BirthStory: The Birth of Maya Amrita

Maya was due on March 17, 2006. But I was two weeks overdue, and extremely impatient, hoping to go into labor. Ted and I had decided that we wanted it to be just us in the delivery room, no other family. On the other hand, I had NO experience with babies; and I wanted my mom to be there to help with her when Ted went back to work. So, we decided she would fly the almost 4,000 miles from Juneau to Philly one week after the due date, so she would be there to help us as much as possible.

Since she was 2 weeks late, our plans were obviously not working out as we had hoped. My mom was there, ready to help. But no help was needed for a week before Maya's birth, which was fine actually. It was nice to have that time together. I couldn't tell you the last time we had spent a whole week together, no work, no school - probably never. Certainly not since the last time we had gone on vacation together when I was a kid.

On March 27th, I had my last exam. The midwife told me that if I didn't go into labor on Thursday, I should check into the hospital Thursday evening, after a light dinner. Um...what? Spend the night in the hospital? I hadn't really gotten that far in my thinking, and I wasn't happy about it. But I wasn't effaced at all, and they would apply some goop to my cervix, which would help efface it, and it might even start some contractions.

I couldn't see any sense in Ted and/or my mom staying at the hospital with me. There was nowhere for them to sleep, and it seemed to me that we were in for a long day on Friday. The more rested we all were, the better. So I was admitted, put into a fashionable robe, had the goop applied, a device strapped to my belly so they could monitor the baby's heartbeat, and that was that. The midwife said they would hook me up to the pitocin at 9am, and that usually it takes a while to get going, so we decided that Ted and my mom should come back at 10 the next morning. They went home, and I stayed behind. The goop did start some very minor contractions, like bad menstrual cramps, which came about every 10 minutes. I dozed throughout the night, waking with each contraction, trying to get comfortable while hooked up to the fetal heart monitor and listening to hospital sounds.

At 7AM, my water broke. I buzzed the nurse and told her. "Are you sure you didn't pee in your bed?" she asked. "Huh? Does that happen often?" I asked. "You'd be surprised," she said.

The indignities of motherhood were just becoming apparent to me. It was my water breaking, however, not pee. At 8AM, they started the IV of pitocin, a whole hour early. I settled in to wait. OUCH! the pain, amazing, scary, what-was-I-thinking PAIN started pretty much right away.

A couple of words about pain. I don't like it. However, I like needles even less than I like pain, and the sight of the needle at childbirth classes had made me rethink the epidural, and try for a natural childbirth. And part of natural childbirth is pain (any childbirth, actually...I have yet to hear of one that is painless, natural or not.) My midwife had told me that one way to look at it was that the pain of childbirth was a natural pain, as opposed to breaking a leg or rupturing an appendix, and that usually what determines whether a woman needs an epidural is the duration of the labor. My family tends to have embarrassingly short labors, so I was hopeful that I could get through without seeing that dreaded needle.

The midwife kept asking me if I wanted to call Ted and tell him that contractions had started in earnest. But my addled brain was afraid; afraid that in his panicked state, he would get in a car accident on the way over to the hospital, and then he and my mom would be dead while I gave birth, left alone in a strange city to raise my baby. Too many Hans Christian Anderson stories in my youth, perhaps.

At 10:00, I was standing next to the bed, trying not to murder the resident who kept trying to take my blood pressure. She couldn't get an accurate reading, because my contractions were too close together, and the cuff tightening around my arm made me homicidal. I think I was in the beginning of 'transitional labor'. I could hear my mom talking loudly as she walked down the hallway. Ted said he heard someone yelling, and he thought, "I hope that's not Julie." They opened the door, and yeah, it was me.

Ted said I was making "animal noises", like an animal that was trapped and in pain. That pretty much sums up how I felt, too. I looked at my mom's face, and I was sure she needed to be in the waiting area. I wanted this to be me and Ted, and if she were there, I would want mother's comfort, which wasn't going to help me right then. So I told her to go. I think her feelings were hurt; and she had been hoping to watch Maya come into the world.

I think mine was a "back labor," meaning the pain was low down my spine, and laying down on the bed was excruciating. What helped the most was for Ted to rub my lower back while I rocked back and forth on my feet, and for him to remind me to relax my shoulders, that they shouldn't be up by my ears. Eventually, that scary needle wasn't seeming quite so scary, and the idea of relief was sounding pretty good to me. So I asked for an epidural. The anesthesiologist was at lunch, but they told me he was busy with another patient, probably because I would have lost my mind if I knew he was grabbing his only chance at a sandwich while I was crazy with pain. They said he would be there soon, and that they needed to examine me to make sure I was far enough along before he came anyway. Up on the table, and oops...time to push. I had been told that I would be moved from the "labor" room to the "delivery" room, but thankfully the midwife left that decision up to me, because the thought of being pushed down the hallway in nothing but that gown, looking like crap, screaming and scaring the other moms didn't appeal to me at all. So I pushed. I had been told what a relief that was, how good it felt to finally push. Nope, it hurt like hell, and I was SO scared. I remember wondering if there was a way to sneak out of there, grab a taxi, go home, and pretend the whole thing had never happened. My fear came from knowing that they weren't going to let me out of there. So I pushed.

After about 15 minutes of pushing, out she came. Ted said, "Honey, LOOK!" But I didn't want to - I was afraid to see myself all gross and bloody down there - so I said, "No! It's GROSS!" He said, "No, it's our baby!" So I opened my eyes, and I can tell you, I don't know what I THOUGHT was going to come out of me, but nothing prepared me for it being a real, live, BEAUTIFUL baby. Her lips were all stretched out, and I remember thinking, "Uh Oh, here comes a supermodel," but luckily they didn't stay that way, and her resemblance to Mick Jaggar was fleeting.

Ted got to cut the umbilical cord, and we got to hold her. That amazing rush of endorphins, relief, and joy overcame me. I was on top of the world. No one had told me that the pain stops the second the baby is out...I guess I had thought it would wane. THANK GOD the pain just...stopped. After we had a few minutes with her, they brought my mom in. Her jaw dropped to the floor, too. They had just told her that I wanted her, not that Maya had been born already.

Overall, I know that I had a very "easy" labor: Four hours from when the serious contractions began to the end. It sure didn't feel easy, though. It was the hardest, scariest, most wonderful thing I had ever done. After that day, whenever something seems difficult or scary, I just think to myself, "I can do this...I've given birth."

"J" is a work-at-home mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works as a tax compliance analyst, and finds more fulfillment in writing her blog, "Thinking About", which can be found here. Her daughter, Maya, is 10 years old.