Rosy’s Birth Story
It should be duly noted that I had contractions, sometimes 7 minutes apart, for a full week before Rosy was finally born. At our 38 week visit with Laura, our midwife, we asked Sophie when the baby was going to come. “Maybe on Thursday.”
Laura: “Today, Thursday or next Thursday?”
Zoo: “Mmm, maybe next Thursday.”
Laura said, in her own rye way, “I’ll pencil you in.”
The next day we visited our good friends and much to my surprise, they started dismantling their co-sleeper and put it in our car, somehow convinced we’d need it soon. I blame them for starting it all. On the way home I stopped at the supermarket for dinner and started contracting like a crazy charley horse. I managed to grab good beer, which we drank in hopes of seeing where the cramps might go. Fifteen minutes apart, not too intense, but enough to make you say Hmmm.
Saturday they ramped up again like clockwork, got to about 15 minutes apart, then chilled for the evening. My parents came down on Sunday, giving me a much-needed break from parent duties, as John was suffering through the worst of our Plague disease (Sophie and I had been sick for 2 weeks by this point). On Monday they got so intense we did a dilation check (1 cm, but “ready”) and walked around the mall, had a beer, no love. I was beginning to think I wanted it to be more than it really was. False starts. But every day, the same ramping up in uncomfortableness. They started to come closer together. They would peak at a certain point in the day and then die away. I got the same full feeling in my ears that I had just before nursing Sophie.
On Thursday we saw Laura again. 3cm, so progress was being made, albeit slowly. She stripped my membranes, gave us tips for “making oneself more uncomfortable” (btw, we tried every natural induction method under the sun- ALL of them, sometimes in combination and sometimes in the car). We went to a different mall, bought the girls matching PJs, ate a really delicious Cuban meal and came home. I contracted all.night.long.
Friday started like all the other days. Coffee. Contractions. With one addition. Castor oil.
Oh the stuff is so gross. I used it with Sophie, as my blood pressure was creeping up and I’d been threatened with a real induction if things didn’t happen on their own. After much trial and error my advice is to mix it with root beer or soda, hold your nose, drink, and then chase it well. I think I took about three ounces, which worked well. Well enough to get me contracting, but not so well that I was losing my insides at the same time. I had no appetite, was pacing around, rubbing my belly out of some weird instinct. Things started to get intense in the early afternoon. Contractions that made me wince just a bit. My friend who’d just survived her own induction ordeal in Key West (welcome, Tabitha!) dropped by with more castor oil (in case) and some black and blue cohosh. I took a drop of the black cohosh, and who knows if it was that, or seeing Tabitha’s beautiful little newborn head, or the castor oil alone, but suddenly labor never looked back. Thank god.
I called Laura and we headed up to her house, halfway to the birth center. We managed a conversation on that drive and perhaps that was what she was waiting for. We chose her name, finally. We had tossed Lillian around but somehow mis-communicated about how much we both liked it. She’d been Stella the previous week, Harper, Fiona, at other times. Now I can’t imagine her as anything but our “Lily Rose,” as Sophie calls her.
I didn’t want to stop at Laura’s, I was so uncomfortable (a theme of ours) by the time we got to South Miami. Unfortunately it was rush hour, and if I was more than 5 centimeters dilated, we’d be having the baby at her house. We’re blessed that her best friend is another midwife, Miriam, who also practices at our birth center. They were hanging out, up to no good, so had it happened there, we’d have been okay. Turns out we were at 4 centimeters, progressing just enough for her to buy my story of “real” labor. She sent us up to the birth center with orders for uncomfortableness. It felt like as soon as we stepped back in the car, things took off. Hard core. It was the longest hour I’ve ever spent, and probably will ever spend in a moving vehicle.
Poor John. When we drove past the hospital where Sophie was born, we have a ritual of saying Happy Birthday to the new babies. He was dutifully fulfilling this obligation and I nearly bit his head off. Radiohead was on. “In Rainbows” will forever be the CD of moaning contractions. It must have helped John to time them, 3 minutes apart, and once he reminded me that I’d have one in 30 seconds. They were at that point where as one starts, the fear of God sets in and it was all I could do to keep it together and not panic through the peak. There was this ever-increasing moan/scream through each one, followed by relatively lucid conversation in the lulls. I swear, nature is awesome. Were it not for those gaps, those breaks for a moment’s peace and time to relax, I’d have lost my mind. Somewhere driving into Hollywood I said how much I appreciated my parents coming down and keeping Sophie for this. To have had her in the car for that would have forever tainted her, I’m convinced.
At the birth center I was in the tub within minutes. It worked for only so long, then we walked, leaned on counters, I had John pressing my hips as they started to ache miserably (and we found out why). Laura checked me early on and we were at 8 centimeters. I said something like, “That’s great f’ing news. (sorry mom)” But after our bout with Sophie, with all that pain and then something like 3cm dilation, I knew we could finish this. We started joking that we’d get to sleep that night (don’t ever do that), fully dilated by 8pm. Transition was awful- just back-to-back for what felt like an eternity. I feel like they tried to have my push through it, to get her past what was a lip of cervix left. It didn’t go well, so we got back in the tub and once past transition, I got a few breaks back and could close my eyes and rest. Good midwives, they were, to let me have that time.
The real theme of Rosy’s birth was patience. Patience through that week, on our part, and patience through the dramatics on Laura and Miriam’s part. In hindsight, they were godsends in that regard. No impatient person should attempt a natural birth for themselves, or attend one as a midwife. It just wouldn’t work. That’s why we don’t do them in hospitals often. Impatient places, those hospitals. Just when we thought Rosy was almost here, the fun began. We pushed for two solid, intense, agonizing hours. I was exhausted when we started. She was stuck on the lip of the cervix, she was stuck on the spines of my pelvis. At some point we got out of the tub and they realized that she was descending at a slightly diagonal angle- not straight on, which is why my hip ached. She also had her hand in her mouth (we discovered later), which explained the getting stuck. There’s nothing streamlined about a diagonally-descending, thumb-sucking baby. We tried every damn position under the sun. Sitting, squatting, standing, lying, side lying, everything. The last inch was excruciating, just as it had been with Sophie. I think by the time she was born, Miriam was pulling on her head, stretching me. Laura was pushing on her rump (all of Laura on me). Vanessa, the student midwife, was monitoring her almost continuously (and thankfully, she was always a champ). But baby girl needed to be born. So badly.
Somehow she showed up to the party. I was fully convinced that I had run out of gas and couldn’t make it happen. There were these lulls between pushes where Laura and Miriam conferred (and I didn’t look at their faces, not wanting to see the apprehension) and I would start to panic just a bit. Only because it seemed harder than it should have been. But never did they say anything but supportive things. When she got close they made me feel her head and that was everything to me. As she finally came, John said, “I see her forehead!!” and I summoned every bit of energy from every muscle in my body. I knew how good it would feel to have it over. And it did. It felt better than that.
It was again, that incredible sense of disbelief that something so alive and HUGE and perfect could emerge from you. She was gorgeous and squeaky and covered in gore. She didn’t scream, she just took it in and grumbled about the junk in her nose. She nursed almost immediately. It was heaven.
I’d finish tonight, but she’s waking up and there is SO much more to tell, as we had another 2 hours before that last forgotten stage of labor had passed- the placenta from hell. But never have I loved five people more than on June 27 at 10:06PM. Rosy, Vanessa, Miriam, Laura, and my dear husband who was at my right shoulder the whole time. I can’t imagine watching someone go through that insanity, and he did, and never said a negative thing. Even if it wasn’t her forehead- it was the top of her head. Whatever, it worked.
(the next day)
To make a long gorey story short, expelling the placenta turned out to be nearly as ridiculous and trying as birthing the baby it was once attached to. We cut the cord, we pushed, we nursed the baby again and again trying to get crampy enough to expel it, we tried Pitocin (so ironic that we managed to avoid it during labor, but here we were . . .). At some point Laura had me trying to convince myself that I didn’t need the thing, like some Jedi placenta mind trick. She went in after it, no dice. Most hospitals would have had me in an operating room long before I was finally able to summon whatever energy was left and push the second baby out.
As it turned out, the thing was formed in some ridiculous rare way, causing it to be bigger, and attach in more places than most.. There was some talk of it having two lobes, whatever that means. It was wonky, and it went out of its way to redefine the fourth stage of labor. Never again. Never ever again. Without patient midwives, it could have been a nightmare. Thankfully the distraction of a beautiful baby made it less awful, for me.
So Rosy is special. She made her special exit, and her special placenta took its grand time making its way into the biohazard bag. The midwives were so impressed with it, they took pictures. Thankfully I never lost blood pressure, lest they had to take more emergent measures.
The tale had a happy ending. Finally able to move around, Laura took care of me like I was her own sister. Rather than be rushed out of a birthing suite at 4AM, like we were with Sophie, we rested and recuperated at our own pace. John bought everyone dinner. Baby checked out perfectly and got dolled up in her whale suit and hat. And just over seven hours after arriving, we drove away with a gorgeous girl. My parents got to hold their hours-old grandbaby, and I got to sleep in my own bed. Birth centers rule.
Sophie woke up in the morning and heard this bizarre new sound, like a kitten whimpering in our bed. John told her that Rosy was here, would she like to see Rosy? She didn’t quite grasp what he was saying and said “No Daddy, maybe tomorrow.” Just like me, I’m sure she was beginning to think we were making all of this up. To see her, even now, is like a dream.
The birth center called yesterday to ask if I wanted the placenta freeze-dried and made into capsules. I understand the rationale behind this procedure, but after two hours of begging my body to be rid of it, I felt a bit wary of reintroducing the crazy thing. Laura and John and I had a good laugh over it.
The long and short of this story- I’m SO glad we chose to have Rosy outside the hospital. But much to my surprise, her birth was at least as intense as Sophie’s. In fact, way more intense, because I was so goshdarn aware of every little thing, every little problem and hiccup. The flipside, I was so much more aware of the joy of holding her and seeing her nurse right away. She was super-alert from the start and continues to seem much more organized and lucid than I imagined she would be. As my dad said, “It’s all that organic birth!”
I’ll also say, for us, there was a marked difference between having a midwife in the hospital, as we did with Sophie, and choosing a midwife outside the hospital. We were able to really cultivate a relationship with Laura, have appointments at her house, have her come down here this past week to see us. She is truly a friend and treated all of us with such respect before, during, and after the birth ordeal. John asked her on Sunday if this was an unusually difficult delivery and very honestly she said, Yes. After two of those, I feel doubly blessed to have my girls. I am so glad to be on the other side; that tomorrow I won’t wake up and chug 3 ounces of castor oil. Instead, I am off to tuck myself in bed, next to my beautiful teeny-weeny girl. Lillian Rose, born on my dear grandmother’s birthday, like it was meant to be.
