This Changed Everything

Finna’s birth story.

This Changed Everything. Finna's Birth Story.

I was so informed, so darned well read, so prepared. But not for this.

I had vacuumed up those pregnancy books, for I wanted it all, every last moment of the thing it that it had me taken 37 years to realize.

But this changed everything.

And in hindsight, it was nothing.

Something so arbitrary, so artificial, a line in their sand, changed my daughter’s birth, her very first breaths and my last ones as a pregnant woman, so profoundly.

A date.

An expectation of punctuality.

I never was very punctual.

My first child was so very wanted, so long in the waiting – for; I have always felt the tug of motherhood right there in the middle of me. When that second blue line appeared on the mast of the little low tech pregnancy test boat floating about in a cup of my pee, I froze for a second’s disbelieving rapture.

Then jumped up and down, the uncontainable bodily expression of the most intensely exciting moment of my life. ‘No way! No waaaay!’

Yep, I was pretty durn chuffed. I felt the sun in my belly.

The pregnancy was healthy and my babe grew happily in her big watery home despite my anxieties for her safety, born of the simple disbelief that I could be this lucky, this blessed. I wanted all of it, the whole pregnancy experience. I watched her on ultrasound at 11 weeks (‘Yes, one baby.” A baby?! There’s a baby in there?!), a fat bigheaded thing with stick limbs, and at 20 weeks (why did she keep moving away from the probe?). I had the blood test, the regular hospital checkups and the GD glucose test. I avoided soft cheeses and read pregnancy books and magazines, I coveted baby stuff and bought a sling online.

I knew I wanted to keep this bub close to me.

I joined the hospital birth centre’s Midwifery Group Practice program (each woman is assigned her own midwife throughout the pregnancy and birth), and wrote a birth plan full of all the things I didn’t want done to me, or to her. We’d chosen to birth here because of the nice atmosphere, the ‘family birthing rooms’, the big deep tub that could be filled with water. And because, other than home birth (for which I was too fearful at the time), it was the only option where we lived. I didn’t really want hospital, had envisaged a nice birth centre, but this, yes this looked ok.

A nice compromise, and all that.

I wanted water.

I wanted peace.

I needed support.

At 26 weeks there was some bleeding, enough to warrant a checking, and here, in this state, I met my midwife. On my back, a portent of things to come. The cause and origin of the bleed were hard to ascertain, and although it was brown, ‘old’ blood, I stayed in for two days, with steroids to mature her lungs, just in case. The Chinese Herbal Gynocologist I saw sent some herbs, and the bleeding immediately responded by slowing to spotting that continued harmlessly for the rest of the pregnancy. There were more ultrasounds, more turnings away from that sound blasting probe.

Now that I know.

It’s difficult to recount this story now, four years later, without editorializing.

Now I know.

So many things.

I must be honest here, Finna, it was not just ignorance but fear and distrust that sent me down that rolling jumbling path to your hasty birth. I found it impossible to trust in the thing that my body was doing, so getting this baby out safely was all I could see. I couldn’t trust in anything so frail as the way I felt about myself, my body, to do that.

And I couldn’t believe that you were safest inside me, in that first warmth, right where you were.

And really, nobody told me I could do it, that I was safe to trust in myself, and in you.

It was an obstacle, a danger, a test. Take the drugs, screamed the books, the magazines. Don’t be a martyr!

Nobody told me until long after your arrival that birth could be enjoyable, uplifting, sacred, empowering.

So it wasn’t.

So I was easily scared.

So birth was something to be got past, so I could have you.

The exception, in fairness, to the general aura of negativity and fearmongering was the Calmbirth class that I took over two warm yellow weekends at 32 weeks. That was soft and light, uplifting and positive. Sunk in soft big chairs that floated our bigness, I learned about breathing in the light of birth, and meditated on guided visualizations.

                                    27 weeks pregnant. Look at the big guts!

Somewhat buoyed by all this, I shared the creeping tummycrawling nightfears for my precious babe’s safety through birth, and the helpful peaceful birth space created by Calmbirth, with my hospital midwife.

She gave me short shrift.

“Birth is hard work,” she said. ‘It’s just really very hard work and you just have to do it.”

Granite face.

I could see what she thought of airy fairy hippie types confessing their weak fears and trying to shirk the hardness of it all.

So, no more fears allowed then. Right, best just get on with it, eh?

The word ‘midwife’ literally means ‘with woman’. You know, support, uplift, that sort of thing. She was a bit of a downer, actually.

41 weeks.

Me; ‘What will happen if I go past 42 weeks?”

Hospital midwife; ‘Well, then your baby will be post-mature…’ She trailed off and the acid fox look on her face told me all.

That would be bad. I wouldn’t want that. Your baby might die, or be sick, and all that.

At 9 days ‘over’ (over WHAT, I now think. Over what? When they are over it? When I am? When the hospital is overfilled? Stupid term…) I had yet another ultrasound.

‘Your baby looks very happy in there, lots of fluid, plenty of movement.’

Smile.

A few days later, the induction is explained. I’ll have a prostaglandin gel on the Sunday to artificially ‘ripen’ my cervix, and stay in hospital overnight to be monitored. It may start labour but unlikely.

Then the membrane rupture (ARM) and the ‘drip’ (Synotcinon) on the Monday.

The midwife says she will try to keep the birth as normal as possible and I’m still free to move around.

Free.

I’ll have to drag a drip and two belly monitors with me, is all.

And no water, no pool, no bath. But past the magical 42 weeks that isn’t allowed anyway. Hospital protocol.

So many things to be done.

Hospitally things, technological things. Monitoring, breaking, dripping.

All so dangerous.

I later learn that the hospital does inductions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

‘Hopefully your bub will arrive on Saturday night!’ chirps the backup midwife, a lovely kind woman, on the phone. ‘They often do that, they seem to know…”

She remarks that she has had two inductions, and that it will be ‘hard and fast’. In my tired addled frightened hopeful mind (after learning that a baby is ‘full term’ at 37 weeks I’d been waiting for the birth since then. Five weeks) this translates to ‘you’ll have to work a bit harder but it will be over quicker.’ I’ve always been into that.

View birth as suffering, and you will want it over as quickly as possible, I guess.

I neglect to mention, as they have faded into the more intense events that followed, that an OB performed two ‘stretch and sweep’ procedures, which were unpleasant and had exactly no effect on bringing on labour. I used the breathing and visualization that Calm Birth taught me to get through them. They caused mild contractions, which then stopped.

Guess she just wasn’t ready.

Sunday morning, hospital.

Kind midwife hooks up another foetal monitor, and proclaims all well. She does a vaginal exam, and tells me that I am already beginning to dilate – one to two centimetres, so the gel won’t be required after all.

Great news!

I could cry when I think of this.

I was already in early labour.

My daughter was coming on her own.

My body worked just fine.

Just fine.

We went home, and spent our last pregnant day together as a couple in the sunshine, Not Thinking about tomorrow.

We went for a walk, held hands.

I’m glad we did that.

Monday morning, 8 am, we arrive, cross the cool silent concrete of the hospital maternity entrance, take the empty elevator box up to the maternity ward. We are shown the room of our child’s birth, sterile, a hospital room, and Baz takes one last picture of me pregnant, covered by the oversize floating green t shirt that I will birth our child in.

 42 weeks pregnant, Birth day.

Our midwife (not the sweet one, the ‘birth is hard work’ one) tells me she will keep the birth as normal as possible. She lays out a ‘nest’ on the floor where I might like to sit or crouch (it’s right there on the floor by my foot in the picture). She hooks up those ubiquitous bloody monitors and rolls me over when the heartbeat is too low. I am attacked by another cringe of fear. ‘If there’s a problem just do a caesarean,’ I say. Really really frightened for my child.

I just want my baby, I just want her.

She looks at me, a look that says, ‘don’t be such a pussy, you have to do the work like everyone else.’ A disappointed, dismissing thing crawling on her face.

I now know that the ‘work’ of a normal birth is a labour of love, it’s not the coalface at all, but something raised above, pushed beyond the normal boundaries of being. It’s oceanic, tidal, the push and pull of the biggest thing you’ll ever be part of. But I wasn’t to discover that until I had my second child at home, undisturbed, almost exactly three years later.

The first time, I just didn’t know what I had to lose.

But it’s the first time, and it’s all happening now.

The midwife shows me the amniotomy hook, ‘Just like a crochet needle.’ Crochet needles are nice.

I lie down on my back, she probes about, pinches a little, and the buckets of liquid that have sustained, protected, enveloped my child to this point gush out of me. Warm. Copious. Buckets. I exclaim, Baz exclaims, the midwife is businesslike.

Granite face.

I get up, start moving about, and I feel period – like tightenings in my lower abdomen.

‘I want to wait a few hours and see if this is enough to get it going,’ I say.

‘No, let’s just get it over and done with.’ What??

But she’s the boss, this is her zone, so I don’t argue (despite the slime of wrongfeelingness in my guts) as she tightens the monitor straps around my belly, those slipping lying arms that embrace my birth. I don’t argue as she pushes a needle into my hand, straps tape on. I don’t argue as she brings in that shitty shitty drip, that snake’s venom that will kick my baby out into the world.

I’m beyond arguing when I’m bent over the nest she has set up in full immediate view of the doorway with my naked arse in the air facing the door, beyond arguing when male doctors pop in and out, have a look around, leave. Yes, you can see a curtain in the picture, but what’s a flappy insubstantial moving curtain between my arse and the rest of the world? How do I even know, crouched there in my kicking pain, that it’s closed? The reality was that it was opened and closed constantly, and one of my birth memories is of a male doctor poking his head around the door to have a gander.

I’m staked to the drip, hogtied to the monitor belts, afraid to move lest the whole edifice slips beyond me, leaves me, even worse, alone.

The pain begins immediately, hard and fast and unrelenting.

I breathe, surviving each wave.

There is no gentle beginning, no tide coming in, no riding anything.

Just staying alive.

The pain does not stop between contractions.

I am clenched hard the whole time, just harder as each drowning wave hits my tiny island.

Baz offers music, icypoles, but I just throw up.

I can’t stand the music, am beyond standing anything.

He goes out for food, comes back, I barely notice.

All I can do is rock my pelvis and breathe through each kicking wave of hard pain.

I am in darkness.

I close my eyes and the hours pass like this, through to mid afternoon.

Hard angry gasping hours, banging away at me.

But I am coping.

Breathing.

Just.

Breathing.

Rocking.

There’s no time here anymore.

At last the midwife comes to me for something other than to pull up those fucking monitor straps that slip like a landslide. ‘Tine, you have to get up and go to the toilet. Your full bladder will be stopping progress. Get up now.’ She pulls me up, helps me to the toilet, wheeling my hideous nemesis Drip.

It is gone. She has broken it, the spell that was me coping. Me the most comfortable I could have got, on all fours on the floor, rocking. I sit on the toilet, urinate, and am consumed, utterly engulfed, by pain, panic, terror. I feel sick to the core of my being with it. I am shaking, every part of me dislodged, flying apart. There is no me anymore, just blinding burning pain, shaking terror.

I can’t do this any more. I’m crying, shaking.

I ask for pain relief. Midwife says no. Baz says yes. There is an argument, but I am in spiralling darkness, and I can’t hear them past my own gasping.

Midwife says she will check me, can I get on the bed? Somehow I do, lay on my back, and she tells me that I’m 7 – 8 cms dilated. Too late for pain relief (which I never wanted, wasn’t really what I was crying for) but she will turn off the drip and ‘let’ me labour on my own. I am simperingly, embarrassingly grateful.

The drip is stopped and the relief is instant. The pain still comes, not as hard and fast, but I am spent. I shake, watching my legs weaving out of my control and beyond my body. I am interested in their steady progress, something not connected to me. I am cold and spent. Baz says later that I was purple, blotched, he thought I might be dying.

I wasn’t, but neither was I any part of the experience.

She examines me again, inside, there’s still a bit of cervix left. I know not to push against this. I know not to push until The Urge hits.

I wait for it, screeching now, breath stretched beyond flesh, through each tearing pain. It’s a live thing, this pain, something crouching on me bullying the breath from me. It spreads from my stomach through my legs and the space between, through the floor, pins me there. It’s fire, it’s a volcano.

She gives me gas, I am a wretched cowed thing chewing on the mouthpiece. It’s my friend.

I need hands each time, Baz’s hand and hers, to crush, to hold onto so that I don’t get swept completely away.

I’m still waiting for that fucking urge, that undeniable force to tell me it’s safe to push, time to push. Each pain is taking more energy than I have.

I am up, crouching over the end of the bed, at least up. But screeching. Keening through the pains, striving to ride them. Waiting for The Urge.

It doesn’t come.

She makes me lie down.

‘You have to change positions. You have to start pushing properly. You’re making the wrong noises. The noises you’re making are fear. You have to work. Lower sounds, and push. Stop trying to escape the pain.’

But. I. Don’t. Feel. The. Urge.

I’m lying down now, flat on my back.

‘You have to lie right down, the baby can’t get past the bend otherwise.’

Oh no.

Not stirrups.

She pushes my feet into the horrible plastic things, and fear starts its tidal creep up my spine.

Let’s just get this over and done with. She says.

They’re rattling the salad spoons at the door she says.

You have to work, she says, it’s been too long.

You’re making. The wrong. Noises.

They’re rattling the salad spoons at the door.

I can feel the cold pinch of those forceps spoons, so I push, mightily, into the pain, with no urge, no guide from nature.

“Not like that. Slowly, sustain it.’

I feel a hard bulging force in my bottom.

The head.

In the wrong place, surely? Shouldn’t it be in the front?

I push into these pains, I try, I really do, with everything I’ve got left. I’m lying there, stranded, tied down, unsafe. I push.

“You have to hold the push.’ The head keeps sliding back again, I can feel it.

Push down, recede. Push down, recede. Tethered.

“We’ll put the drip back on.”

NO!!! I plead, nononononono!!!! Not that, I’ll push, I’ll push.’ I’m the baby now. Plese, please don’t do that to me again.

But snake is back, the evil thing kicks me again, but still I fail to push out my child.

“Out baby!” I say, ‘Out baby out!”

It’s been two hours of second stage.

She lets in the salad spoon rattlers, the Fearsome Ones, because I have failed.

The Fearsome One is actually a gentle, softly spoken female doctor with kind eyes and an empathic manner. She hurts me, it’s true, sucking that thing onto my baby’s head, cutting me, but she anaesthetizes me too. She pulls as I push and there it is, I feel the head slip out. I push again and she turns it, and the body twists and slides from me.

For a brief blank moment I am emptied. It is over.

I am utterly emptied.

Then Baz says it. “LOOK Tine!”

He has seen her, and I look, and our tiny whiteslimy pale daughter with huge dark looking eyes waves and starfishes tiny fingers and splays and she is here on my chest and everything is right again.

“She is perfect. She is beautiful.”

(Is it Finna? I look, yes, a girl!)

She is on me, and suddenly she is everything. I am laughcrying, and she is just. Everything.

Just. Everything.

All at once.

So perfect.

 A love comes whole, completely formed, all encompassing and irreversible. The biggest thing in the world.

For the tiniest.

Then the final insult.

“Oh she’s tiny isn’t she? And lots of vernix. She almost looks premmie, she could have had a few more weeks in there.” With Woman gives me an injection because after all that snake venom by body no longer knows how to deliver a placenta. It arrives, I barely feel it, it is whisked away and I don’t even look. I don’t know it but my body has secreted some away, a thumb sized bit that will live inside me and come away 18 months later after a homeopathic treatment. I will add this to my son’s whole placenta and keep them to be returned to the earth at the right time, in the right place.

The kind doctor starts putting me back together, repairing the cut. She tells me that ‘wasn’t even a bad birth!’ It is she who will visit me first the next morning,not my midwife. She who will smile and make me laugh and admire my beautiful daughter.

I guess my With Woman wants to go home, and I guess she needs to tick the box ‘feeding initiated’ before she does so. Hands descend, grab my perfect tiny child’s head in one and my right breast in the other, literally force the two together. She sucks, and despite the violation, the ruining of my intention to let her do this in her own time, I am delighted that she has attached.

She is weighed, this new centre of my world, and is less than 3kgs.

The terror, the pain, the humiliation recede to be picked over later. They are strong and there, but for now they are papered over with this love. His and mine, because Baz had his own kind of hell watching me in mine, being left alone in the room with me and a screaming monitor alarm, arguing with the midwife over her treatment of me. But right now this new father of my child and I are swamped, smitten by this tiny person who is so huge to us, so eclipsing. We are bonded through the trauma, through the love, through this earthshake that only we know.

Kind Midwife arrives., Hard Work leaves (I see her once more, late the following day, when she is mildly interested in my infant, and tells me not to let them put her under lights for her jaundice is mild, then leaves me to battle ‘them’ alone when ‘they’ want to). She supports me to get up, and the hideous bloody mess I have been lying in looks like nothing more than a scene from a slasher movie or a slaughterhouse. More of the gore goes onto the shower floor as I move, clotty blood flowing a watered pink river down the plughole.

I am cleaned, dry, I get my daughter back from Baz, I am wheeled into Postnatal, put into bed, tucked in with my perfection, this being who has formed from the very best parts of me. I spend the night smelling her, watching her head. I know the softness, the direction of the softbrown hair swirl, the ridiculous smallness of the fingers. It is all inside me. I imagine her at twenty, the love unchanged.

Watch her now, asleep on my chest.

And now she is four, way past a baby, beautiful, intense, emotional, kind, deeply loving, creative … all those things and more.

I do wish that I had made different choices about her birth. I wish I trusted her and me to know our right time, our right place.

Now that I know.

I regret the way of her birth, the time, the place, the caregivers.

But I cannot really ever regret anything that brought her to me. She has changed me forever, and although I wish it was different for her, I wish her exactly as she is.