natasha + eric’s birth story
My mucous plug started to give way the Monday evening before our due date; there was a nice big blob of bloody show. I tried not to get my hopes up because I knew it could still be days before labor truly started.
On Wednesday, our due date, I got everything wrapped up at work and felt compelled to send out my “While I’m Out” sheet to my coworkers. At the end of the work day, all the office ladies went to the kitchen and toasted that I’d made it to my due date.
We went to bed around 10PM Wednesday night. At 11:45PM I woke up feeling a period-like cramp so I got up and went to the bathroom, wondering if that was the beginning. I woke up again around 2AM feeling the same sensation. I went to the bathroom and when I got back in bed I felt another wave. I stayed awake and loosely timed the waves for about an hour. They were peaking every 8-10 minutes. Eventually I fell back asleep until sometime between 4AM and 5AM. The waves were happening less frequently, every 10-15 minutes now.
I decided not to wake Eric up - he needed all the sleep he could get! When my alarm went off at 6AM on Thursday, I got in the shower as usual, trying to keep my normal routine in case the waves stopped. It wasn’t until Eric was in the shower that I finally told him he probably wasn’t going to work that day. We called our birth center around 7AM to let them know what was going on. Finally, we started timing the waves. At 8:30AM, they were still irregular, peaking every 8-15 minutes and lasting anywhere from 40 seconds to over a minute.
The waves remained irregular for much of Thursday. It was a constant rotation of bouncing on the yoga ball, going up and down stairs, sex, and a lot of side-lying on the couch with a pillow between my legs. We went for a walk, but the weather was miserable and we went back home. I sat in the bathtub for a short while, but I didn’t stay there long. The length between waves was never very consistent. They were anywhere from 3-6 minutes apart for most of the afternoon. After two more calls to the birth center, Eric decided he couldn’t continue supporting me on his own. The waves were peaking every 3-4 minutes now. We left for the birth center around 9:15PM.
When we arrived at the birth center, the on-call midwife had us walk laps through the halls and made sure I drank a lot of water. I threw up. Twice. After the midwives checked my progress, we settled into our room around 11PM. She didn’t tell us at the time, but I was 5 cm dilated.
At some point, we developed a ritual. I held Eric’s criss-crossed hands and he said the phrase, “This is just a wave, it’s coming up, and it’s spilling onto the shore and going back out into the ocean.”
Our parents arrived around 2AM (now Friday) and our moms helped with holding my hands, keeping me hydrated, and feeding me small snacks. Again there was a rotation, this time from shower, to bed, to toilet, and back again. I have a vivid memory of waddling from the bed to the bathroom, my bag of waters putting immense pressure on my cervix. My waters opened around 9AM while I was sitting backwards on the toilet. After this, while I was on hands and knees on the bed, the midwives checked me and told me I had a cervical lip caught on my baby’s head which they pushed out of the way.
When the birth tub entered the location rotation, I again have a very vivid memory - this time of transition. In my head I thought, “I cannot do this.” Instead of saying that out loud, I said, “I didn’t know it would be. THIS. HARD!” I also began making Godzilla-like growls and yells. After another few rotations, I ended up squatting on the floor, holding the edge of the bed frame. Eric supported me from behind, holding me beneath my arms as I started to push. There was a mirror beneath me and I remember seeing the whiteness of our baby’s head as he crowned.
Our son was born at 1:41PM with a gush of blood and meconium. The midwives unwrapped the umbilical cord from around his neck three times as I held him. He was very tangled in his cord (one midwife commented later that it was the longest cord she’d ever seen). The midwives suctioned his airways and administered oxygen. Around a half hour after he was born, I birthed the placenta and cut the umbilical cord when it was done pulsating. Once they were satisfied he was doing well, Eric got to do skin-to-skin with our son while the midwives stitched a small tear I got thanks to our son’s nuchal hand.
We stayed at the birth center for a couple days to monitor our son’s breathing and to make sure we had breastfeeding under control. Finally we got to go home and spent the next few days snuggled in bed together while I recovered.
