One of the things I’d planned to do if I went overdue was attend a reading by the authors of Great Expectations: Twenty Four True Stories About Childbirth. Since I wasn’t as overdue as I feared I’d be, I got the book out from the library and read it over the first three weeks of Claire’s life. With my own childbirth experience so fresh and raw in my mind it was especially poignant to read about other’s experiences, and it made me so incredibly grateful and awestruck that my own birth experience was totally and completely free of conflict and complications

Reading those birth stories when my own pregnancy hormones were plummeting and the warm fog of being full term was beginning to clear away made me feel like taking a stab at writing my own birth story. The writers who contributed their stories to Great Expectations are all highly talented and skilled, which is inspiring in itself. Trying to write and assign words to an experience so visceral, so spiritual and so far outside our normal realm of experience is a daunting task. The vast majority of birth stories online are either hour by hour accounts of dilation progress, interventions and nursing shift changes, or completely vague descriptions of communing with the earth goddess. Talking about the actual experience of giving birth is truly trying to describe the indescribable, but these writers did an amazing job, and I’m going to take my best shot too.

I’ve never really known where the beginning of a birth story really starts. Birth itself is one event in a long continuum of events that stretch back to my own birth and out into the future, each event a critical piece of a puzzle that takes a lifetime to complete. Even identifying the beginning of a discrete event like labour seems difficult – does pre-labour count? Those contractions that woke me up at 5am one morning, pulling me out of a dream that I was walking around with a group of people while wearing uncomfortably tight fancy clothes and pinchy high heels? What about the contractions that started the night before Claire was born, which seemed to be the real deal and then dissipated? They’re part of the story too, because the fact that they petered out meant that I got a full night’s sleep and my midwife could attend another woman’s birth that night, arriving home herself at 3:30am. The real beginning of my labour, I suppose, would have been when we woke up at 6:30am and decided to help things along with some natural prostaglandins and uterine contractions. By 7am I was having semi-regular contractions. Nothing too intense. Nothing I hadn’t already experienced in the past couple of weeks. I ate breakfast and told myself that I’d decide in an hour whether or not to go swimming with a friend as I’d planned. In the meantime, I’d do a bit of tidying up.

Planning a homebirth, for me, means that I become compulsive about a clean house in a way that I could never have imagined in myself 5 years ago. Every night from 37 weeks onwards I’d look around the house before going to bed and ask myself, “Do I want to give birth here tonight?” If the answer was no, I’d sweep the floor or do the dishes or whatever it was that bugged me that night. So that morning when I started having contractions at 7am, the first morning of Tom’s paternity leave, I started cleaning up the bedroom, doing the dishes and picking up the toys off the living room floor. Patti, my midwife, had told me to call her when the contractions were 7 minutes apart. Second births are often much faster, she said. Calling at 7 minutes would give her enough time to get to my house and set up her equipment before the baby arrived.

At about 9am I started having to stop putting dishes in the cupboard in order to breathe through a contraction, so I told Tom that he should start timing. 3 minutes apart. 2 minutes and 40 seconds apart. 2 minutes and 30 seconds apart. It’s time to call Patti. It was time to call Patti an hour ago. We are way past 7 minutes, but things really aren’t that intense yet. Tom puts a video on for Beatrice. Beatrice wants to talk to me. I want everyone to go away and leave me alone. I hear a voice in my head as clear as day – the same voice I heard when I was truly in labour with Beatrice. IT IS TIME TO CALL THE MIDWIFE, RIGHT NOW. So I call and leave a message on her pager. Beatrice is still wandering in and out of the dining room and I can’t cope with her noise and activity, so I ask Tom to phone a friend and ask her to pick Bea up, then I escape upstairs on the pretext of putting old sheets and a waterproof layer on the bed upstairs.

As I strip the sheets off the bed and put new ones on, I pause every couple of minutes to kneel on the floor beside the bed when a contraction hits. It doesn’t occur to me to stop working at getting the sheets on the bed – I’m not tired and I really only need to concentrate on each contraction as it’s happening. My body feels better when it’s moving, my mind feels better when there is something else to focus on. Lift the corner of the mattress, slide the edge of the sheet underneath. I time tasks to the minute-long interval between the end of a contraction and the start of the next. By the time the bed is made up I’ve decided I’m ready to be done with housework, and I start just resting on my hands and knees between contractions.

My friend arrives to pick up Bea. She shouts, “You go, Michelle!” up the stairs. I shout a “Thanks!” down before another contraction comes on. I hear Patti arrive and make her way upstairs. After all my worrying about a posterior baby, it turns out this baby knows where she needs to be – front and centre. “Only one thing left for this baby to do,” Patti says. “Come out!” I reply. Meanwhile, Tom is rushing around downstairs trying to get all the things done on my Labour To-Do list. He brings me a cup of juice and asks whether he should make the labour-aid recpie. I tell him to fill the pool, I want to get in the pool now. He starts filling the pool and I go to the bathroom. The next contraction is accompanied by an almost involuntary push at the end. I start to have fearful thoughts that the baby will be born on the bathroom floor while the midwives are downstairs setting up and Tom is busy filling the birth pool. Even though I was really comfortable in the bedroom I force myself to go downstairs because that’s where the midwives and the birth pool are. I want to get in the pool. I will go get in the pool.

The pool is not ready.

I manage to make it into the living room and pull down the blinds before another contraction hits. The intensity has been cranked up and I start thinking that maybe I’d like to stop doing this now. Yeah, this isn’t really that fun. Nope, not liking this at all. Then the contraction is gone and I look up and see Patti trying to find an electrical outlet for a heating blanket. “There’s an extension cord just there, above the games,” I tell her. Then I turn back to the red couch and continue going through transition. This baby is coming SOON. Are we here already? Am I in transition already? I was 5cm dilated ten minutes ago. I can’t tell if I’m experiencing some weird time compression or things are really going that fast. (Turns out it was a bit of both.)

I would really REALLY like to get in the pool now. I can’t move away from kneeling in front of the red couch. Patti asks me, very gently and considerately, if I would like to get in the pool. “The water is hip deep” she says. “You can get in the pool even though it’s not full yet.”

“No thanks,” I gasp. Two more contractions. I’m pushing, pushing, PUSHING!

We watched a birth video with Bea when we were preparing her for the possibility that she might be at home when the baby was born, especially if it happened that I went into labour at night when she was asleep and she woke up partway through. The woman was so quiet, so peaceful, that even though I could see she was working hard she didn’t sound like it. Her contractions spaced out near the end and there were a few minutes of quiet between pushes. I remember this happening to me during Bea’s birth, and I hadn’t known at the time that things would kind of slow down during the pushing stage. I was looking forward to this happening for my second birth, now that I knew to expect it.

But the urge, no, the tidal wave that is pushing hits me long and hard and fast, just as fast as the rest of this labour. Between the waves of pain and pressure as my pelvis moves apart to accommodate the baby, I know that it will be over soon and that everything is progressing as it should. During a contraction there is nothing in the world except the pain – the pain and the world and I are all one. This pain is everything and nothing and my body knows that the only way out is through. So I shout and push and throw myself right into that pain. I hear Patti’s voice saying, “Pant when it gets strong,” and I do, I pant and try to push slowly but my body wants to be upright. I straighten up and feel the baby move down in my pelvis. I want to stand up. I get one leg up into a lunge before a contraction hits, and on the next I heave myself up into the air and hang on to Tom’s shoulders. It’s all instinct now. I think I muttered, “Come on, baby,” but I can’t be sure. My body gave a great heave and I could hear Shannon saying, “I see a nose, I see a little ear,” and another great heave and she was out. Flubbity-flub, one of the authors in Great Expectations said. Flubbity-flub, the word to describe the sensation of arms and legs and a whole slippery body emerging from my body into the world. It seems like there should be some way to say it that conveys the profundity of the event, but there’s not. Flubbity-flub, that was exactly it. She was born.

If it’s difficult to find the beginning of a birth story, it’s equally hard to find the end. In some ways I feel this is the end of the birth story and the beginning of the newborn story. In other ways I felt like the birth wasn’t really over until my milk came in – for three days and nights we were magically suspended in a birth bubble created by endorphins and leftover pregnancy hormones and the euphoria of a happy, healthy normal birth. When the milk comes in you get down to business but before then it’s all wobbly legs and days in bed and trying out different names to see what fits this tiny, wrinkly new person.

During this bubble of not-quite birth when baby had been born but not yet named, we laid on the couch together, all mixed up in blood and sweat and I laughed at the fact that it was over. Over already! She was quite blue from the pressure of the birth, with eyes almost swollen shut and some bruising on her forehead. I could feel her breathing but never heard her cry – she went from the midwife’s hands to my hands to my chest and hardly seemed to wake up at all, just gradually shifted from dusky pinky blue to a slightly bruised pink. Shannon said that she had her left arm up by her neck, which made pushing more difficult and caused baby’s bruising. Tom made everyone bagels and tea at quarter to eleven while the midwives filled out their paperwork and I cuddled the baby. After a while Patti asked if I was ready to have baby weighed, so I handed her over and they did the newborn check and weighed her – 9lbs!

Then Patti and Shannon gathered up their things and waved goodbye, leaving us in our peaceful, quiet home with this tiny person just waking up to the world.

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