My Birth Story for Baby C

I’ve neglected this blog more than any other year before, I think. 2020 was an absolute dumpster fire for the entire world, so I’m going to forgive myself and move on. On top of everything going on globally and nationally, I got pregnant! Being pregnant with two toddlers running around is a whole new level of exhaustion and yet another reason I just didn’t have the mental capacity to rant and rave on Bite Me.

 

Aaaaalrighty then, let’s talk about the birth of my newest hellspawn, Baby C.

 

    My pregnancy with Baby C was simultaneously easier and much harder than mine with the twin baby bats. Physically, I was, predictably, infinitely more comfortable. Walking a few blocks with Hubby and the babes was exhausting, but I was able to do it. When I was pregnant with the twins, I was all but couch-ridden by 30 weeks.

    However, this pregnancy wasn’t without its challenges. I was somehow far sicker in the first trimester than I had been last time. Nausea and exhaustion literally never faded. I had to brace myself with deep breathing in order to take my prenatal vitamin, whose taste made me nearly vomit. Ginger and lemon, typically helpful nausea-reducers, did absolutely nothing. The only relief I experienced was from sour candies—Sour Skittles and War Heads, mostly—and even then, I only felt relief while they were in my mouth. The constant nausea and fatigue triggered my depression, so the first trimester was an extremely dark time. The second and third trimesters went fairly smoothly, other than the fact that I had to spend my days wrangling toddlers. Due to this, my singleton pregnancy was far more exhausting. Baby C is our last child, and I’m not sorry to put pregnancy behind me. The only things about it I miss are the feeling of a baby moving inside me and how nice and friendly strangers are when you’re pregnant.

 

    Yeesh, those paragraphs were stale. Oh, well. Mama’s tired, guys. If I go back and edit, this will never get posted. And so we barrel ahead.

 

          Baby C was due November 22^nd. Like most pregnant people, I was ready for him by mid-October. I was done. Though I wasn’t as big as I had been the last time, I still felt like a whale swimming through molasses most days. The twins had hit their climbing-and-jumping-on-ALL-THE-THINGS stage of toddlerhood and I was terrified I couldn’t move fast enough to save them from themselves. A, for example, loved (and still loves) to meet eyes with me across the room and immediately fling himself from the edge of high furniture, delighting in watching me drop whatever I was doing and sprint to catch him before he fell face-first on the hard floor. Intellectually, I wanted Baby C to gestate for the full 40 because it’s obviously the best scenario for a fetus, but physically and emotionally, I was screaming like a character in a Jordan Peele film.

            Bad joke. Deal with it.

By November 7^th, was exhausted on multiple fronts. Third trimester insomnia was in full force, and I was forced to get up 3 or 4 times a night by my squished bladder or Restless Leg Syndrome (seriously, pregnancy is so much fucking fun.) I was also burnt out from attempting to plan the world’s safest and tiniest birthday party for A and M, who were turning 2 the following weekend. Planning a birthday party at the height of a pandemic is no picnic, even if the guest list was literally just the grandparents and two uncles. Before anyone comes at me for something that happened months ago: All involved were COVID negative and quarantined before coming out, trust me, this bitch is meticulous in her caution. We had also taken the twins to my parents’ house to spend the night that weekend, which is often a nice break for us, but also spikes my anxiety.

Anyway, I was both mentally and physically exhausted and hoping I’d only have to get up a handful of times on this night. So when 3:30am hit and I felt a thin trickle of liquid streaming down my legs, I was ready to burst into tears with frustration. You see, between both pregnancies, I ran the gamut of typical symptoms. However, I had never peed myself, which is an unfortunately common occurrence in the third trimester. I took a strange pride in my lack of incontinence and this turn of events was the cherry on top of my stress. Sticking a towel between my legs, I waddled through my darkened bedroom to the bathroom.

            In the bathroom, I realized the fluid wasn’t urine (I’ll spare you the details) and immediately panicked. Was this tiny trickle my water breaking? I’d done excessive research and knew that, contrary to what TV and movies portray, only a small percentage of waters break before labour. And besides, I thought breaking waters were a bit more dramatic; you know, more of a bang than a whimper. As I puzzled over this, debating whether or not to wake my husband, the trickling stopped completely.

            Well, that settles that, I thought. If it had been my waters, it wouldn’t have stopped after a tiny trickle. I chalked it up to yet another glamorous symptom of late pregnancy—maybe that gross watery discharge What to Expect When You’re Expecting warned me about—set a towel on my sheets in case it happened again, and crawled back into bed.

            As soon as I settled beneath the blankets, my abdomen seized. I sighed. I’d had Braxton Hicks, or “practice” contractions, since early in my second trimester. Braxton Hicks aren’t painful, but they are distracting, and as my due date neared, I had them more and more. As I waited for it to pass, I noticed that this BH felt a little…different. For me, Braxton Hicks felt like an automatic blood pressure cuff squeezing my ab muscles for a few seconds and releasing. This one felt similar, but it was accompanied by a dull ache in my lower back that reminded me of a very light menstrual cramp.

            I reached for the lamp and hesitated. In my obsessive research, I came across many labor stories from people who described true contractions as similar to menstrual cramps, but far more intense. This just felt a little achy. I had also read that as birth nears, BH contractions can change how they feel. I hadn’t lost my mucus plug, something that happens in the days before labor starts and I don’t recommend you Google. And besides, I’d just been to my OB the day before and sh’de predicted I wouldn’t go until at least my due date. I shrugged, turned off the lamp, and tried to go back to sleep.

            The night was rough. The weird new Braxton Hicks contractions kept dragging me from sleep to rub the ache out of my lower back. By morning, I was beginning to wonder: Am I in labor? The contractions weren’t long or regular like labor contractions were supposed to be, but they were very persistent.

            “Wouldn’t it be crazy if I went into labor now?” I asked my husband. “The baby would be born at 38 weeks, just like the twins were.”

            “I mean, the babes are already with your parents, so it’d be convenient,” he said. “And everyone could meet him at their birthday party.”

            As the morning went on, the contractions continued, mild and moderately annoying. By noon, I was fairly certain: Labor had started.

            “Don’t get excited, though,” I said when my husband’s eyes widened. “This is early labor. Like really early. I could be like this for hours, or even days.”

            “Well, just let me know,” he responded calmly. I didn’t seem anxious, so why should he be?

            He went upstairs to paint D&D minis, his adorably nerdy passion, and I decided if I were, in fact, in labor, it would be wise to take a nap. I shot a text to my parents that I might, possibly, probably, maybe, be in labor, but that we weren’t totally sure and I’d contact them when we were, and curled up for a nap.

            Two hours later, my back pain had grown to a deep, crampy burn that gave me flashbacks to lying on the couch curled around a hot water bottle every month. It still wasn’t very painful, but I was in labor. For sure. I pulled out my phone and began timing my contractions. They were all over the place. Thirty seconds here, forty seconds two minutes later, a minute two seconds later, there was absolutely no pattern. I recalled the 5-1-1 Rule my OB had taught me: I didn’t have to go to the hospital until I had five contractions in one hour that went on for at least one minute. That certainly wasn’t happening to me.

            “All right, I’m in labor,” I told my husband. “The contractions aren’t too bad and they’re all over the place, but we should probably finish packing up the hospital bags, just in case.”

            “You think it’s happening today?”

            I shrugged. “It’s late afternoon and the contractions are getting stronger, so…maybe? There’s really no way to know. But we won’t have to go to the hospital for a few hours at least.”

            As Hubby packed his own hospital activity bag upstairs, I shuffled into the bedroom to get my and the baby’s bag. I was folding a pair of pants when the mild burn of a contraction started…and grew…and grew…and grew. I dropped the clothes and bent over my bed, but it was over. Wow. Okay, that one…that one had hurt. That one had definitely hurt. Before this, the most pain I’d ever experienced was enduring a long tattoo session. This was worse, for sure, but if it only got this bad, I could totally handle it.

            I turned around, took a step toward my dresser, and sank to my knees as another contraction attacked. Holy shit, okay, this really hurt. I strained to recall the breathing exercises I knew by heart from years of managing anxiety through meditation. I breathed in for 4 counts, held it for 4 counts, and exhaled for 6 counts. It did fuck all, so I just stayed on the floor with my eyes squeezed shut, thinking ow, ow, ow, ow, ow until the contraction passed.

            “Jesus,” I muttered, struggling to my feet. That one was bad. That fucking hurt. And it had come fast. But they still didn’t follow the 5-1-1 Rule, and my OB had said-

            Another contraction. I all but collapsed back onto the carpet. This one felt like it went on for an eternity. These were getting bad. Maybe we were going to the hospital a little sooner than I’d thought.

            I was determined to pack the bag, but every step hurt. I grimaced. My research said that true contractions happened no matter what I was doing, and didn’t change whether or not I moved, but I was having contractions with every move I made. I finally packed the bag and dragged myself to the kitchen, intending to go upstairs and tell Josh that my contractions weren’t exactly following the 5-1-1 Rule, but maybe in a couple of hours we ought to start thinking about going-

            My lower back burst with pain. I gasped and clutched our stainless-steel prep table with such force I swear I could have bent it. On and on the pain rolled, well over a minute, with no sign of stopping.

            Fuck the 5-1-1 Rule.

            I opened my phone and shot a text to my husband, the pain rendering me unable to shout for him.

            Hospital!

                                                                          ---

            By the time I was in a hospital gown, contractions were frequent and agonizing.  Nurses and OBs waited patiently through them for me to answer their questions because I couldn’t speak until the contraction had ended. As the OB on shift checked my cervix, I silently hoped that I was at least a little dilated and that they wouldn’t send me home to wait until I was further along. I couldn’t stand the thought of putting my clothes back on, walking all the way back to the car, walking across the driveway and up the stairs. There was no way I’d make it through that.

            “Four and a half centimeters,” the OB announced, “Wow! Looks like you’re in labor!”

            I almost sobbed in relief. I was staying in the hospital. Only then did it actually hit me: Holy shit. We’re having our baby today.

            The next couple of hours consisted of a very kind nurse scrambling to check off all the boxes she needed for me to get an epidural. At one point I looked over at Josh, who stayed fastened to my side the whole way through.

            “You know when Jennifer Lawrence went into labor in Mother!, and the entire world literally shook every time she had a contraction?”

            Josh nodded.

            I grimaced as yet another contraction began. “That’s exactly how it is.”

 

            And now, a discussion about contractions.

            When I learned I’d be able to labor with this pregnancy, rather than having to get a C-section again, I was excited. I get to have both experiences! Yay! I didn’t have a birth plan, per sey, but I had a few “goals.” If possible, I wanted to have an unmedicated labor. My reasons for doing so weren’t typical. I didn’t fear medication or distrust doctors. I didn’t believe unmedicated labor is somehow superior to medicated labor. Nor did I trust my body in the way many natural-leaning people do. Yes, as a healthy cis woman, my body was built for birthing babes. Yes, it’s a ‘natural’ process. But you know what else is natural? Dying. Not sure why people forget that. Nature isn’t benevolent, kids. She loves death just as much as life.

            Anyway, I wanted to try unmedicated labor for a few reasons:

            1. To understand the experience of my (cis) foremothers and their strength.

            2. To know what birth ‘feels’ like. I’d heard many stories from people who had labored with epidurals, and many of them had mentioned that they were totally and completely numb, that they didn’t even feel the baby come out of them. I wanted to feel that on some level. I’d felt C growing and moving inside of me for so long; it seemed appropriate to feel him exit into this realm.

            3. I am a needlephobe, and the idea of a huge needle going into my spine made me want to crawl into a hole and sob hysterically.         

            And so I had a loose goal of experiencing contractions and birth without medication. My OB was more than supportive…except for my third sticking point (ha!) You see, when a mom undergoes a VBAC—Vaginal Birth After C-section—she is at a slightly higher risk for certain complications. The hospital at which I was going to deliver required certain precautions be taken—including having an epidural placed        in case an emergency C-section is required.

            “You don’t have to take the epidural medication,” my OB assured me, “but you’ll have to have the epidural itself placed.”

            Thus perished my hope of avoiding the giant spine needle.

            By the time I was placed in a delivery room, I was quite obviously in active labor, and my contractions were excruciating. How to describe them? Well, I was experiencing what is known as back labor, which pretty much just means I felt most of the contraction in my back rather than my front. Joy of joys, back labor is supposedly more painful than its traditional counterpart. My contractions felt like…like menstrual cramps as controlled by Satan. An aching burn bloomed in my lower back and spread and expanded and glowed hot and white and unendurable and then, slowly, slowly, slowly ebbed away. When a contraction began, the world vanished. There were no nurses, no monitors, no husband at my side, not even a body of my own. There was only the pain, searing in my core, burning with the heat of a dying star.

            I never screamed—Shadow Man rules.* The pain was everything. Everything. I didn’t even have the physical presence to find my vocal chords. Instead, I collapsed in on myself and curled around the glowing ember of pain. I think my silence disconcerted the nurse more than screaming would have, because she seemed more and more frantic to get the anesthesiologist to me with every passing contraction.

            When I told friends who had kids that I was terrified of the epidural, nearly every one of them said something like, “Honey, contractions hurt so badly that you’ll be begging for the epidural.” I thought they just didn’t understand how needlephobic I was.

            They were absolutely right.

            I was still anxious as I felt the cold gloved hands of the anesthesiologist on my back and cringed at the burn of the needle, but I can say with confidence that I welcomed that burn. Still, I was a little down. I wasn’t disappointed in myself for needing to escape the pain; the pain was beyond excruciating and no one should ever have to endure it if they don’t have to. I was down because now I wouldn’t feel anything. Surely the epidural would numb me so badly that I wouldn’t even know I had given birth until the nurses placed the baby in my arms. Despite my sadness, as the pain from my contractions ebbed and died away, I was relieved. Then I began to realize, hey, I was feeling something. I still felt the contraction of my muscles, the pressure against my back. I just didn’t feel the pain.

            Folks, I swear to sweet Satan, epidurals are a miracle of modern medicine. I know this isn’t the same for every laboring person, but for me, the epidural only took away the pain and left every other sensation of birth. And I can’t tell you how happy that made me.

            The rest of labor, which was a few hours, was fantastic. I was relaxed, able to chat with the nurse and actually have a conversation with my husband. It sounds so weird, but before my epidural, I didn’t like how apart from everything Josh was. I couldn’t tell him how I was feeling, or seek him out for comfort, or talk to him about the impending babe. There was just pain and pain and pain. With labor only happening to me, obviously, Josh was already apart from the experience. But with the epidural, I felt much more that it was something we were going through together.

            The hours passed in peace, other than me sneaking some trail mix and being caught by the nurse, who was very upset with me. Not being able to eat during labor is some bullshit, seriously. Your body is exerting so much energy. How are you supposed to keep going without food?

            Time passed slowly after the epidural. I continued to have, and feel, contractions, and we even had to increase my medication at one point because I started to feel a bit of pain again as birth neared. I wish I had more to say about giving birth during the COVID pandemic, but in all honesty, the birth wasn’t all that strange. I was in a mask for a few hours until they received the results of my COVID test and then they allowed me to remove it. Everyone around me was masked. Josh was the only person allowed to be with me in the delivery room. The pandemic had far more impact on my stay after the birth, but we’ll get to that.

            Close to 11pm, I suddenly felt a peculiar pressure low in my abdomen.

            “Um,” I said to the nurse. “So, I’m not sure, but I think I might be ready to push.”

            The nurse shot me a skeptical look. She had checked me only a half hour before and I had been 8 centimeters dilated. My body had progressed quickly throughout labor, but dilating 2 inches in 30 minutes seemed a bit excessive.

            “Oh. Oh!” said the nurse, eyes wide. “Yep, let’s get the doctor in here, you are definitely at 10 centimeters!”

            My heart leapt to my throat as she sped out of the room and a team of masked-and-gloved medical personnel rushed in with her minutes later. An OB I didn’t know instructed the nurses to prop up my legs. My OB had warned me that it was highly unlikely she’d be the one to deliver my baby, but that everyone on her team was highly capable.

            “Besides, we’re all practically the same person,” she’d said with her typical snark. “No matter what, you’re gonna get a blonde, middle-aged white woman.”

            So here I was at another moment I had dreaded in the past. When I thought of delivering a baby, I couldn’t stand the idea of being on my back, legs up, completely vulnerable.  Part of the reason a water birth appealed to me so much (before I learned I couldn’t actually give birth in the tub) was that I was concealed in the water. In my day-to-day, I’m self-conscious to a nearly crippling degree. There was no way I was going to handle lying prone with a group of strangers staring down at me with any modicum of grace.

Well, my dear readers, I can tell you with the wisdom of hindsight that while I was giving birth, I gave zero fucks. All of the details I worried about in the months leading up to the birth meant fuck all to me.

Had I been able to shave or were my legs like an overgrown forest? Zero fucks.

Strangers staring at my prone genitals? Zero fucks.

Even the greatest fear of many pregnant women……would I poop? Zero. Fucks.

When I was told the baby was coming, you could have hired a circus showman to stand next to my bed with a megaphone screaming, “COME ONE, COME ALL, SEE THIS SPIKY-LEGGED FREAK GIVE BIRTH! WITNESS THE CROWNING IN ALL ITS FLUID-FILLED GLORY! WILL SHE POOP? WILL SHE TEAR? STEP BEHIND THIS CURTAIN TO FIND OUT!” I couldn’t possibly have cared less. It was time to meet my baby. Let’s do this.

Many people who give birth describe a primal, all-consuming need to push; even when they end up getting epidurals. I had none of it. All I felt was an incredible amount of pressure in my lower abdomen. I know I’m not exactly winning any descriptive awards here, but there’s no other way of putting it: It felt like a head was pushing its way out of me. I mean…yeah. That’s what it was and that’s what it felt like. I didn’t have the urge to push it out, no instinct to guide me. In fact, the act of pushing felt incredibly…counter-intuitive.

When you push a baby out of you, you’re essentially positioned as if you’re doing a crunch; on your back, knees up, and directing your strength below your center. However, the OB instructed me to do everything you’re not supposed to do while doing crunches: Hold your breath, strain with all your might, and direct every ounce of strength into your bottom. My OB described pushing as “feeling exactly like pooping,” and, well, it’s unromantic, but correct. It makes sense, actually. While it’s actually all happening with vaginal muscles, the inner walls of the vagina have next to no nerves. There’s very little sensation inside the vagina. (So sorry, cishet boys, but your girlfriend probably is faking it when she acts like you penetrating her is a singular ecstasy.) What you do feel is a ton of pressure and sensations from the more sensitive organs like your large intestine, which is definitely feeling the giant fucking head stretching your lower body.

I was lucky, not only that I had an epidural and it ‘took,’ but that the pushing stage of my labor, which can be a long and excruciating ordeal for many, was over in less than ten minutes. Baby C was out in maybe three pushes. It didn’t even last long enough for him to have the cone-shaped head typical in vaginally-delivered babies. After push 3, the intense pressure vanished, I felt slick little limbs against my thighs, and there he was, reddish and wrinkly and uttering a small confused cry that said, “what the flying fuck just happened?”

The nurses placed Baby C on my chest and twin feelings of calm and relief rushed over me like the current of a swollen stream. Josh expertly captured the exact moment in one of my favorite pictures of all time:

 

11:01p, 7.5lb

It’s truly bizarre how instantaneously something as long and intense as labor is just…over. There’s no slow descent to normalcy, no “cool down.” It’s just boom, done, here’s your baby. C immediately began rooting around to eat, making the silliest grunting noises while doing so (the nurses loved this.) He nursed like a pro while the OB delivered the placenta without a hitch and stitched up a second-degree tear that I neither felt nor cared about. All in all, from my water…well, leaking rather than breaking… to C’s entry into the world, I was in labor for about 20 hours. C and I handled it like champs and, all things considered, the entire ordeal went off without a single complication. We really couldn’t have asked for a smoother ride, and I can’t accurately express how grateful I am to C, my body, my OB, and the medical staff for rendering every moment my broken anxiety brain spent ruminating on everything that could go wrong completely moot. I pretty much had a fairytale birth. I’m lucky as fuck.

The recovery, however, was a little less than ideal. You see, COVID didn’t change much about my labor and birth experience. I hadn’t been too keen on the idea of my parents visiting while I labored, so only having Josh there was just as it would have been. Because I’d had an epidural, I wasn’t going to be walking the halls to jump-start my labor—something forbidden due to the pandemic—and hell, once I got to the hospital, my body didn’t even need a jump-start. But recovery? That was a different story.

The first thing I’ll always remember is how C first looked upon his Daddy’s face while it was masked. This picture is an eternal reminder that our last child was born during a major and truly bizarre global event.

The pandemic made my post-partum hospital stay both heartbreaking and unendurably dull. Only Josh could visit Baby C and me; no grandparents, no siblings. The magical moment of my twin toddlers coming to the hospital and gazing upon their hours-old sibling could not come to pass. We would never have photos of my parents and Josh’s parents holding their new grandbaby in that silly hospital-issue blue and pink hat.

On top of those heartbreaks, because my labor technically started with a placental rupture, even though everything went off without a hitch, Baby C and I were stuck in the hospital for three days. Josh came in and out, but for the most part, we were alone. It was pure agony being away from A and M for that long. I hadn’t been away from them for more than an overnight stay at their grandparents since they’d been born. I truly couldn’t handle it. I missed them so much it physically hurt. I loved having the one-on-one time with Baby C that we likely wouldn’t have again, but I longed to put the pieces of the family together.

Finally, Baby C and I were discharged at 10pm on Day 3. I was salty about the time, because it meant the twins wouldn’t meet their new baby brother until the following morning. When they did meet, though, it was absolutely adorable. A, Big Brother, was only passingly interested in his little sibling. He would occasionally amble over to him, poke his head, and saunter away again. Big Sister M, who had begun to mimic Josh’s and my behaviors shortly before the birth, though, was obsessed. She repeatedly came over to Baby C with blankets and tried to tuck him in over and over again. She insisted on placing burp cloths on our shoulders. She even kissed and—because toddlers are weird—licked Baby C’s head, delighting in our reaction.

Since this is a birth story, I won’t get too much into how the twins adjusted (and are still adjusting) to Baby C’s entry into the family, but I do want to say, holy shit, toddlers have trouble with major changes. Parenting books tried to warn us, but yeesh. From little things—the twins used to sleep together in the same bed, but they stopped shortly after Baby C was born for some inexplicable reason—to big things: M has always been a Mama’s girl, but for the first week after I came home from the hospital, she was all about Daddy. Not going to lie, though I want our children to love us as equally as possible, that ripped my heart out. The twins are only now settling into life with a baby brother.

Baby C’s first few months have been the most stressful of my life. It’s absolute chaos, but like most chaos, there’s indescribable beauty in it.

And there you have it; the birth story of our final child. And it only took me 4 months to write. Like I said, life is chaos.

 

 

*Shoutout to my girls Heather, Mel, and Jessica, literally the only people who will get that reference.