My Birth Story

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They told me that every woman’s experience is different. I still wanted to hear from every woman who had ever been pregnant and gone through labor. I’ve been like this my whole life: I’ve always been on a “need to know” basis…meaning, I need to know….EVERYTHING. I know this isn’t possible, but I’ve always tried to research the crap out of everything I can so that I can at least limit my surprises and understand all possible outcomes.
Some women who had gone through labor thought this was crazy: “You’re watching all those live birth videos? Why would you do that?!” Watching the videos didn’t scare me – it just informed me of all my choices – in detail. After researching all of my birthing options – home birth, hospital birth, medicated birth, water birth, natural birth, c-section – I opted for a natural birth at the hospital…I mean, of course, if my child’s birth was free of complications.

Tuesday, March 15.
I’m a yoga teacher and on Tuesdays I teach one class in the morning, from 11 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. then work from home in the afternoon, and teach another night class from 7:15 – 8:15 p.m. and always fit in an hour-long practice in the morning. This particular day, though, I had also booked an essential oil workshop in close proximity to my yoga class from 5:30 – 7 p.m. where I educate people on how to live their lives in a natural way through the use of essential oils and oil-based products. I knew this was cutting it close but I had wanted to fit in one more workshop before I had my baby. It wasn’t a very well-attended class, which was good, because normally there are tons of questions and I usually stay an hour afterwards to help answer those questions. I very quickly scooped up all my belongings at the end and somehow, nine months pregnant, carried everything out to my car in one trip even though usually it takes me at least three trips or someone else’s help (something I’m not very good at asking for….) and scooted off to teach. With only 15 minutes to get to my next class, find parking, and waddle my way into the building before my students arrive, I made it there just in time (okay, I was a few minutes late and my students were all wondering if I’d suddenly gone into labor) but truthfully I was out of breath and sweating. I somehow made it through the class with very little demonstrating and just speaking my instructions. Exhausted, I went home, took a shower, and went to bed.

Wednesday, March 16.
The next morning it seemed like I had gotten my period. I was “spotting” and I called the doctor right away. The first thing they asked me was, “Did you happen to do a lot of running around yesterday?” Why, yes I had. I had overexerted myself just a little. I told them I had my regularly scheduled appointment the following day but that I still had one more yoga class to teach tonight and one tomorrow morning. “It would be smart to take it easy and maybe think about not teaching for the rest of the week.” I hated giving up my classes, but did have substitute teachers lined up just in case and honestly, I knew I could use the break to rest.
I was 38 weeks, 3 days. That night, I kept having what felt like deep period cramps. They were pretty consistent…I’d say at least every hour I would wake up and have these long, deep cramps in my low belly.

Thursday, March 17.
The next morning I felt fine but I had noticed that I had lost my “cervical plug” which I kept hearing about (I’ll leave the details for you to google). Taking it easy until my 1 p.m. appointment, I went in, chatted with my midwife and had an internal, where she discovered I was 1 cm dilated. This meant that I could’ve had my baby that night, or….weeks from now.
Coincidentally, when I was leaving my hospital appointment, my brother was coming in to pick up his wife who was just being released from the postpartum ward since they had just had their second child the day prior! I went in to visit.
As they were being visited by nurses and the resident photographer, I hung out for a while but had to sit down at one point, feeling very heavy and also because those same damn period cramps kind of came back again. I went home and my mom was graciously with me, cleaning and getting dinner ready while I was working on the computer at the kitchen table. Around 4 p.m., still staring intently at the screen, I unconsciously lifted my hips off of the chair I was sitting in and started waving them back and forth, breathing heavily while still typing, keeping my elbows on the table. Then I did it again. Then again. Not thinking ANYTHING of this, my mom finally stopped what she was doing, looked at me, and said, “Jennie – please start timing those.”
“Timing what?”
“About every 5 minutes you’ve been getting out of your chair and leaning over the table. Please start writing them down.”
Sure enough, they were every 6 minutes and lasting about 40 seconds. “Call your midwife,” my mom ordered.
My midwife suggested, since I had just come into the office that day and was only 1 cm dilated, that I time them for another hour, maybe take a bath and call back. After getting out of the tub and having jotted my now 5-minute-apart timed contractions which were lasting a minute each on a notepad, I dried off, laid on my bed, and felt the biggest “wave” yet. I called my midwife again. This time, a new midwife had just started her shift – Lynne – my favorite and the one I had been hoping I would be able to “work with” when I eventually went into labor. After giving her the full report, she said, “You can go ahead and come on in!”
Having given my baby-daddy, a soccer coach who had had trainings scheduled all afternoon and into the evening in Boston, the play-by-play via text since my 4 p.m. contractions, I finally called him at 7:30 p.m. right before his night practice was supposed to begin. “Hunnie – I’m having your child – please drive to the hospital!” He showed up right after 8 p.m.

The next hours were a whirlwind but I’ll do my best to remember all the juicy details. First of all, if you’d ever asked me if I had ever planned to have kids, my answer would’ve been No. And if you’d ever asked me, hypothetically, if I DID happen to have a kid if I would want my mom in the delivery room with me, my answer would’ve been, an unequivocal, NO…but there she was, not only with me through contractions, in the car with me on the way to the hospital, but was basically my doula throughout the entire birthing process. There were no words exchanged about this – there was almost just a knowing that a)she would be there b)she would not leave and c)she would do whatever I asked her to do.
By the time my man got there, they, along with my nurse and midwife, made up my delivery team.

Straight up, the contractions were – awful. All birth trainings and classes, years of yoga, meditation, breathing and video education basically goes out the window at this point, because all you want to do is lie in bed since they take so much energy out of you, yet, lying in bed is just about the worst position for contractions. I didn’t realize this at the time, until my midwife (who, by the way, had about a half dozen other patients going through the same thing at the same time) came in and let me in on this fact.
The first thing she instructed in her soft, lovely, melodic voice as she crouched by my bedside was, “Breathe, Jennie – you’re doing great – just keep breathing.”
“Lynne – you’re gonna have to be way louder and more authoritative than that throughout this process. Don’t be afraid to yell at me!” For some reason, soft voices made me nervous. She laughed.
“Try taking a hot shower,” she suggested.
Ah, yes, a hot shower. This particular facility did not have the option for a water birth or even a tub to “labor” in so a shower was the next best thing. A shower hadn’t even occurred to me. It turns out that standing up and letting the hot water run over my big belly was aMAzing…except for the fact that, again, contractions are so tiring that all you want to do is lie down. Ideally, if I could’ve lied down in some kind of bed with warm water pouring all over me, this would’ve been perfect. After about 45 minutes of shower labor, I dried off and put something on – I say something, because it wasn’t much of anything. They had this elastic fabric around my entire torso so they could intermittently monitor me and the baby via wireless devices that they stuck up in there. I think that’s all I was basically wearing, since I was damned if I was going to wear that nasty hospital johnny that had never seen fabric softener a day in it’s life. All other body parts were flapping in the wind…they aren’t lying when they say, “Once you’re in labor, all humility flies out the window.”

Like I said, the rest was kind of a blur. I went in between lying in bed on, and hugging, my yoga bolster (yes, I brought that) in between contractions, to hands and knees on my yoga mat (yes, I brought that, too), to squatting next to the bed, hugging and dancing with my midwife at one point, and in all of these positions had my baby-daddy rubbing my back, my mom rubbing my low belly, and myself vocalizing a few choice words now and again. Now when I say “lying in bed in between contractions,” this was not as glamorous as it sounds. I’ve heard women say they’ve fallen asleep during contractions, drugs or no drugs. At one point my delivery nurse said, “Wow – your contractions are lasting a really long time.” Thanks for stating the obvious. But it was good to know that not all women suffer such contractions – they were lasting almost two minutes long, and were only about a minute apart….so basically, for twelve hours, it just felt like one constant contraction a.k.a, wave of horror.
I realized that standing up and stretching out my entire torso and uterus actually felt quite good. I had wished some kind of gymnastics bar was in the room – like something I could reach up and hold onto while squatting or sitting on something. The only thing I could find, however, was the door hinge to the bathroom, which was only accessible to me by standing up on my tip-toes and barely getting my fingertips over the hinge.

Friday, March 18.
Around midnight, a big contraction coming on, I decided to roll up from my reclined position and do a deep yoga squat right next to the bed. Strangely, my mom and baby-daddy realized what had happened before I did.
“Doc! Her water broke!”
Again, I’ll spare you the details but somehow they had seen and heard it before I even felt it. My mom was psyched because when her water broke with all three of her kids, we had basically come gushing out within minutes. Two and a half hours later, I finally started pushing.
Around 2 a.m., my midwife suggested I get in another position: “How about hands and knees?” and so, down on my yoga mat, exposed to all who were in the room, I start doing the yogic cat/cow positions and all of a sudden felt this new sensation: pushing something deep down, but not really meaning to. Apparently, baby was getting lower. My nurse and midwife had told me to hold off pushing (they continued to monitor how dialated I was and wanted me to be a bit further along) unless I absolutely had to. At one point, my nurse had said, “You’re not quite dialated all the way, but if you want, during the next contraction, I can try to move your cervix out of the way.” Um, okay. Lying on the bed, my mom on one side of me, baby-daddy on the other, I’m squeezing both of them while my nurse moves my cervix out of the way…whatever that means. Let’s just say I was glad I had someone to hold onto during that one.
Next, my midwife suggested I lie down and start pushing. Cool. This must mean baby’s almost here. After a little while on my back, and feeling pretty uncomfortable with the bed all tilted in a weird way, I said during a conscious moment in between contractions, “Can I move? This isn’t really the way I had pictured giving birth.” We moved the electric bed and I went to hands and knees on the bed – ass facing the midwives. (I can’t tell you how much I wanted to thank them later for what they had done and what they do for a living – I can’t even imagine!). This worked for a while, but then, my midwife suggested moving again, “The more positions you try, the easier it will be for baby to move down and come out!” I laid on the bed again, on my back, this time the bed tilted down more so that I was a little more vertical, yoga bolster and pillow underneath my upper back. Right before 3 a.m., the room was “prepped for delivery” and I had a whole team of ladies in there with me. In between my long contractions, I would make jokes and ask each new person who came in the room, “Who are you? Welcome! Thanks for being here!” and really didn’t give a shit WHO was in the room and watching.

In the months before delivery, I had heard women warn me, “The head coming out is awful!”, “The ‘ring of fire’ is the worst”, “The baby’s shoulders felt worse than the head coming out!” Honestly, I couldn’t feel ANY of this. I had known that the contractions were there for a reason: to aid in the dropping of baby into the birth canal, and to eventually push the baby out. By the time the “pushing” stage came, I finally felt like the contractions were serving a purpose. I pushed with all my might. Huge yoga breaths. Six or so people coaching and cheering me on. And because this was my first rodeo, and at times I used my legs more than my uterus muscles, these specific instructions were given to me: “Push like you gotta poo!” I won’t mention, because of that instruction, how many times the nurse had to clean up after me…bless their hearts.
At one point, one of the new gals in the room who’s job it would be to weigh the little munchkin upon arrival said to me, “Jennie – he’s gotta come out on this next one, otherwise, it’s dangerous for his heart rate and yours.” I pushed again. We could see the head (on the huge mirror they had put for me near my nether regions!) and his full set of hair, but he was still in there. I looked at my midwife, “Is my baby okay?!”
“He’s okay, Jennie – this is all normal. Rest during this break and we’ll push again during the next wave.”
During each contraction, I tried to breathe and push two to three times. At one point, I tried to push four times in a row, and it took so much energy out of me, that I hadn’t recovered before the next contraction began. Lesson learned. Three times it was.
Finally, 4:52 a.m., I pushed. Midwife said he was coming. The head was out. She said “Continue to breathe and push slowly and consistently so his shoulders can come out, Jennie.” I think my eyes were closed. I think I was breathing. I think I was doing as she asked. I think I was pushing like I had to poo.

Many women told me and many articles reiterated that “When your baby comes out, you will be so in love, and you’ll forget everything that just happened.” I had seen pictures and videos that women were grinning ear to ear in ecstatic bliss when they held their babies. I had instructed that when my baby arrive, he immediately be placed on my chest and belly, so he could meet his momma, skin to skin. All 8 lbs 3 oz and 20 in. of him was placed immediately on top of me and I just laid there, exhausted, catching my breath, looking at him, trying to keep him on top of me, and I don’t remember smiling really at all. I remember breathing. I was glad it was over. I was glad he was here. But I still remembered EVERYTHING I had just gone through.
What I did do was chant to him immediately:
“Om a hung vajra guru padma siddhi hum.” It was the first thing he heard and he seemed to be quite mesmerized. I now can get him to bed by doing this same kind of chanting.

One month later, I fall in love with my little guy more every day and enjoy getting to know him. Some women fall in love immediately, and for some it takes time to get to know the little stranger! I write this birth story to help those women, like me, who want to know it all. Who want to know others’ birth stories so they can feel more connected to motherhood, especially in a culture where we are not brought up to know much about it at all. I write it to stay connected to the feelings and emotions and memories of that day, to give deep, deep gratitude to the women, my mom, the midwives, the nurses, and the staff who were working that day and throughout my pregnancy. I wish I could give more and hopefully someday I can. My friend Jackie, a good friend and the mother of a three-year old came to visit me and my boy and looked me in the eye and said, “Aren’t all mothers warriors?” I could’ve have said it better. I also write to pay respect to all mothers of this world – past, present, future – and all women, no matter what they have chosen to do with their lives or what decisions they have made. Like another friend mentioned to me before I gave birth, “You enter some kind of motherhood cult that you didn’t know existed before having a baby – I can’t explain it.” And it’s true – like it comes with some kind of new knowing and respect for this group of ladies. But I’ll still always remember my single 33 years and respect (and I’m sure envy) those women, whose cult I always thought I’d remain a part of.

In the days before I gave birth, I stopped at a light at a busy street corner and noticed all the people walking and driving around. I thought to myself, “Wow – someone BIRTHED all these humans!”
Respect to all women. Respect to all men (especially mine who was forever changed in that delivery room!). Respect to all.
In the words of Ellen Degeneres: “Be Kind to One Another.”

Om namah.