queenaregina (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} nowishere) wrote,@ 2007-03-16 01:29:00 |
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Welcome, my son!
My son Rowan was born 3 weeks ago. On Tuesday I went to my friend Mav's and he took a lot of pictures of me that I wanted to document the pregnancy. The previous week I had told people I thought the baby might come Monday or Tuesday and I was hoping just to have the time to get in the photos while I was still pregnant. During the standing and changing positions for the photos I felt some new and different kinds of pain and discomforts in my abdomen but didn't stop to pay attention to them. When we got home though, I started having lots of light contractions - they were 3 minutes apart for quite a while, so we called my dad and the midwife and my grandparents to say we thought labor might be starting. I was quite tired though and everyone said if you are able to sleep, definitely do so, so we went to sleep and I noticed contractions when I woke up during the night but kept going back to sleep.
When I woke up in the 9 o'clock hour, the contractions started up again, not as close together but enough that we figured it was early labor so we called and let everyone know again. My dad started getting things taken care of so he could come from Baltimore for the birth. The midwife said she'd come in the afternoon if things kept progressing. My mom and I started keeping a labor record of the time and duration of each contraction, which was maintained almost up to the moment I gave birth. I wanted to have energy so I ate some soup and other soft, light things. We made some calls to ask people to think good thoughts and pray for us during the labor and I took a shower. Eventually some friends came over to visit and wound up helping my mom get the space and the birth pool and other things ready.
For a while I stood for the contractions and rotated my hips in the "spiral" movement I'd heard recommended. As they got more intense, I changed positions to sit on the birth ball, lean against the couch, lean on people, or begin to squat, and at some point I began toning "oh" through the contractions, which I then did for all the rest of the contractions til the pushing started. Once I started toning, I was not very aware of what else was going on. I would try to listen if someone talked to me, and I would try to express what I needed if I felt a change would be helpful, but other than that I couldn't really pay much attention to anyone else, or even the beautiful music one friend had brought over. I threw up a number of times as the labor got more intense. I don't know when the midwife or doula arrived, but it must have been in the mid-afternoon. The doula, especially, actively supported me by making suggestions for positioning and other tactics and by physically supporting me or showing others how to support me in certain positions. After a period of taking as much support as I could, though, I was feeling very dependent and concerned how I would cope with even more intense contractions that I knew were to come, so I asked to be allowed to manage the contractions on my own. Everyone was very receptive to everything I said, but for a while I was worried about hurting people's feelings by rejecting offers of help or support. Eventually it became apparent that no one was worried about that and just wanted to make sure what I needed was what happened. My dad arrived around 7 or 7:30 when I was already toning and trying to manage the contractions on my own. I did take some physical support, like resting against the doula or using my dad's lap to pick myself up off my seat to spiral my hips during later contractions, but verbalizing my needs or my experience at that point was very difficult because it demanded I divert my attention from managing the contractions.
I was in pretty hard active labor for several more hours, and at one point I asked the midwife how much longer she thought it would be. She didn't seem to want to answer but said she didn't think the baby would come before midnight. I had no idea what time it was and thought it would be a terrible idea to find out and start worrying about how much more I had to get through so I said I didn't want to know the time and refocused on getting through each contraction as it came. I think it was a little after 11 when I noticed the contractions change and felt my body beginning to push. People checked the temperature of the water in the pool and started trying to bring it to 100 degrees and we called the midwife into the birth room (my bedroom). She apparently had sensed, perhaps from a change in my vocalizations, that I would be pushing soon, or that I was already pushing. I stripped down and got in the pool and the doula rolled up her pants and sleeves and got in with me to support me as needed.
My parents told me later that they were scared by the pushing because I appeared to be in agony. My dad said he thought that either a neighbor would call the cops to report torture or that I might die. All I knew was that there was a force moving through me that I couldn't conceive of containing, and wasn't certain of surviving. I changed my "oh" to the "irrnnh" my yoga teacher had told me is the natural sound of pushing, of the root chakra, and I know the volume increased by at least an order or two of magnitude. I also seemed to have a nearly unlimited lung capacity and would groan/yell with that intensity all the way through a contraction for a minute or so (I think - I haven't looked at the video or checked if these contractions are on the labor record). As I tried to explain later, I wasn't experiencing agony at all - the pushing didn't really hurt physically - but was managing a completely different experience. I was basically pretty humbled and maybe even terrified by the power of the pushes and the noise I was making was the manifestation of my effort to channel or direct this force I felt could easily shatter me to pieces if I tried to contain it. It had to come through me and was doing so, but I could not possibly contain it so I yelled in an effort to let off as much of the energy that way as I could, so that what remained did not destroy my pelvis and birth organs. I know my face was contorted in what my parents saw as agony, but I think if they had known it might also have been interpretable as the fear, concentration, and basically devastation of ego that I was really feeling. It was a magnificent culmination to that journey.. throughout my pregnancy I was repeatedly surprised that instead of the pride and empowerment that I expected to experience (that whole earth goddess thing), I instead felt more and more humbled and in many ways insignificant in the grand scheme. My ego played little to no role in the progression of the pregnancy. I was merely a vehicle that nature was driving. It didn't matter much what I thought or felt or wanted or feared or planned or procrastinated - nature simply ran its course, and didn't really care, or even notice, that in this particular case it happened to run right through me. Nature was concerned with the development of the baby, and my body was just the environment in which that was taking place. The birth was just like that, but the pushing was that to the nth degree.. nature took my body right out of my hands. The uterus is supposed to be the strongest muscle in the body. With each push I felt like all my insides could easily be rocketed out the birth canal right along with the baby if I didn't do something to curb the force, and I yelled with the effort of holding back any fraction of the power of that force of nature. It was the most awesome experience I've ever had.
The pushing lasted a little over an hour I think, so it was probably 20 pushes or so all told. At one point during the revelation that feeling of being blasted apart from the inside out started to take root so I asked my midwife out loud "are you sure it's not too small?" and she said "you mean you?" and I said yeah and she said she was sure, the baby would fit fine. I had heard some cases of a lip of the cervix remaining in the way when a woman was pushing and becoming swollen and preventing the baby from entering the birth canal and prolonging labor so I also wanted to be sure that wasn't happening, even though it didn't seem like that was really feasible given how certain my body was that pushing was the thing to do now. So I reached in with a finger and felt a smooth sort of tissue and asked the midwife what the baby's head would feel like, because it didn't seem to feel like a head but more like muscle or some other smooth, slippery tissue so I thought it might be the cervix after all, never having felt my own. I hadn't had any kind of internal exams to check dilation or anything else so no one who already knew had verified that the cervix was fully open, but the midwife was confident that it was, but I still wasn't sure why the baby's head would've felt like that. After a bunch of pushes, people by the pool started saying they could see the baby's head, and then that it went back in and they could no longer see it when the contraction ended. I kept thinking "why is it going back in?! I don't want to have to do this more than once.. why lose progress we've already made?" But then at one push the head didn't go back, and I said "Why isn't it going back?! Make it go back!" Soon the head emerged, and it was in the caul - my water had never broken and the amniotic sac was still intact. The midwife asked me if there was a cord around the neck and I reached down to feel and had no idea what I was feeling - it was all encased in the membrane and I couldn't tell if I was touching his neck or poking him in the eye (we didn't know he was a he at that time). With the next push, the baby's torso and one arm came out and the baby was almost totally still, hanging in the water upside down half in and half out of me. I reached down for the hand, and it grabbed my finger. Then I felt the baby kicking like mad, I figured he was trying to swim out the rest of the way, but he didn't go anywhere. It didn't hurt at all. With the next push he was born and sort of popped/floated off under my right leg. I reached down with both hands and passed him back under my leg and brought him up out of the water. The midwife said the cord was around his neck but I couldn't comprehend that at the time so she came and slipped it over his head. I brought him to my chest and he started to breathe and cry a bit. The midwife and doula helped me latch him on to feed and people gave me towels to cover him with, which got all wet and I just tried to keep them wet with warm water from the pool instead of water cooled too much by the air. After a long while, maybe 45 minutes, we switched to the other breast and in doing so I happened to notice that he was a boy and let everyone know.
The placenta didn't come and I wasn't really having many contractions, despite the breastfeeding. After 2 hours the midwife asked if I was sure there weren't 2 babies and I thought I was pretty damn sure but did she have a Doppler she could use to listen for a heartbeat? She felt my belly and didn't find anything that felt like a baby, and neither did I, but she listened with the Doppler anyway and said that yes, there was another baby - she heard the heartbeat loud and clear - and it was a good strong healthy heartbeat. My response was "Oh shit!" because I couldn't imagine going through that pushing phase again. That thought was most prevalent and totally outweighed the rest, but I also flashed back to the beginning of the pregnancy when I'd thought I would kind of like to have twins and that if I thought it or dreamed it enough it might happen. The cord was too short for anyone else to hold the baby with it still attached and the placenta still inside me, but I knew I couldn't hold it and deliver another baby so we had to cut it. The midwife tied it off and asked who would cut it and I said I would, so she gave me the scissors and I cut the cord when she said to. Then I basically don't remember seeing the baby for the next hour or so because my mom had him and I was focusing on delivering either another baby or the placenta. The doula had gone home and to sleep but the midwife called her back saying she thought there was another baby and the doula got up and came back and got back in the pool to help me. I still didn't really have contractions but eventually with a push a large part of the placenta was born. A big part of me had started holding back tremendously at the thought of another baby, so even though the midwife told me to push I didn't really want to. It felt like it could be another head and I was afraid if I pushed actively that would cause what I'd feared before - basically big time damage. But it turned out it wasn't a head, it was the placenta. On examining it, the midwife said there was still more of it and we needed it to come without pulling it out to avoid hemorrhage. After a few minutes she asked me again to stand up so I finally did and she held the placenta to see if the rest of it would separate and emerge with the help of gravity. It did, fairly soon - by that time it was 3:30am. By 5 or so we were finally all asleep.
I woke up around 8 or so and took the first pictures of Rowan waking in sunlight. I couldn't even think about naming him for the next couple of days because there was so much else going on - doctor visits, breastfeeding, pain and bloody nipples and visits, not to mention getting to know him. Over the weekend my aunt and brother got some name books and we started working with him, but after all that none of the names I picked came from any of the books anyway.
My son Rowan was born 3 weeks ago. On Tuesday I went to my friend Mav's and he took a lot of pictures of me that I wanted to document the pregnancy. The previous week I had told people I thought the baby might come Monday or Tuesday and I was hoping just to have the time to get in the photos while I was still pregnant. During the standing and changing positions for the photos I felt some new and different kinds of pain and discomforts in my abdomen but didn't stop to pay attention to them. When we got home though, I started having lots of light contractions - they were 3 minutes apart for quite a while, so we called my dad and the midwife and my grandparents to say we thought labor might be starting. I was quite tired though and everyone said if you are able to sleep, definitely do so, so we went to sleep and I noticed contractions when I woke up during the night but kept going back to sleep.
When I woke up in the 9 o'clock hour, the contractions started up again, not as close together but enough that we figured it was early labor so we called and let everyone know again. My dad started getting things taken care of so he could come from Baltimore for the birth. The midwife said she'd come in the afternoon if things kept progressing. My mom and I started keeping a labor record of the time and duration of each contraction, which was maintained almost up to the moment I gave birth. I wanted to have energy so I ate some soup and other soft, light things. We made some calls to ask people to think good thoughts and pray for us during the labor and I took a shower. Eventually some friends came over to visit and wound up helping my mom get the space and the birth pool and other things ready.
For a while I stood for the contractions and rotated my hips in the "spiral" movement I'd heard recommended. As they got more intense, I changed positions to sit on the birth ball, lean against the couch, lean on people, or begin to squat, and at some point I began toning "oh" through the contractions, which I then did for all the rest of the contractions til the pushing started. Once I started toning, I was not very aware of what else was going on. I would try to listen if someone talked to me, and I would try to express what I needed if I felt a change would be helpful, but other than that I couldn't really pay much attention to anyone else, or even the beautiful music one friend had brought over. I threw up a number of times as the labor got more intense. I don't know when the midwife or doula arrived, but it must have been in the mid-afternoon. The doula, especially, actively supported me by making suggestions for positioning and other tactics and by physically supporting me or showing others how to support me in certain positions. After a period of taking as much support as I could, though, I was feeling very dependent and concerned how I would cope with even more intense contractions that I knew were to come, so I asked to be allowed to manage the contractions on my own. Everyone was very receptive to everything I said, but for a while I was worried about hurting people's feelings by rejecting offers of help or support. Eventually it became apparent that no one was worried about that and just wanted to make sure what I needed was what happened. My dad arrived around 7 or 7:30 when I was already toning and trying to manage the contractions on my own. I did take some physical support, like resting against the doula or using my dad's lap to pick myself up off my seat to spiral my hips during later contractions, but verbalizing my needs or my experience at that point was very difficult because it demanded I divert my attention from managing the contractions.
I was in pretty hard active labor for several more hours, and at one point I asked the midwife how much longer she thought it would be. She didn't seem to want to answer but said she didn't think the baby would come before midnight. I had no idea what time it was and thought it would be a terrible idea to find out and start worrying about how much more I had to get through so I said I didn't want to know the time and refocused on getting through each contraction as it came. I think it was a little after 11 when I noticed the contractions change and felt my body beginning to push. People checked the temperature of the water in the pool and started trying to bring it to 100 degrees and we called the midwife into the birth room (my bedroom). She apparently had sensed, perhaps from a change in my vocalizations, that I would be pushing soon, or that I was already pushing. I stripped down and got in the pool and the doula rolled up her pants and sleeves and got in with me to support me as needed.
My parents told me later that they were scared by the pushing because I appeared to be in agony. My dad said he thought that either a neighbor would call the cops to report torture or that I might die. All I knew was that there was a force moving through me that I couldn't conceive of containing, and wasn't certain of surviving. I changed my "oh" to the "irrnnh" my yoga teacher had told me is the natural sound of pushing, of the root chakra, and I know the volume increased by at least an order or two of magnitude. I also seemed to have a nearly unlimited lung capacity and would groan/yell with that intensity all the way through a contraction for a minute or so (I think - I haven't looked at the video or checked if these contractions are on the labor record). As I tried to explain later, I wasn't experiencing agony at all - the pushing didn't really hurt physically - but was managing a completely different experience. I was basically pretty humbled and maybe even terrified by the power of the pushes and the noise I was making was the manifestation of my effort to channel or direct this force I felt could easily shatter me to pieces if I tried to contain it. It had to come through me and was doing so, but I could not possibly contain it so I yelled in an effort to let off as much of the energy that way as I could, so that what remained did not destroy my pelvis and birth organs. I know my face was contorted in what my parents saw as agony, but I think if they had known it might also have been interpretable as the fear, concentration, and basically devastation of ego that I was really feeling. It was a magnificent culmination to that journey.. throughout my pregnancy I was repeatedly surprised that instead of the pride and empowerment that I expected to experience (that whole earth goddess thing), I instead felt more and more humbled and in many ways insignificant in the grand scheme. My ego played little to no role in the progression of the pregnancy. I was merely a vehicle that nature was driving. It didn't matter much what I thought or felt or wanted or feared or planned or procrastinated - nature simply ran its course, and didn't really care, or even notice, that in this particular case it happened to run right through me. Nature was concerned with the development of the baby, and my body was just the environment in which that was taking place. The birth was just like that, but the pushing was that to the nth degree.. nature took my body right out of my hands. The uterus is supposed to be the strongest muscle in the body. With each push I felt like all my insides could easily be rocketed out the birth canal right along with the baby if I didn't do something to curb the force, and I yelled with the effort of holding back any fraction of the power of that force of nature. It was the most awesome experience I've ever had.
The pushing lasted a little over an hour I think, so it was probably 20 pushes or so all told. At one point during the revelation that feeling of being blasted apart from the inside out started to take root so I asked my midwife out loud "are you sure it's not too small?" and she said "you mean you?" and I said yeah and she said she was sure, the baby would fit fine. I had heard some cases of a lip of the cervix remaining in the way when a woman was pushing and becoming swollen and preventing the baby from entering the birth canal and prolonging labor so I also wanted to be sure that wasn't happening, even though it didn't seem like that was really feasible given how certain my body was that pushing was the thing to do now. So I reached in with a finger and felt a smooth sort of tissue and asked the midwife what the baby's head would feel like, because it didn't seem to feel like a head but more like muscle or some other smooth, slippery tissue so I thought it might be the cervix after all, never having felt my own. I hadn't had any kind of internal exams to check dilation or anything else so no one who already knew had verified that the cervix was fully open, but the midwife was confident that it was, but I still wasn't sure why the baby's head would've felt like that. After a bunch of pushes, people by the pool started saying they could see the baby's head, and then that it went back in and they could no longer see it when the contraction ended. I kept thinking "why is it going back in?! I don't want to have to do this more than once.. why lose progress we've already made?" But then at one push the head didn't go back, and I said "Why isn't it going back?! Make it go back!" Soon the head emerged, and it was in the caul - my water had never broken and the amniotic sac was still intact. The midwife asked me if there was a cord around the neck and I reached down to feel and had no idea what I was feeling - it was all encased in the membrane and I couldn't tell if I was touching his neck or poking him in the eye (we didn't know he was a he at that time). With the next push, the baby's torso and one arm came out and the baby was almost totally still, hanging in the water upside down half in and half out of me. I reached down for the hand, and it grabbed my finger. Then I felt the baby kicking like mad, I figured he was trying to swim out the rest of the way, but he didn't go anywhere. It didn't hurt at all. With the next push he was born and sort of popped/floated off under my right leg. I reached down with both hands and passed him back under my leg and brought him up out of the water. The midwife said the cord was around his neck but I couldn't comprehend that at the time so she came and slipped it over his head. I brought him to my chest and he started to breathe and cry a bit. The midwife and doula helped me latch him on to feed and people gave me towels to cover him with, which got all wet and I just tried to keep them wet with warm water from the pool instead of water cooled too much by the air. After a long while, maybe 45 minutes, we switched to the other breast and in doing so I happened to notice that he was a boy and let everyone know.
The placenta didn't come and I wasn't really having many contractions, despite the breastfeeding. After 2 hours the midwife asked if I was sure there weren't 2 babies and I thought I was pretty damn sure but did she have a Doppler she could use to listen for a heartbeat? She felt my belly and didn't find anything that felt like a baby, and neither did I, but she listened with the Doppler anyway and said that yes, there was another baby - she heard the heartbeat loud and clear - and it was a good strong healthy heartbeat. My response was "Oh shit!" because I couldn't imagine going through that pushing phase again. That thought was most prevalent and totally outweighed the rest, but I also flashed back to the beginning of the pregnancy when I'd thought I would kind of like to have twins and that if I thought it or dreamed it enough it might happen. The cord was too short for anyone else to hold the baby with it still attached and the placenta still inside me, but I knew I couldn't hold it and deliver another baby so we had to cut it. The midwife tied it off and asked who would cut it and I said I would, so she gave me the scissors and I cut the cord when she said to. Then I basically don't remember seeing the baby for the next hour or so because my mom had him and I was focusing on delivering either another baby or the placenta. The doula had gone home and to sleep but the midwife called her back saying she thought there was another baby and the doula got up and came back and got back in the pool to help me. I still didn't really have contractions but eventually with a push a large part of the placenta was born. A big part of me had started holding back tremendously at the thought of another baby, so even though the midwife told me to push I didn't really want to. It felt like it could be another head and I was afraid if I pushed actively that would cause what I'd feared before - basically big time damage. But it turned out it wasn't a head, it was the placenta. On examining it, the midwife said there was still more of it and we needed it to come without pulling it out to avoid hemorrhage. After a few minutes she asked me again to stand up so I finally did and she held the placenta to see if the rest of it would separate and emerge with the help of gravity. It did, fairly soon - by that time it was 3:30am. By 5 or so we were finally all asleep.
I woke up around 8 or so and took the first pictures of Rowan waking in sunlight. I couldn't even think about naming him for the next couple of days because there was so much else going on - doctor visits, breastfeeding, pain and bloody nipples and visits, not to mention getting to know him. Over the weekend my aunt and brother got some name books and we started working with him, but after all that none of the names I picked came from any of the books anyway.
