Four weeks ago today i waded naked in our backyard pool, chanting and moaning like some gunshot monk while Bill the handyman hung hurricane shutters nearby. “i heard of them waterbirths before,” he said in his thick West Virginian drawl.
But there would be no waterbirth- not in the saline pool or in the ocean. Ike bore down its category four Hurricane with our island one of many along its projected path. With the Key West hospital officially closed, and following the proper protocol for a homebirth of having one nearby should we need it, we had to evacuate.
The night before, Rob and I hung out, hoping Ike would shift directions, postponing our packing until the next morning and making cookies until almost midnight for our planned “road trip” up to Sarasota, where our midwife Sarah had connections to a birthing center should i go into labor early. I wasn’t due for more than another week, and according to statistics, the sort of adrenaline being drummed up in my body by all the storm-related activity would unlikely trigger its arrival. That and the fact that most first time moms tend to deliver later than than their due date, and sometimes even need to be induced. I was more concerned about being forced into a Cesarean because my baby like being tucked into her safely padded womb than I was about going into labor early.
But I’ve never been one to follow tradition or statistics, and clearly this situation would not be any different, whether i liked it or not. At 2:30 in the morning, my contractions were coming hard and strong. Sarah checked my cervix. Only one centimeter dialated. “Welcome to early labor,” she said. “Try to get some rest.”
“Rest?” i thought. How does one rest through what feels like a house crushing the lower half of your body? The weight of intense sensation (aka PAIN) tore through me every five to ten minutes, lasting about thirty seconds or so. If THIS was only early labor, what would active labor feel like? Everything I’d read about being able to talk, shop, and play tennis during early labor seemed really off to me.
“Turn on the pool heater,” i directed Rob, assessing the length of time it would take for it to warm up. Maybe I’d be lucky and the projected path of Ike would change. Maybe the hospital wouldn’t close. Maybe we wouldn’t have to pack up our things and leave after all. It wouldn’t be the sea birth i dreamed of, but we’d be home, safe, relaxed, comforted by each other and the warm salt water of the pool under the Spanish Lime tree.
But at noon the next day, I was still only one centimeter dialated and the Key West hospital was officially CLOSED.
I could not believe this is how it was all happening: Rob packing our belongings to escape a hurricane and me laboring in the pool without him while the local handyman hid behind shutters while walking through the back yard. The worst of it was that we eventually had to get into the car, where I would not be able to move freely and sway my hips or stretch my limbs to help alleviate the tension.
At around three in the afternoon, someone (Rob? my mother? Sarah? ) managed to get my naked being out of the pool and into a pair of yoga pants and a tank top and pile me into the back of Sarah’s car while Rob caravaned behind us in his truck with our three cats and our most important belongings.
So much for an orgasmic ocean birth.
I labored down U.S. 1, trying my damndest to channel all that intense energy (PAIN) into sound vibration, chanting out OM’s and Ah’s and occassionally OWWW’s. By the time we stopped for gas in Islamorada, I told Rob I would not make it to Sarasota and we needed to go to the nearest hospital. Sarah, thinking my request was targeted to ease my pain with the epidural i had decided i actually DID want (oh the PAIN), encouraged me to hold on til Sarasota.
She also explained that the hospital would turn me away if i wasn’t dialated any further, and since she’d checked me less than five hours ago, chances were I wasn’t more than three centimeters along. (Statistics apparently show that women tend to dialate about a centimeter every two or so hours). Rob assured her that I didn’t like hospitals, and if i was saying i needed the nearest one, i needed the nearest one. Jackson South Community hospital was but an hour away, and I knew it.
I hated that I was constantly thinking details and assessing everything. I wanted to stop and relax, feel safe enough to let go. I wanted to let my primitive brain take over, disappear without thinking. I had to go to the bathroom but could not muster up the control to get out of the car and walk into the gas station bathroom. Besides, there were a gazillion people gassing up to prep for the storm and I did not want anyone to see me. I only hoped Sarah would forget that she said she’d check me once we got to the gas station to see how far along I was dialated. I did not feel like moving. Thankfully, she forgot, and I did not remind her. What i thought was going to be a relaxed and very private experience was turning out to be anything but, and surely crawling across the gas station parking lot to the public toilet was not on the birth plan.
As we drove north towards the hospital, the contractions increased and I could feel the baby dropping down, pressing on my bladder, making the contractions even more intense (PAINFUL). I grabbed the cake mixing bowl that had become my vomitorium, dropped my drawers and peed into the bowl.
“hold this” i said, passing it to my mother. I then opened the car door and dumped its contents out onto the highway as we sped along, hiked my pants back up and repositioned myself for the next wave of contractions. WIth my bladder emptied, my water broke, and I’m sure I felt the baby dropping further into position.
Meanwhile, my mother thought it a good idea to telephone everyone in her cell and give them the blow by blow of my accounts. I think the only mean thing i said during the whole birth experience was could she “please get off the fucking phone? This is personal.” And looking back, I don’t feel too bad about that. But the fact that she rubbed my head while we were both cramped up in the back of Sarah’s car for four hours made her a Godsend.
By the time we reached Jackson South Hospital, I did not give a shit about the fact that I was walking in with my hair standing on end (my previous jaunt in the pool left me with some serious Billy Idol hair), was bra-less and underwear-less, had a big wet spot on the back of my pants, and had a yellow sheet wrapped around me like Linus with his security blanket (I thought it a good idea when we left the house to tear it from the bed, as i figured it would be cold in the hospital). Where was the bag packed with a cute little birthing nightie and the lip gloss for photos after the birth like I’d read about?
My chanting was coming loud, fast and furious. The intake nurses did not make me sit in the wheelchair they brought because I barked that I’d had enough sitting. A man got out of the elevator before the doors closed when i started my next round of chanting.
At the front desk, I was made to fill out paperwork and sign here and there and there. It occurred to me that I probably ought to know what i was signing but i could not bring myself to read any of the details. I scribbled my signature everywhere they pointed and wondered when the PAIN would stop. it was almost 6 oclock. i’d been feeling the waves crashing down hard on me since 2:30 the night before.
I was so dissappointed in myself. PAIN. why couldn’t i transcend the PAIN? All my meditation and yoga practices were of no use; i could not stand outside of the sensations and simply notice them. They OWNED me. At one point in the car, at the gas station in Islamorada, I thought that this must be what it’s like to be a pregnant mare, unable to birth her foal. I had a vivid image of being that mare, being brought out into a field full of daisies and shot. I know it sounds sick, but i actually felt some relief in that. Just shoot me, I wanted to say. But I knew that wouldn’t go over so well.
For a little while i tried to imagine something i’d remembered reading on the net, someone’s description of watching the energy of the contraction fill up to a bubble and then dissolving. That worked for a few contractions,until the bubble started to explode all over me. I went back to my chanting. At least I had a place to put the energy, however bizarre it may have sounded and awful i felt.
Once in the labor and delivery room at the hospital, I was blessed to find out that the doctor on duty was a midwife. “So you won’t freak out if i want to labor in different positions?” I asked her. She laughed and assured me that, no, she would not freak out. In my best paradoxical fashion, I then promptly asked “Can I have an epidural?” She checked my cervix. 9 and a half centimeters.
“You are almost fully dialated. By the time we test you to see if you’ll have any adverse reactions, order it, administer it and have it take affect, you’ll be pushing the baby out. I think you can do this without it. You’re almost there.”
It felt good to have her say so, and knowing that I was that far along made me feel like it wouldn’t be much longer. And being there, safely in one spot-not fleeing my home thinking i may not have one after the storm hit or flying down the highway unsure of where we were truly headed- helped me let go some and not attach so much to the pain.
Even if it was in a hospital. The very place I had decided early on that I did not want to give birth in unless some medical emergency forced me to do so. And there I was, perfectly healthy, with a healthy baby inside of me and wanting OUT NOW, in the hospital because of the WEATHER! Crap.
Writing this now, I realize that i had NO RELAXATION in any of my labor. After the birth, Sarah reassured me that my circumstances were highly unusual. Fleeing the place where we intended to give birth. My adrenaline pumping up the process rather than shutting it down. My cervix dialation the full ten centimeters in less than six hours. labor and delivery, for a first time mom, in less than five. It’s not wonder, she assured me, that i was in so much pain. Opening that quickly is not easy. and, she reminded me, “hard to have an orgasmic birth when your partner is driving in his truck behind you while you’re evacuating from a hurricane.”
I know i sound hung up on the whole “pain” thing, and I’m still searching within to find out why. It’s taken me a long time to get to this post not just because I’ve been smitten with this new little girl or totally exhausted by learning the ropes of being an attentive and good mom, but because I am still terribly sad about the whole birth experience and know that writing about it, though hopefully healing, would be difficult.
But before i continue I will say that the power I felt within me during the last two contractions as i pushed her out where like nothing i’ve ever felt before. And the awe that washed over me as i picked up her vernix coated body and looked into her one little open eye (the other all gooey with vernix) was the most intensely beautiful and connected feeling I’ll ever have (right along with the night i suspect she was made… ). And that if I had to do it all over exactly as it was to have her be in my life, I would do so a thousand times over.
My dear friend Raj reminds me that Seava chose her arrival and it was my first lesson in learning that I am not in control despite my best intentions. I think that’s great advice, and when I look at all of this from a spiritual angle, it helps immensely to surrender to this notion. Seava is, after all, named partly for Siva, the Hindu deity of destruction, of clearing the way and dissolving the ego.
What happened AFTER she was born, however, adds to my disappointment and confusion. Though I didn’t see the film, I suspect it could be an added clip to Ricci Lake’s documentary “The Business of Being Born.” I intend on writing more about this later, as well as a more creative healing piece to “rewrite” Seava’s birth story so that when she grows up, I can tell her about her arrival with the magic and beauty she deserves, and not some hospital policy and procedure bullying bullshit that actually occurred.
