frayed. He was relieved to be there, yes, but it took me frankly asking for what I needed for him to turn himself out of that stress and into the needs of his laboring—no, transitioning—wife. But turn himself he did, almost as soon as I spoke to him.

Now I was pacing. The fluffy queen-sized bed in the room that was usually covered with a colorful quilt had been stripped down to its white sheets and now held only several white pillows. Teresa wanted to check me, and I wanted to be checked. She listened to the baby and everything sounded good, and then she told me I was dilated to at least nine.

I went to the bathroom, taking Jeremy with me because I didn't want to be alone. Then I walked out of the bathroom, stood at the end of that bed and said, “I think I’m going to throw up.” To my surprise, the midwife’s assistant instantly jumped up and retrieved a hospital-style barf bowl from the bottom drawer of a nearby dresser and held it out to me. She was fast, and that was good. I vomited into it.

Almost immediately, two things happened. I knew I needed to push and Shelley arrived. In fact, as I remember it, I had just gotten onto the bed, lying on my left side, when Shelley walked in.

Shelley, a very experienced apprentice midwife, was not my favorite. She had helped me during a lot of my prenatal appointments, and something about her was slightly off-putting. She was kind, professional, and qualified, and I knew that. I’m not sure what it was that bothered me.

But for some reason, when she walked in that day, all that was gone and she brought with her a wave of confidence. With her presence, I immediately felt I had the energy and support I needed to go on. I was comforted. All I had left to do was push this baby out. And I had three strong women and my dear husband there to help me.

And they did help me. Jeremy knelt on the bed next to me holding up my right leg and talking to me calmly. The midwife team assured me that all the cervix was gone and I could push whenever I felt like it. They applied hot compresses to my “bottom” (as they call it) to help the tissues stretch around baby’s head. And they helped me know what to do.

Hard pushes followed by gentle breath-the-baby-out pushes. A few of each kind, a lot of encouragement from this team, and some reassurance that no, I was not tearing, and I had given birth.

It was over so quickly. He was born at 9:52am. Two hours and forty-two minutes from start to finish.

Bald and perfect, he filled us up with love and joy from the very start. If only we knew what to name him...