Calla Tells the Birth Story of Moss Teshub

Labor started between 10pm and midnight on Sunday, July 14.  I didn't know for sure that labor had started until about 6am on the 15th, but retrospectively I know I started feeling weird right after dinner the night before.  I think Aoro knew something was up before I did -- I took a bath around 11pm and he not only followed me into the bathroom, he got his front legs up on the edge of the tub and leaned in to kiss my face.  My water-hating dog practically climbing into the bathtub with me, I was clearly acting/feeling/smelling different.

I told Ben I was feeling weird, but that I had no idea if it was just more of the same increasing weirdness, or actual this-is-it weirdness.  I went to bed around 12:30, figuring if The Weirdness was actually labor that it'd be super smart to get some rest.  But really I only slept in 15-45 minute chunks, which now I know is probably because I was having contractions about that far apart.  But at the time I really didn't think what I was feeling were contractions (in fact looking back I'm still not sure that I ever experienced what I imagine a textbook contraction to feel like -- more on that later).  By 4:30ish I woke up and could not get anywhere close to comfortable enough to fall back asleep, so I decided to just get up and watch some TV while I came to terms with the possibility that what I was feeling could possibly maybe potentially be labor.  Aaaand by 5:30ish I was pretty sure it was.  Indeed I was so sure, I went totally outside of my comfort zone and called my midwife and my doula Heather at the uncivilized hour of 6am (I *hate* calling people before 9).

Got the totally reasonable advice to time the "contractions"to see if they were at all regular, and call back around 9 to see if I could sneak myself into the books for a check-up that morning instead of the one I already had scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.  And whaddaya know, between 6:30 and 9:00 they were as regular as regular can be: 6-10 minutes apart, lasting 10-30 seconds, increasing in intensity despite positional changes, a shower, a meal and a healthy dose of skepticism.  

Okay so how were my "contractions" different?  I had been told that while a true contraction is a totally unique and hard-to-describe sensation, it often has elements of menstrual cramping, a wave-like feeling of "tightening" muscles that moves from the top of the belly to the groin, and increased pressure in the pelvis.  For me though, I never felt anything even vaguely "uterine" throughout the whole process.  Pelvic pressure was part of it, but I felt every single one of my contractions completely in my back and never in my front.  Dorsal, not ventral; lower back, not upper belly; tailbone, not uterus.  Even really late in my labor, the pains didn't really ever radiate to the front at all, they stayed pretty much in my tailbone and pelvis.  The strangeness of my contractions compared to what I was expecting definitely lent itself to my skepticism that this was really labor.  As did the fact that I had no other signs of labor besides these weird sensations; no spotting, no water breaking, no other physiological signs that I had been told might help me differentiate real labor from false labor.  The only hints I had were my intuitions and the fact that I had been nesting like a maniac for the previous 2 days (if it was made of fabric and in my house, it was laundered on Saturday or Sunday).

At around 9 we all piled into the car to get to the check-up.  I was very peppy and cheerful at that point, probably because of whatever hormone cocktail was brewing away in my endocrine system.  Two midwives practice at my clinic, both amazing but very different.  Maria is jolly but no-nonsense with a German last name, a deep voice, and a presence both commanding and soothing, where Lin is effervescently sweet with a Mary Poppins accent, fluttery mannerisms, and an impossibly reassuring way of explaining all things baby.  Maria was on call for the day, so she made sure to be the one to examine me.  Everyone was making casual chit-chat during the exam, good spirits all around.  She snaps off her gloves and nonchalantly remarks that I'm "3-4 cm dilated, 90% effaced, everything's in order, so how'd you like to meet your baby tonight?"

As my brain slowly redefined the previous 12 hours as true early labor, the thought of "back labor" popped into my head.  I'd read about how sometimes when the baby has the back of his skull positioned towards mom's spine (rather than the ideal position of face towards spine) labor can be experienced more as pain and pressure in the lower back than anywhere else, but in all my past exams, both Maria and Lin seemed pretty sure that he was in the ideal head-down, back-forward position.  (As it turns out, since Moss was so small, he had plenty of room to wiggle around in there, and may have been in several different positions throughout the day, as well as throughout the last weeks of my pregnancy.  But since I didn't have an ultrasound past 20 weeks, only Moss knows for sure what went on in there.)  Maria confirmed before we left that it is indeed possible to experience "back labor" even if the baby is in an anterior position the whole time, so I decided not to worry about it.  Walking back out to the car, the news sunk in.

Then Ben called literally everyone we know, and our day began in earnest.

And it began with a nap.  Heather's advice was EAT and REST.  Done and done.  Somehow, my body managed to rest for a full two hours, bringing us to 2:30pm, or "the more exciting half of the day".

We called Heather around this time and asked her to come over, despite my continued impression that my labor was not progressing typically and therefore that I shouldn't be bugging people with my perceived "needs" and such.  She arrived less than an hour later, just in time to watch me eat eggs and spicy chicken sausage (and to her credit, to not immediately give me crap about my food choices, which we had learned from her class not two weeks prior would have been more wisely selected to be more carb-y and less protein-y).

The following 5 hours or so were fairly uneventful, and each hour resembled the previous one more than I would have liked.  I sort of fixated on this idea that I wasn't progressing "right" -- I still only felt my contractions in my lower back, and although there was a slight increase in intensity over the 5 hour period, they didn't seem to get closer together or longer.  Plus, even by 8pm I still hadn't displayed any other physical signs of labor that I had been looking for -- bloody show, water breaking, crying or losing control, or at least having trouble walking and talking.  Maybe in some way I was confused about why things felt so easy so far.  Looking back, I see that my body was setting every single ounce of Hard aside so that it could cram it all into the final 2 out of 24 hours, but at the time, my experience was not lining up with my expectation.  

From 3pm to 8pm I moved around a lot...

...and even went on a pretty long walk (which was accidentally not photographically documented).  

At one point, I got a little nervous that I hadn't felt as much baby kicking in the last few hours as I would have liked.  

Except I only noticed this right after Heather asked if I'd been feeling the normal amount of kicking, so I was obsessively second-, third-, and fourth-guessing myself about it.  Knowing what I know now about what was going on in there, Moss playing dress-up with the umbilical cord (matching necklace and sash), I wonder if my odd-numbered intuitions of concern were on the right track (although since everything turned out perfectly, that's not a particularly productive train of thought).

A couple of times during this period, Heather warned/reminded that the first few contractions after water breaks can be somewhat stronger than any of the ones before it, since there will be more pressure, more progress, a lower baby, etc.  This was nice to hear, not just because it gave me time to mentally prepare for that kind of shift, but also because it informed me that she expected my water would indeed eventually break.  I was still skeptical that my water would ever break, that I would ever make progress, that I would ever not be pregnant any more, that the ordeal would ever transition into something more real-seeming.

Then my water broke at 8:30pm.  Moss was born at 10:15pm at the hospital, which is a 25 minute drive away from home, if that gives you some sense of how densely the action was crammed into the last 7% of this whole thing.  The first contraction after my water broke was indeed more intense than any of the ones before it.  I'm giggling at how much of an understatement that is.  I asked for "real-seeming", so I guess I should be glad...  Considering the interval from 10pm on 7/14 until 8:29pm on 7/15, my pain level had topped out at around a 5/10.  Then at 8:31pm on 7/15, I realized that I had apparently been using the pain scale represented by the function y = e^x (where x is my pain rating on a 1-10 scale and y is my actual pain experience)...

My memories of the final two hours are best described as "encoded using a strobe light".  When I try to recall the series of events, what I find is more like an disorganized slide show than a coherent narrative. 

• Suddenly there was a lot of crying.
• I asked for a piece of bread and Heather was like, Are you sure?, which caused me to realize that I did not in fact want to eat AT ALL, I just wanted to feel different from the status quo, which "bread-eating" may have temporarily accomplished.
• Heather said if I have one more contraction as strong and close together as the first 3 post-water breaking ones, that we were going to leave for the hospital ASAP.  Then I did, so we did.
• Someone asked if I wanted to change my clothes before we departed, so I started to try, and quickly decided that I did not want to due to the contractions being made of molten lava.
• I sat down in the car and learned that the "seated+immobilized" position was so far at the bottom of the list of Comfort Measures, it was at the top of the list of Discomfort Measures.
• Lurching manual transmissions and speed bumps are also pretty high on the Discomfort Measures list.
• I think there was some very loud, uninhibited car-screaming.  My chanting mantra may have been "Nothing is good.  Everything is bad."
• Arriving at the hospital, things got abruptly scarier-seeming.  I sat in a wheelchair and we went through a labyrinth of doors and halls and dark corners, moving briskly.
• I didn't ever have an IV, but it still felt like I was being "hooked up" to a bunch of crap, which I found extremely aversive.  Blood pressure cuff, pulse oximeter, external fetal monitoring belts, lots of cords and velcro and plastic.  :(
• On the bed because walking?  Hahahahaha no.  Sitting in a reclined position, NOOOOouch.  Hands and knees, NOOOoowww.  Lying on left side, NOOouchie, but that position won given it had the least number of Os.  I remember clutching the side rail of the bed like I would have fallen up and away from the earth had I not.
• Maria arrived, performed exam, 7cm dilated.  I was disappointed at not being any closer to 10 given the overall intensity levels of everything.  Not sure how I was going to make it, but I didn't have a choice, so that ended up being the answer as to how I was going to make it.
• Someone suggested I go to my Happy Place, so I chose a forest (I guess I wanted to see moss...)
• Ben's disembodied head floating above me described a specific Happy forest to me, camping by the ocean in South Carolina, playing on the beach, he got way too sunburned, and we listened to the ocean lull us to sleep from our tent in the trees.  shhhhhssshhhhshhhhhhhhshhsssshhhhh.  He made a pretty convincing ocean sound, which made breathing easier for about 90 seconds.
• Someone suggested getting into a shower or bathtub, which sounded awesome, but also inconceivably far away and impossible.
• Amanda, my first and oldest best friend, showed up sometime after 9 and before 10.   
• I used a combination of English and whatever other communicative strategies I could think of to convey that I really wanted to start pushing.  People said not to, since I had only been 7cm dilated at my last check, which couldn't have been more than 30 minutes earlier (probably more like 20).
• Things I remember saying: "I'm sad."  "Why?"  "*unintelligible whimpering*"  "Nothing is good.  Everything is bad."  
• I think I bit Ben's hand at some point.  Several times.  Such a trooper.
• Second exam confirmed that I was 9.75cm dilated, bathtub idea abandoned, pushing okay-ed.
• I started scream-breathing, gasping in shallow, panting breaths and screaming them out about once per second.  I *really* didn't know how to do anything else.  Heather's disembodied head firmly reminded me that "You have a choice.  You may breathe, or you may push.  You may not scream though, your baby needs you to use your energy, not waste it.  Take a deep breath and let it out slowly, or take a deep breath and hold it in and push."  Somehow that was translated into crazy non-verbal Calla-ese and I semi-successfully didn't scream quite as frequently.
• Not sure how many times I pushed -- more than 6 but less than 15.  The last 3 felt really good, which was heartening.
• It's a boy.

I have never felt so much all at once.  In a very early post on this blog, I described my revelation that pregnancy symptoms were not sequential but simultaneous.  The last two hours of labor and birth engendered a similar revelation, but at such an unfathomably higher degree.  The way that last hour felt -- it was made up of many discrete recognizable feelings, hundreds of different emotional and physical states, but they were all at once.  The way it felt is almost within the realm of imagination of someone who hasn't done it, because it's made up of individually tangible feelings.  What is not within the realm of imagination of someone who hasn't done it is what it feels like to feel everything there is in the universe at the same time.  Very dense, and not accessible to language.

Happy birthday, Moss.