Birth stories are perhaps only interesting to pregnant people (and even then just marginally), but here is a truncated version of ours.
On my due date, May 8, I felt my first contractions while sitting in a meeting at work. I was excited and surprised; I’d expected that the baby would be a late arrival. A calm sense of anticipation and joy marked the next several hours as Guion and I ate dinner (spicy sausage and broccoli over orecchiette pasta) on the back deck and prepared the various places around the house for the birth. I felt focused and ready. Or as ready as I could be.
Contractions began to pick up in intensity around 10 pm, right when we hoped to be sleeping. We’d texted our midwife and doula and the advice consensus was to try to sleep. This, unfortunately, was rapidly becoming an impossible task, as I’d jump out of bed as things intensified. I could not lay still, much less fall asleep. Soon, I couldn’t speak through the rushes, and Guion knew it was time to call the midwife.
Our wonderful birth team (our midwife, her assistant, and our doula) arrived around 4 am. I was already so much in it that I don’t think I had the ability to greet them properly. I recall standing in the front hall doorway, clutching the frame, when our doula arrived. She rubbed my back and then apparently mouthed to Guion, “Wow, you really waited a while to call me.”
At this point, because of how early labor has progressed, I was buoyed by a misplaced optimism that the baby would arrive soon. Alas, this was not the case.
The rest of the story, from my perspective, is shrouded in a traumatic fog. You’d get a much more accurate and detailed account if you asked Guion what transpired from dawn until Thursday afternoon. For my part, I felt simultaneously out of my body and entirely controlled by it. I labored all over the house, in and out of the birth tub, in our bed, in the bathroom, on a chair and ottoman, begging the baby to please come out. He was, however, quite content to hang out in the birth canal for hours. Afterward, our midwife estimated that I’d probably been 10 cm dilated for five or six hours. I screamed for almost all of those hours and don’t recall very much, except for the sweet encouragement of our doula, who prayed for me and read scripture while I moaned, and Guion, who was so strong and supportive (figuratively and literally, as he spent many hours holding me up in my various positions). I also remember a short pep talk from our midwife, who leveled with me while I was in the tub and said, “Abby, you can do this. You have to push your baby out now.”
I knew this was the work of the day, but this whole push-your-baby-out-now thing still took a tremendously long time. I remember hearing birds singing and noticing the golden afternoon light filtering through our living room curtains and wondering what day it was, whether this would ever be over. It was easy to forget why I was in this state, why I was being ruled by this unimaginable pain. In the early afternoon, our midwife sensed this, I think, and encouraged me to reach down and touch our baby’s head. This was encouraging; I had absolutely no idea how or whether I’d progressed at all, and the baby’s head was this sharp reminder of why this was happening to me. I swear I’d forgotten.
Finally, blessedly, after being persuaded to do an impossible forward-leaning inversion and a few other positions to encourage the baby to descend, we moved to the sofa. Guion sat behind me and held my knees with every push. The baby’s head was out, and in one more push, he had arrived.
We welcomed our son, Moses, at 3:17 pm on May 9, 2019, in the peace of our home. I felt totally spent and amazed:
We are both so grateful to have had such a joyful—albeit long—birth in the comfort of our home and immensely thankful for our incredible birth team.
Moses, on his first day of life:
And last week:
We love our little blond boy, and we’re all well and settling into our new life. Every day brings a new crop of delight and anxiety and sweetness.
Little Stories 