Sonya’s birth story:
Confessions of a
vegetarian idealist

 

I’ve just come home with my son, my firstborn. He’s a toe shy of nine pounds, and is a beautiful, healthy little wriggler. I can barely see a path through the chaos of feeding, changing and settling him, but I wanted to write the story of his arrival before endorphins erase it.

The birth was officially pretty textbook. Nine hours of active labour, after eight hours pre-labour, with little more than a small graze and body ache to complain of now.

But to me, it was like no textbook I’ve ever owned. Truth be told (and at risk of breaking an unwritten code of silence on this topic) my son’s labour and birth felt like a living hell.

This has left me shell-shocked and rocked to the core of my ‘natural-process/non-intervention’ sensibilities. I’m genuinely baffled as to how other women could possibly survive to repeat childbirth. Perhaps, I wonder, I have a low pain tolerance? Or possibly I really did have a worse labour than many?

Because survivable or not, I can’t for the life of me see how I will be able to willingly suffer like that again.

I chose a Family Birth Centre as the closest thing to home birth, without the midwife insurance cost. Aside from a couple of Panadeine and gas on request, they don’t do pain relief and they certainly won’t offer it. I chose them because I believed in ‘nature knows best’ and ‘my body is designed for this’. I wrote a birth plan. I stipulated specifically against Syntocin, episiotomy and anything else that would subvert my body’s ability to birth my baby the way God intended.

I had, in other words, very good intentions. Sarah J Buckley, Michel Odent and Kitzinger were my guides; the Pink Kit and a birth ball my weapons. Like many thirty-something pregnant professionals, I was well read and overeducated on oxytocin. And education cannot help but direct the expectant toward the sometimes self-righteous path of natural birthing.

In my fantasies, I laboured quietly at home, not even disturbing my poet-husband as he typed away at his keyboard mere feet from my gently swaying form. And then at the final moment, I calmly asked for a hot towel and supporting arm as I ‘breathe out’ his precious progeny in a perfect moment of ecstatic birth.

Lovely, yes? The reality was somewhat different.

I had a show at 7:30am, and the first small contraction at 7:45. From then until midday, contractions came in groups of three. At 12 I lay down to rest and they stalled. Worried I’d lose momentum, my husband, Cam, and I walked a wintery, windy uphill walk which brought them back. At 4pm we rang the Birth Centre to say they’d reached three minutes and were relatively strong.

They suggested we come in when I felt the intensity was very strong in every contraction. By 6:30pm, this was the case. More to the point, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get in a car if we left it much longer. I had a shower, dressed, with some excitement, and we drove the short distance to the Family Birth Centre. After check-in, we were recommended to try the birth pool to help move the baby down the birth canal.

Within an hour I was intermittently groaning or screaming. My mother arrived, and I heard the midwife tell her I was in transition. This meant little as I was lost in the pain of contractions and running out of emotional energy to greet each one.

I was moved from the pool to warm up in the shower, where I told Cam I didn’t think I could withstand the pain any longer. Limp with exhaustion and doubting my ability to hold myself upright, I said I’d changed my mind and wanted an epidural. I knew this meant transfer from my lovely room in the Birth Centre to the hospital ward next door, but all my thoughts were driven by the need to lie down and rest. The midwife excused herself to gather ‘paperwork’, a recognisable stalling technique we’d previously joked about in Birth Classes and implicitly agreed to by selecting the Birth Centre in the first place.

The midwife came back saying she’d need to check dilation first. I asked her to please hurry. Each contraction was a horrifying agony, and it was all I could do to divert the desire to scream into repeating ‘open!’ like a mantra. My dilation was revealed to be 8-9cm, and I was told there was no time for transfer before I’d need to start pushing. I wasn’t sure if this was true, but felt too tired and powerless to argue. Fortunately, I was distracted by a change in pace as contractions spaced out, heralding the arrival of Second Stage.

It was 11pm on Saturday night. Hoping to encourage me, my mum told me that I would have a Sunday baby. I told her between guttural moans that I wanted a Saturday baby.

The midwives decided to break my waters and speed second stage along. My birth plan – never removed from my bag – stipulated against this. But by now, the plan seemed little more than a fantastical, frivolous description of an uncontrollable process. I was not going to ‘rotate my hips to free my child and give birth’. I was going to yell like a banshee and silently curse the Birth Centre’s stalling tactics.

Waters broken – a relieving warm gush – I began to push. The midwife guided this process with wondrously practical coaching and the sage advice to “Yell through my bum”. I was moved onto a birth stool where, held upright by Cam and my mum, I pushed solidly against terrible burning pressure and fought the belief each push would split me limb from limb. Although I knew the sensations to be correct, having read descriptions earlier, I experienced less of an ‘overwhelming desire to push’ and more of a profound and desperate need to stop the pain by the only means now possible: getting this giant vaginal obstruction out.

So I pushed. I yelled with my bum. I gripped the hands of my birth partners. I bit Cameron’s shoulder. I begged for help. And I pushed.

Finally: “I see a head! There he is!”

They hoisted me off the birth stool and leant me forward. Another push brought relief from the burning. My son’s head had emerged, closed-eyed and scivvied by my perineum. The midwife urged me to pause. I obeyed, panting, until I could pause no more.

Another push, a final hot poker of pain, and he came slithering out, caught by the midwife – a purple little creature.

A baby! My son.

After the birth, the midwife swiftly lifted my top over my head, and my baby – this strange internal inhabitant of my body now outside and writhing – was placed to my breast. He did not suckle immediately, but we clung to each other like survivors of a natural disaster: Wet. Bloodied. Exhausted. Relieved.

To my surprise, the pain did not stop after the birth. The pull of the cord between my legs hurt, the contractions to bring out the placenta hurt, the assessment of tearing by the midwife hurt. All I wanted was for the pain to stop.

Syntocin evacuated the placenta in two grunts (what birth plan?), and a glowing report of my perineum saved me from stitches (all praise to the midwife’s coaching; just a slight graze because he came out with his arm raised in victory).

Within the hour the midwives were gone, my mum had congratulated everyone – strange as I’d surely only survived the catastrophe by virtue of good luck, not prevailed heroically – and we were left alone. My husband-my-angel-of-strength, and our baby, as yet unnamed.

Post Script

So what now? Or more pertinently, what next time? Natural labour with its perineal benefits, or the relief of epidural and live with the consequences? I honestly don’t know.

I’m an organic-eating-left-wing-vegetarian-with-hippy-leanings, but all I want to do is tattoo EPIDURAL PLEASE on my chest and book the elective caesarean. Maybe I am too posh to push? Or perhaps just too battle-scarred by textbook birth and its ‘textbook’ trauma.

I’ll let you know what I decide when that time comes. Until then the jury is out. Because all I know is that my Sunday son’s eyelashes look like spun gold in the sunlight of this frosty winter morning

And I am thankful to live in a country and a time which all but assured his safe birth.

 

© Sonya Burggraaf Semmens