Judith's Birth of Lia

~*~   ~*~   ~*~

A little about me and my journeys in childbirth and motherhood...

I had a baby after 17 years of trying. That's not a typo. I think there were emotional and spiritual factors at work, and I knew I didn't want to go the medical route; I did check out a few things with a fertility specialist, and knew that hormones and surgery weren't for me, and that no one could promise me a healthy baby no matter what I did.

It was a lonely thing to experience...I didn't know anyone else who was going through the infertility scene and who also didn't want to go the high-tech route. This was years ago, way pre-Web, and the Internet wasn't an option the way it is now, though there were always a subset of techies who used it for all kinds of things.

I've been interested in natural childbirth, especially oriented towards home birth, since I was in my early teens, which is over thirty years. That's also when I became a peace and justice activist, and a vegetarian. I don't think all those things have to live in conjunction with one another, but that's just where I'm at with these things, and have been for the majority of my life.

So, some of my feeling about hospitals is long-standing, and some comes, more recently, from assisting at hospital births. I don't call myself a doula, partly because I dislike being identified with anything that takes its name and imagery from slavery in classical Greece. But I've attended births in a role that's roughly cognate to that for some years, and I have to say, the only births I've seen in a US hospital in the last 10 years I considered non-interventive were the ones that were so fast there wasn't time to intervene.

~*~   ~*~   ~*~

I had Lia at home with a midwife when I was 38, after, as I say, decades of trying, and it was a pretty non-interventive birth. Although I must say, looking back at it almost 7 years later, there are things I would do very differently if I had it to do over again. LESS medical/midwifery consciousness, rather than more. I trust my body, and the birthing process, better now. And I may get a chance to find out...I have this weird intuition that I hope is more than wish fulfillment, that I may have a child at age 50 or so, which is 5 years away. I'm in good health (know what I can't tolerate in terms of allergies and irritants and how to avoid them), loose in the hip joints, have a good attitude about how childbirth feels, have seen enough babies born and have done it myself, so I have no strong fears.

When I was in labor with Lia, I had a lot of personal issues going, not the least of which was that I wasn't with the person I thought I'd raise this child with, and I *was* living with, and accompanied by, with the man I'd lived with for many years, in something of a marriage (we never took out legal papers) and who was really trying to be my partner. But I only wanted Dave, and as it turns out he was in the hospital, 150 miles away, himself that night, critically ill with a blood pressure crisis following a bad reaction to an antibiotic he was taking for pneumonia.

I'd been studying midwifery, mostly on my own, never clinched an apprenticeship and felt too old and cranky and set in my ways to be someone's indentured servant in exchange for training by the time opportunities came around. I guess I also had, maybe even have still, some resentments, though they are perhaps minor.... when I was young and believed it really was karma yoga to work with disturbed children, or in health projects in Central American villages, or assisting women at their birth time, for little or no money, the general consensus was that having a child oneself was a prerequisite for being a good midwife. There were no granny midwives left most places, and it was the young women having babies themselves who had to teach themselves and each other the lost knowledge of how to be helpful at a birth. By the time I had my baby, young, often single women with no intention of having children in the approaching future were the ones getting all the apprenticeships; who else had time (and, sometimes, parents to support them?)

Anyway, my second stage labor lasted a long time; I felt my knowledge about childbirth was in conflict with itself. Some of my most trusted lay midwifery books talked about how two hours "should" be the maximum for the pushing stage, some said, you shouldn't even need to push, just let it happen, some said to work energetically. I sure never got the urge to push and never got the hang of it, though Erin, the chief midwife, tried to instruct. I laughed about this an hour after being told I was fully dilated. "WHAT urge to push, Erin?"

And I kept thinking of what Spiritual Midwifery said about ones "sexual subconscious" interfering with a smooth labor sometimes, especially pushing, and I was sure that was true. I took my girlfriend Erma into the bathroom with me and told her what was going on, my fears about my feelings and regrets, re: Dave and Arnold and Jon, to whom I'd talked just a few hours before, my former lover and the baby's probable biological father, interfering with the birthing. Erma, my friend, was the only person I really wanted touching me, and maybe Jen, an apprentice midwife with whom I had excellent rapport, but I couldn't really say that and Arnold was really trying to be helpful, like I say.

~*~   ~*~   ~*~

Well, this is where I think it got too interventive, although by hospital standards it was nothing, and I still feel I had a wonderful birth with Lia.

I don't blame my midwife at all; my own conflicts including the one about how much nursing-type behavior is "responsible" at a birth and how much is just interfering, and the ones about who I loved and who was there, were what got in the way. I worried a little, feeling I often don't finish what I start, and maybe childbirth would be like this too. The midwife responded to my feeling that we should "do" something. They gave me some herbal "labor tincture" and they weren't even sure all of what was in it. (Asked me if I were allergic to any herbs and I said maybe valerian and they said they thought there might be a little valerian in there and gave me some of this tincture anyway. Go figure...) I don't think it did a damned thing, and that could be improper storage or preparation of the ingredients or the product, or it could be that SOME THINGS ARE EMOTIONAL AND SPIRITUAL IN NATURE RATHER THAN MATERIAL, AND THUS DON'T LEND THEMSELVES TO MATERIAL HERBAL ADJUSTMENT. This is how I always have felt about my infertility, and I think it's how I feel about the second stage of labor.

But the other half of this was...maybe there was nothing at all wrong with a longer second stage anyway. I'd wanted to believe this, and had read books and articles that supported the "your body will move the baby down, don't worry" approach, but also the stuff about what hard work a woman has to do, all the stuff about being a "good pusher."

I'm sure that if I had been in a hospital they'd have brought out the vacuum suction thing by then and it would have been hard to refuse. To this day I despise hearing nurses praise a woman as a "good pusher." It implies that some women, like me, are "bad pushers", damn it.

I mean, if that nonsense they like to throw out, usually to guilt trip mothers who think their experience giving birth counts for something, about how a healthy child is all that matters means anything, then they ought to take a look at how perfect my little 10/10 Apgar baby was after 3 and a half hours of full dilation inside her "bad pusher" mother. Guess I wasn't so terrible a baby-haver after all.

Jen was taking the baby's heart rate throughout and it was a textbook-perfect 140, which should have reassured me. But the last of my fears, that maybe home birth is only safe if it goes according to some schedule's parameters, caught up with me and mingled with my discomfort with my family life and what to do about it, if anything COULD be done, now that my baby was almost here.

So I kept "trying" to push and not moving the baby much, and refused "a little Pitocin in the nose" to make the contractions stronger, but agreed to fundal pressure from... I think it was Jen (at Erin's suggestion). Again, I think they were responding to MY need to "do something" and I don't blame them, although I think that someone like Erin or Jen saying firmly that everything was fine and the baby would be here soon, would have done me a world of good. I think they tried that but my conflicts got in the way. So someone leaned on my belly...it didn't hurt, but I was SOOO tired.

I went into the bathroom, which is tiny in that house, with Erma again and asked her to please try paging Dave. I wanted him to come see me now if he could. Even though I didn't think it was likely. Even though Arnold would get totally weird about it; Hey, I was the one having the baby. Maybe I thought he'd realize it was meant to be his baby all along if he showed up for its birth. I don't know all of WHAT I thought; I think that thing about "all one's brains being in one's bottom" when giving birth has some validity to it. I was a lovable space case. (I still thought I was having a boy then. No ultrasound, no amnio, no CVS, and I still would reject them.) I didn't know Dave was in the hospital. I knew he had pneumonia, because I'd called him at work 2 days before, to tell him I was really close to having this baby, and heard from a business associate there that he was out because of pneumonia.

I sang and chanted in a cracked voice in the shower; before that, I'd cracked jokes right through transition. (No one knew how far along I was because I was handling it that way.) I lectured my belly, "okay, this fetus stuff is over, you're supposed to be a BABY now, get it?"

Befitting an old activist, Erin and the group got to chanting, "What do we want? BABY! When do we want it? NOW!!!" which really did help me keep my perspective some. Charlene, who had just a week or two before moved in downstairs, was listening on the staircase and said later she didn't know whether to laugh or cry but it was wonderful. We became good friends.

Erin asked Arnold to do some nipple stimulation on me to keep the contractions going. I wasn't totally comfortable with that...oh, I shouldn't even get into what I *didn't* have going with Arnold at the time, like I say, I'd invited Erma partly because she was the only person I really wanted touching me...Erin, the midwife, midwife had her hands in me more than I really wanted but I guess I didn't know I could say "no" to my hired midwife in late second stage yet. I don't think it helped relax me though, at all, though that's supposedly what that stuff's about.

And Erin had Erma and Jen push me with each contraction into what's sometimes called the McRoberts position, which is anti-gravity but folds you up into a squat on your back, opening up the pelvis more, supposedly. Again, I think Erin only took charge like that because I didn't trust my own judgment enough and wanted her to "do something". Now, I believe the baby was going to come out just fine without this...Erma and Jen, who got with my wacky sense of humor, twitted me about "How's that for politically incorrect birthing positions?" and "Don't worry, Ina May does this all the time" (they'd been teasing me sweetly by reading mystical statements from my dog-eared copy of Spiritual Midwifery, earlier in the afternoon and during the birthing.)

Anyway, after all that shit, and three and a half hours of second stage, the baby slid out. She started up right away, without really even crying, turned pink before her foot was all the way out. She was beautiful. I was surprised that she was a girl, and smaller than I'd anticipated...she took up a lot of room (I'm not a really large person) and had almost no fat on her...the length of most 8 pound babies, but she weighed only 6 and a half pounds.

I lost about half a liter of blood, which in retrospect is not surprising: I probably didn't need those idiots (no, they weren't idiots, *I *was an idiot for saying they "should" go ahead) leaning on my belly. I got the standard IM shot of Pitocin to stop the bleeding then...nobody asked me. Guess they were "worried." I didn't even feel the needle, and I have a mild needle aversion. Erin said she'd stitch me up; I said look carefully, 'cause I don't think I tore. And I was right, though there is one little stretched-out place (some midwives call these "skid marks") that's only recently completely stopped making itself known.

Jen, who was starting to feel like family even if she was part of the crew, gave me a kiss. She said she was proud of me. I asked her to wash her hands, they smelled of these Chinese herbs they gave me for the bleeding, and I thought they stank like mold. Then I gave her a hug.

"Wow, I did it, I have a healthy baby girl," was what I kept thinking. I thought it weird that I had a girl...I had a boy's name picked out, but I was happy though I wondered what lay ahead and when I'd hear from Dave. She was dressed in a little lavender velour sack I'd bought at a yard sale. She was so perfect.

These midwives expected to be fed, and I'd bought a whole load of stuff at Trader Joe's the day before, including coffee if the birth was going to keep people up all night. It didn't; the baby was born at 8:33 p.m. I never touch the stuff; I'm the product of a mother who took Dexedrine while pregnant with me in the 1950s, legally prescribed, and I'm too wired to handle caffeine. I'd made a big pot of pinto beans for everyone (...or maybe Anasazi beans, which I prefer if I can get 'em...) the night before, when it was pretty clear I was about to go into labor, and I had someone go to our miserable excuse for a kitchen and bring me beans and tortillas. Erin said she'd had some, they were delicious, and then asked how to make them (I thought, 'Doesn't everyone know how to cook beans?!' I'd been living on beans and vegetarian Chinese food for 25 years.) She said I looked like I needed a napkin, and I made some crude joke about which end was she referring to wiping? Back to normal, my weird sense of humor (some other time, I'll supply some of my transition wisecracks) and I was hungry.

~*~   ~*~   ~*~

So that's my birth story. I was afraid the midwife would try to talk me into going to the hospital and I wouldn't have the clarity to say no. I was afraid of my unspoken relationship problems, which I've never addressed in writing, though other versions of my birth story have been published. (Check out the Midwifery Today archives if interested. It ran in spring, I think, 1997). I was afraid to ask the midwives for what I really needed. I was afraid of not being able to push the baby out myself. I was afraid that maybe my ideas about birth were too radical after all, and I'd pay for it with my health or my baby's, or at least have to let my mother do an "I told you so" about the whole thing. (She had given me a *lot* of trouble, and some really manipulative stuff, about my plans for home birth. I got mad and told her that I had been studying this for 20 years, and that this was one subject where she really didn't know a damned thing that I didn't, and her fears were exactly that...fears. She didn't know ONE person who had had a bad experience with birthing at home. And that there might be good reasons for going to a hospital to have a baby in some circumstances, but I didn't have any of those circumstances, and "because my parents are afraid of homebirth" was not a good reason.)

My mother had said she'd "feel so guilty if something went wrong at a homebirth" and she had done nothing to prevent me from having one. I asked her how she'd feel if I had an unnecessary Cesarean...good? If I were horribly depressed because I'd capitulated to something I didn't think was in my or the baby's best interest? Or if I died after a hospital birth, as a friend of theirs had just a few months before, ten days after a Cesarean? Do hospitals never make deadly mistakes? Or do you just automatically exonerate them if they do?

This thing with my mother, who wrote an article after my birth called "Nuts to Natural Childbirth", about how foolish these do-it-yourself types were for thinking that birth had anything to do with parenthood, was different, about irrational FEAR.

I'm not afraid of those things I listed above any more. And I'm almost sure I'll do it with a few good friends who are calm-headed and maybe experienced about birth and bodies, but no professional midwife, if I get another opportunity. I've thought a lot about under what circumstances I'd go to the hospital, and it's a really short list: uncontrollable bleeding, cord prolapse, persistent transverse presentation, sudden loss of heart tones (and even there, I'm not sure...if the baby dies, the hospital can't bring it back.). Anyway, I'd need to be halfway to dead, or think the baby was, before I'd be convinced that the hospital was the way to go.

Okay, this long story isn't what I thought I'd do with two hours of my precious afternoon, but I think it was cathartic. I cried a little, and I think it was useful.

I could talk about ex-homebirth CNMs and lay birth-center MWs and how I've seen a lot of them fall in love with their techno-tools...the Pitocin, the IVs, internal monitors, even the damned epidurals and so help me the vacuum extractors, which a few actually bring. Not everyone does, but I've heard enough horror stories and seen enough smaller annoying things to think having been a homebirth midwife is no guarantee of non-interventive treatment.

As soon as someone, no matter where she or he practices, starts referring to women as "primips" instead of as women having a first baby, I start thinking "danger."

Okay, not everybody sees it this way...

Email

~*~   ~*~   ~*~

Back to top

Back to Birth Stories