Life On The Farm: Starr Andrew's Birth! (Finally!)

“It snowed on the day you were born.”

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 16^th. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.