“It snowed on the day you were born.”
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| Great Grandma Grace. See? I look like her. It's weird. |
When it started snowing early in the morning on November 17,
Joanne, one of the midwives attending my birth, said, “That’s how your birth
story will begin.” It’s a lovely line to start with, and I should have thought
about it more at the time. Snow is one of my favorite things in the world, I
was actually born during an Indiana blizzard on the day after Christmas, 1982.
But after moving away from Pennsylvania when I was eleven I got to enjoy it more
and more rarely, going from Washington to California and now to the deep south
(with delightfully icy stays in the Midwest in between). We certainly didn’t
expect it to snow here in Tennessee, and before Thanksgiving at that, so when
the night’s rain turned to a light dusting that stuck to the now nearly-bare
branches outside our windows, my mom said “It’s a sign from Grandma Grace,
honey.”
November 17 was my Great-Grandma Grace’s birthday, and since
my grandpa told me that last June I just knew it would be my baby’s birthday
too. I never got to meet her, but we look eerily alike and I’ve surmised that
she also struggled with her fertility…her only two children were born seven
years apart (in the twenties) and she eventually died of ovarian cancer. I’ve
always felt connected to her and wish that I could have known her.
I should have taken the snow seriously. I should have put a
mental post-it on that moment: noted that it was a sign, that everything would
be okay; but at the time I was floating in a birth pool, contracting and dilating
as peacefully as I think is probably possible, with no reason to believe
otherwise.
My water broke at 10 PM the night before; Sunday night, the
16th. I was ready. I had been talking to the baby all day, telling
him to come out, that we wanted to meet him now. I bounced on the birthing
ball, I did laps around the bottom floor of the house (because it was FREEZING
outside and I couldn’t hike, irony of ironies in this beautiful place!). I
cooked tofu-mushroom stroganoff for dinner, played Uno with my family, then got
on my hands and knees with the birthing ball in yet another effort to be sure
baby’s head was in an optimal position. (Ha!) After ten or fifteen minutes in
that position I straightened up. A gush of water immediately soaked my yoga
pants; there was never any question of what it was. I looked up at my mom and
Matt and just said, “My water just broke.” There was a little shocked silence
and a few “Are you sure’s” as I ran to the bathroom, quite sure.
I wrapped a towel around myself as I absorbed the reality
that this was it. The baby was coming. I had an overwhelming sense and an image
of standing at the foot of a great mountain that I had to climb now, and there
was no turning back. I started shaking and I couldn’t stop; my mom came in and
I asked her through shaky tears, “I can do this, right? I’ll be okay, right?”
And she held me and told me of course I could and she had no doubt. She
reminded me that my baby was really coming and I would finally, finally,
finally be holding him soon.
Matt’s sister Katy was still in the house with a now very
nervous Simon, so we tried to reassure him as best we could and quickly sent
them off. Thank God that Katy and Matt’s mom were there, and had just checked
in at one of the home B&Bs on The Farm. I had been afraid of where we would
put Simon if labor began on either of the two nights prior that they stayed
with us. Thankfully, fate was on our side. (I should give Mom some credit on
the date here; her guess was November 16 because I arrived 6 days past my due
date…technically the process began on that date so I concede that we both win. J )
Matt called Deborah, my midwife, as I tried to calm myself
and gauge if any contractions were beginning. There wasn’t much to notice in
the first ten or twenty minutes, but after Deborah arrived and put in the
hep-lock for my IV antibiotics (for Group B Strep) I began noticing mildly
crampy waves of pressure. Of course we all quickly agreed that we’d better see
if we all could get any rest before they picked up, so I had Matt start my
Hypnobabies CDs and settled into bed. He laid down next to me and Mom dragged a
foam pad to the other side of the bed and we tried to get rest. It seemed like
contractions picked up fairly quickly from there, but I guess it wasn’t until about
1 AM that I was uncomfortable enough to want to get out of bed to pee. In the
bathroom, standing, there was no mistaking that this was for real. I was still
shaking, and at this point I was a little panicked. Never having done this
before I was certain that the contractions were about to get way worse (*they
didn’t) and that there was no way I would be able to do it. Matt and Mom both
reassured me that I would and I could, and reminded me that I was doing it the
way I had always wanted to.
I wondered if it was too soon to get in the birthing tub,
since I knew the warm water would at the very least help me fend off the shakes,
which felt like they were making everything much harder to handle. Mom pointed
out that Deborah was going to have to give me another dose of antibiotics in an
hour anyway, so they agreed to go ahead and wake her up and ask to start
filling the pool. I laid back down on the bed while I waited, and from this
point forward the details of the night go very hazy. I remember thinking that
Hypnobabies wasn’t working, that the contractions were definitely painful and
not just “pressure waves,” no matter how hard I told my brain to process them
that way. Still, the voice was soothing and I was used to it; the cues absolutely
helped me stop my body from tensing up and reminded me to breathe in the way
I’d been practicing for months: 4 slow counts on a deep breath in, 8 counts
down on a slow breath out.
Finally the tub was ready (finally? I still have no concept
of time in this memory, or how long it seemed to me) and Mom and Matt helped me
downstairs, still shaking and I think moaning through contractions at this
point.
Another thing I remember is making the sound “oh” when I was
moaning, and this is the part where my language nerd kicked in and joined my
subconscious. Knowing that my body would respond to the cues that I was giving
it, I really did not want to say “ow”. Just saying “ow” makes me tense up and
flinch; my brain processes it as a response to a threat. “Oh,” on the other
hand, is a word of understanding and accepting, and saying it kept my mouth
loose and open and prevented me from clenching my jaw (and tightening the rest
of myself up in turn). I processed all of this on some semi-conscious level and
was determined to never say “ow” through the entire process. When things got a
little tougher and “oh” wasn’t enough, I switched it up to “open, open, open” (as
Hypnobabies occasionally reminded me) to tell my body that I was okay with what
was happening and to keep going, or “oh, baby” to reconnect with my baby and
feel like we were working as a team. Both of those things helped so much.
Like I said, time is so hazy in this portion of my memory. I
don’t remember at all when I started needing to moan through contractions. Mom
says it was pretty early, after the first hour or so. My lack of consciousness
of time is partly due to Hypnobabies, I now believe, and also partly due to
another conscious decision I had made prior to the onset of labor, which was
that I didn’t want any numbers in my head, ever. I had asked my midwife to not
tell me how many centimeters I was when she checked me, and I’d asked Matt to
be sure all clocks were covered and phones out of my sight. I knew that I could
easily get psyched out by doing math (‘it took me x hours to get to y centimeters,
at this rate I’ll be at z when…etc. etc.) and I didn’t want that at all. My
goal was to stay present in each moment and not allow myself to be overwhelmed
by the task ahead or get worked up wondering when I would be complete. I was
also very afraid of “transition” and if I had been told I was at a 7 (at
transition’s front door) it would have been very hard to let go.
I got in the pool and immediately relaxed. The warm water
was so perfect and the shaking, the worst part really, stopped right away. I
noticed my contractions seemed to slow down and become weaker, so I was worried
I’d gotten in too soon. I asked Deborah if I should get out until I was further
along and she told me to wait and see; often it’s just a temporary effect of
the relaxation. I could soon tell that she was right; contractions picked up
and were stronger than before, but much easier to get on top of and handle while
floating weightless in the warm water and not shaking. Deborah said after some
time (20 minutes? 30?) that she noticed my birthing sounds had stopped and
maybe it wasn’t time to be in the pool yet. She asked if I was still feeling
contractions and I told her yes, and they were stronger, I was just better able
to handle it now and didn’t need to make noise for now.
She seemed content with this and I stayed in this exact
place until the sun came up: floating in the water, the dimmer lights in the
room turned low, staring at the ceiling beams and light fixtures and
occasionally noticing the level of darkness out the windows without much
concern. I noticed the endorphins buzzing around my body in between
contractions, making me feel light and high and kind of drugged. I appreciated
this. Sometimes I noted with mild surprise that it was getting lighter much
sooner than seemed right; I’d begun this process at 10 PM and morning was
definitely drawing near. Hypnobabies played on and I think I continued to think
it wasn’t really working, that labor still hurt and this lady was so full of
shit; still I kept it on. Her voice was soothing and I’d been listening to it
in preparation for this every night for months, she was a welcome presence even
if she was a liar. J
In hindsight, Hypnobabies was amazingly effective and I truly believe that
using it in combination with the tub is what ultimately got me through to the end.
If I had been trying to wing it, without the water and the relaxation cues, I
think I would have gotten tired and scared much, much sooner than I did.
Mom says that we all drifted in and out of sleep from our
various perches on couches, chairs and in birth pools. I certainly don’t
remember sleeping but maybe I did and that’s what made the night seem
surprisingly short.
When it was still very early in the morning I think my moans
got loud enough to prompt Deborah to check me again. I was discouraged every
time she checked me; though as promised she didn’t give me any numbers, I
always feared from her words that I was progressing really slowly. She seemed
to emphasize that I was thinning more than dilating and that that was really
important too, but from where I was floating I wanted action. I wanted to move
through this at a quick-but-not-too-quick pace, a ten hour or so labor sounding
ideal in my head. So I was frustrated when she told me that to dilate the rest
of the way I needed to relax (I’d thought I was!), that tensing up was going to
keep my body from doing the work it wanted to do. I didn’t know how I could
relax any more than I already was! At least this is what I remember; and I
don’t totally trust my memory at this point. I was in such a weird state of
in-between (in-between what, I don’t know) and overall I was okay, more okay
than I thought I’d be, except for when I was afraid that I was progressing
really slowly and things were still going to get much worse.
I must have been further along than I feared, because
Deborah called in Joanne, the second midwife, around this point. (Matt thinks
it was about 4 or 5 AM.) I knew that if she didn’t think I was progressing well
she wouldn’t do that yet, because Joanne was coming to assist with the birth
itself. So then I felt a little better.
Then it started snowing (I think), and I watched it falling
and felt more at peace. I noticed that things had seemed to slow down a little.
I said that out loud and Deborah said there were peaks and valleys and that was
to be expected. So I decided to let it be and the rest of the morning is lost
to me. It picked up again and my memory fails me again. I remember Joanne
coming in to the house and sitting on the couch and knitting. (Matt thinks Joanne
actually arrived at maybe 7…remember the clocks were covered so this is all
very loosely estimated.) It got intense enough around 10 that I was hanging over
the side of the pool hanging on to Matt and Mom, and one contraction was
intense enough that my moaning turned to sobbing. It hurt but it also felt good
to get it out; like I was getting out my fears of what the worst would be like,
getting them out of where they had been living for the past few weeks in all of
my muscles and deep in my brain.
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| In the birthing pool, late-ish morning. |
But then Deborah came over and told me I was going to have
to stop being so tragic and I immediately felt ashamed and went silent. It
didn’t feel good to be admonished when I was feeling so good about going with
my flow and not letting any inhibitions make things harder for myself. It felt
like I was being told I was doing something wrong and that made me feel like a
sad little kid, but then, it did actually feel good and relaxing to go silent
at that point. In hindsight, I wonder if I was heading into transition and my
body just stopped when told I was doing it wrong. She told me a few funny
things that got me laughing a little bit, and reminded me that my body was
never going to give me more than I could handle—it would push me to my very far
edge, but it would never be more than I could handle. Then she gently suggested
that I move position to help change my state of mind.
Even though getting out of the tub sounded like the most
miserable idea imaginable just then, I agreed. Matt urged me to walk with him
to the window to look out at what had stuck of the snow, and with what seemed
like more willpower than I’d ever possessed in my life, I got out of the tub,
let them dry me off, and slipped a loose nightshirt over my head. I was
surprised that instead of getting worse, things got immediately better. The
contractions seemed to ease again, and I was getting breaks of about five
minutes in between. Walking felt good and normal, and the snow on the trees was
so pretty. I remember this part pretty well. Talk turned to pushing and what to
expect, and I started to feel downright cheerful, and like all of this wasn’t
nearly as bad as I’d feared it would be. I think this was maybe around 11 AM,
13 hours in. As I stood at the window I began to have bloody show, and Mom
encouraged me that meant that pushing was very close now. They told me to let
them know if I got the urge, and I told them I was afraid I never would. I
certainly didn’t at that point. So they suggested I get on the futon and get
checked again.
I agreed very reluctantly, knowing this was going to hurt.
Deborah seemed fairly optimistic this time when she checked and asked my
permission to push me a little bit, saying it would hurt but it would also save
me a lot of time. I agreed even more reluctantly. I was starting to really get
excited about meeting my baby, whatever it took to get there. She wasn’t
kidding about it hurting when she opened me up more; I definitely made some
pretty primal noise in response to that! But it was over quickly and she said
if I wanted to I could try pushing on the birthing stool while she held the lip
of cervix that was left out of the way in the hopes that we could get it to
disappear. The baby’s head had been quite low from the onset, so I hoped that
pushing would not be too drawn out. (Ha!) I was elated to hear that I only had
a lip of cervix left…if I had experienced transition, I certainly had not
recognized it for what it was. I suspect I was pretty much pushed through it,
which I have mixed feelings about.
I got on the birthing stool around noon, and this was when
the hardest, scariest, most transcendent five hours of my life began. (It’s
also when my hate-hate relationship with that damn stool began!) I pushed for
an hour, dealing with the extra pain of having the rest of my cervix manually
held out of the way as I did. It’s not usually a great idea to push with a lip
of cervix in the way, but I found out later that the baby’s head was crooked,
which was why my cervix was dilating
unevenly. Uneven pressure equals uneven dilation. So I pushed, but it wouldn’t
budge, and neither did the baby. Or at least any budging that occurred was
minimal enough that after the hour was up, Deborah decided I needed a break,
and that maybe relaxing through some contractions was what my body needed to
get that lip of cervix gone.
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| Following directions. :) |
So I went through another hour or so of contractions back in
the birthing pool, and they were really tough ones. I think Deborah and Joanne
said some more funny things, and I laughed. (I never did lose my sense of humor
throughout this entire experience, which fascinated me. I did, however, lose my
ability to answer any questions, which also fascinated me. My response to
everything was “I don’t know.” Except which flavor of coconut water I wanted; I
was very adamant about that! J) They told Matt and me to kiss, which he really enjoyed and I really did not. I am not used to kissing my husband being associated with such unpleasant sensations, and I think it did make the contractions stronger. So that was tough.
I got frustrated with dealing with the contractions and not
doing anything to move things along. Deborah reassured me that I was doing something; she checked me
again and said she barely felt anything left now and what was left was just
swollen and that we should try again on the birthing stool. Feeling daunted by
the prospect of both doing that and not doing it, I got out of the pool
starting to feel shaky and uncertain that I was going to be able to do this.
Joanne reminded me that being a mother takes a lot of
patience, and sometimes becoming a mother requires that of us as well. This was
comforting to me, and I felt connected to every other mother who had gone
through a birth that was harder than she’d hoped for. I didn’t know what time
it was (it was probably around 2), but I knew it had been bright daylight for
some time now, and my personal ten hour hope had long since come and gone. I
remember thinking that wasn’t so bad in and of itself; time had actually gone
by shockingly quickly. But not knowing how much longer it was going to be was
making me feel more tired and miserable than I had ever felt in my life.
We tried for a little while back on the stool, but I was
getting really frustrated with its structure. It felt too small for my body,
any time I really needed to feel braced to push it seemed to rock forward or
backward and the back kept reclining right when I needed it to stay put, which
was making me really mad. I couldn’t direct my pushing where I knew it needed
to go while feeling so unstable. I tried to articulate some of this but I’m not
sure how clear I made it that I really hated it…maybe I was bound to hate
whatever was happening at that point. I knew that once the baby’s head made it
past the cervix I would get the urge to push, and I still didn’t have it. This
was continuing to make that overwhelmed feeling bigger.
The midwives encouraged Mom and Matt to press on the sides
of my hips as I pushed, performing a “clothes pin” maneuver to help my hips
open from the inside. I was shocked that I needed this; the mention that my hip
opening might be too narrow inside was very disheartening. Of all the things I’d
feared about labor, the width of my hips was not one of them! Pushing on my
hips did nothing though, nor did getting on my hands and knees.
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| Lunges. Ugh. |
They finally had me stand and try some ‘lunges,’ putting one
foot up on a kitchen chair, bending the other knee with each push. This SUCKED.
That’s all I remember about it. It may have done some good, though. Mom and
Matt took turns being the support pole that I was hanging from for these
pushes.
As all of this was going on, the intermittent monitoring was
showing some decelerations in the baby’s heart rate immediately after pushing.
It was recovering quickly, but being 35 minutes from the hospital, talk turned
to how much longer we were going to do this before agreeing to transfer. Joanne
explained that if we did transfer me they wanted baby and me to both still be
in good shape for a vaginal delivery—what she didn’t have to say was to give me
my best chance of avoiding a c-section. This was my low, low, low point. I was
in total despair, thinking that I just couldn’t do this, nothing was working and
I had come all the way here and gone through all of this only to end up in a
car for a miserable eternity and in surgery in a hospital; that I was actually going
to be in that unlucky 2% of Farm moms that end up with a c-section.
Finally, Joanne pointed out that I hadn’t emptied my bladder
in some time and that if it was full, it could be taking up space that the baby
needed for his head. At this point I was miserably submitting to all
instruction, but not really believing that any of it would help.
When I sat on the toilet with my feet butterflied up on a
stool in front of me, though, I realized that I finally had an urge to push. I
said as much and Joanne told me to go with it and do whatever felt right. I had
a flicker of hope at this point, and the thoughts streaming through my head
ranged from “You HAVE to do this, do ANYTHING to end this,” to “How does that
Sponge Bob bath toy on the floor EVEN EXIST right now?!” And I pushed, and I
knew it was finally doing something. I could feel him moving. However, the
midwives were checking his heart rate often and he was continuing to dip when I
pushed. Though it was still continuing to go back up between pushes, they
decided to give us a both a little extra help and put an oxygen mask on me for
a few pushes. That worked really well; or else I had gotten him past the
trouble spot, or maybe it was a combination of both. I was so sure I was making
great progress that I asked if he was moving and they said they couldn’t be
sure. Though the toilet was an excellent spot for me, it didn’t give them any
room to involve themselves and check my progress. After feeling like I’d made
significant progress and the baby’s heart rate stabilizing, they got me to go
back into the main room so they could check me on the birthing stool.
I don’t remember getting any confirmation or update that I
understood, but at this point I knew I was doing it. As I walked out of the
bathroom I could feel the baby’s head between my legs, and I knew then for sure
that it would be okay then and I was going to get him out. I was relieved, but
the pushing contractions were still powerfully painful, mostly the part where I
had to breathe in and out at the beginning without pushing, and then the first
five seconds or so when I had to push his head right into my stretching pelvic
ligament. That ligament pain was so intense that under any other circumstances
I would have just quit. But that is the awesome and incredible thing about my
birth: quitting was simply not an option, and so I found the strength I never
in a million years would have believed I had and pushed past it, many, many
times in a row, praying to God to end this soon and get my baby in my arms.
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| Right before he came out... |
I did a few more chair lounge pushes before sitting back on
the &%@*ing birthing stool and I knew then the end was finally near. The
burning sensation was intense and so, so, so
welcome. Mom and Matt and my midwives were cheering me on, telling me they
could see his hair, and that it was dark, that I was doing it and I was going
to do it; I could feel myself making real progress with each push at that
point. I don’t know how many pushes it was at this point, but it wasn’t very
many, when he finally came so close that I popped a band of tissue and began
bleeding kind of a lot. I remember the midwives seemed a little concerned,
though Deborah said she suspected it was likely just that I tore a blood vessel
in the tissue band, but I really could not have cared less at this point. I
asked “Am I going to be okay?” as I continued to push and Mom reassured me that
I was, and I said loudly, “I’m just so glad that I’m close enough to tear!”
Then his head was crowning and I asked if I could touch it;
they said that I could (why did I ask?
I wonder now!) and I reached down and remember being really surprised by how
soft and spongy it was; his skull, apparently, came after the rest of his head!
It was just a couple more pushes after that that I felt more of his head come
out and with one big push his head and half his body were OUT.
I was elated and thrilled and trying to understand and
suddenly realized I would have to push one more time to get the rest of him out
so I did it, and the rest of him actually came out and they put him face up on
my belly and I couldn’t stop saying “Oh my God,” over and over. I could not and
never will be able to understand or begin to articulate how I could feel so
many different things so intensely all at once. Relief and exhaustion to a
point that I had never known existed, unending joy, total disbelief in what I
had just done, love that completely consumed me. I saw how perfectly beautiful
his face was, I couldn’t believe he really had
a face, and I said “Oh, look how wide set his eyes are!” and I grabbed him and
held him to me as they suctioned his nose and mouth. I looked at Joanne and
said “I can do anything, ever, in the whole world!” and she told me something
about how I would always know that now, but still I couldn’t really believe
what had just happened. I was delirious and the high was something no chemical
substance could ever reproduce.
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| My face the minute Starr was born. <3 |
I asked about three minutes after he was born what time it
was; nobody had looked! It was 4:52. We all settled on 4:49, nearly five hours
after I was told I could try to start pushing.
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| The two great loves of my life. |
Though I had asked to not have the baby taken from me at all
in the first hours after birth and to not cut his cord, my significant bleeding
and his meconium staining knocked that part of the plan off the rails a bit. They
had to cut the cord after three minutes or so…it could have been five or six, I
don’t know, time was a warp for all of us at that point. After his cord was cut
Joanne took him for just a few minutes to thoroughly suction and dry off. There
was also the matter of stopping my bleeding and making sure it didn’t get any
worse. (It didn’t.)
Joanne handed the baby to Matt at some point while Deborah
knelt in front of me and reminded me that I had to deliver the placenta still.
That sounded like the worst joke ever. “It’s the easy part,” she said. “I know,
I know, it doesn’t have bones,” I finished, quoting Ina May on the placenta
delivery part of labor. Still, I didn’t want to push ever again. I was so tired.
Deborah said I may not ever feel the urge, or if I waited fifteen minutes or so
I might. But then she said with one good push I could just get it over and done
with so I figured what the hell, and gave it a good shove. It hurt coming out,
but it was just a quick jolt of pain and it was over and I was officially done.
It was enormous, which explained why.
Once the bleeding was slowed and we were reasonably sure I
wasn’t going to pass out, I had to make my way across the room to the futon to
get stitched up. This was the best part of the whole day…I finally got my baby
boy laid on my chest while the hour passed looking for tears and sewing them
up. Considering that we now knew my almost 9 pound boy had a 15 inch head
circumference and a weirdly tiny fontanelle that just wouldn’t mold much, I
expected to hear worse news than I did. One second degree tear and a few skid
marks here and there, but other than that I was in
not-as-awful-as-one-might-expect shape. I thought it was really funny as
Deborah was stitching me and she asked if I could feel it. Sometimes I could,
but I was like, “Really? Nothing will ever hurt again!” (Still, I admit I
flinched when she gave me the lidocaine injection before sewing up the largest
tear. Funny how life is.)
But mostly all I noticed in that hour was my baby and how
perfect he was, and how unendingly thankful I was to not be having contractions
anymore. I was a little sad when he started rooting around, obviously wanting
to nurse, but I couldn’t get in a good position to let him. He found his fist
and sucked on it while I fretted a bit that now our breastfeeding relationship
was forever doomed. (I get dramatic like that. Breastfeeding has actually been
blessedly easy for both of us.)
Everything from the point he was born through the end of the
day was like this elated fog of perfection; I knew I was sore, I knew it was
hard to walk, I knew blood vessels were busted in my eyes and the skin around
them was puffed up in pillows, but I didn’t care about any of it. I had just
given birth to a baby, and it wasn’t even a (relatively) easy birth by any stretch
of the imagination, and I had done it anyway, and I just couldn’t believe it. I
could hold him, do you understand?! I
was done!
Less than two hours after he was born, when I was all
stitched up and helped into a loose dress, everyone came streaming in: Simon,
my mother and sister in law, and my friend Myriam from California had showed up
with her two girls just in time to see me still flying high in the immediate
post-birth glow—which was awesome, since she had three girls at home herself
and I could say things like “I kicked so much ass.” And not worry that she felt
like I was judging her. She was the perfect person to have there with me,
passing the night helping with the baby so I could get a little sleep,
listening to me rambling about my memories of the day and totally getting my
glee and disbelief and mildly traumatized shock.
The weeks that followed were the best babymoon ever, but
that’s another post. This one is long enough for now.
I had obviously hoped that I wouldn’t have to go as deeply
into the valley of serious doubt in myself as I did; I pictured myself as the
typical birthing woman announcing that I couldn’t do it right as I was minutes
away from doing it. I feared that I wouldn’t be able to do it for hours. I
really had to face that fear and deal with the very real possibility that
things might not have gone as planned. I’ve never felt more helpless in my
life. But there is nothing like going there to that dark place of self-doubt
and fear and then having the opportunity to climb back out.
I will never be able to express my gratitude for my husband,
my mom and my midwives who stood by me with just the right support and
encouragement. I needed to feel totally uninhibited and they gave me that
freedom. They were my literal physical and also my spiritual support, without
which I never would have made it through. I didn’t mention Mom and Matt much
because my experience was so incredibly internal; I remember having the
wherewithal to look into Matt’s eyes maybe two or three times through the
entire experience. But I felt them there, and that was everything to me.
And that’s how I became Starr’s mama.
