A spirit of power

The Birth of Liam Maxwell Max’s birth story actually begins over 4 years ago. I had just found out that I was pregnant and was so excited! We had suffered an early miscarriage before this and were overjoyed to be expecting again so soon. Everything went smoothly besides debilitating nausea, and I was having a normal healthy pregnancy. At 28 weeks I had a routine ultrasound and my Ob told me that my little girl was breech, but still had plenty of time to turn. Fast forward to 37 weeks, and my OB sounded surprised when he discovered she was still breech. Knowing what a vertex baby feels like now, I can for sure say that Dani was breech the entire pregnancy, and I had no idea. “Well” he said, “We will go ahead and schedule your c-section today, for 40 weeks. If your water breaks before then, just call me and we will get you into surgery.” Wait. WHAT??? Just like that? No other options? “ I don’t perform versions on first time moms, in fact I don’t even do them at all anymore, they are too traumatic for baby.” So that was it, no other options that I have since learned about, like Webster chiropractic, moxibuxtion, homeopathic remedies, inversions at home, etc etc. I was your typical American mom, I totally trusted my OB and never did any research or preparation beyond an 8 hour hospital birth class. So Dani was born by scheduled c-section, I had a very easy recovery ( for a c-section anyways) and was successful in breastfeeding her. Her birth story can be found in the book The Birth Next Door. I had told my doctor at my first postpartum checkup that I was not having any more c-sections that future children would be VBACs. His response was that he would love for me to do that, but he did not attend those because he would have to be at the hospital the entire time. So off I went to the internet to research options for years down the line. So I finally talked my husband into an out of hospital birth. I had decided that for my best chance at a VBAC, I needed to be comfortable, relaxed and as far away from a hospital and pain medication as possible. I just know myself and I knew that if I was in the same type of environment as where I had Dani, I was going to be defensive, fearful and anxious and my body may not open up for the baby to be born. Craig was not too happy but agreed because he wanted to be supportive of my decisions for my own body. We interviewed a few midwives and finally decided to hire one that really seemed to click personality-wise with me and my family, and was very comfortable with VBACs. I liked that she was very laid back and easy-going, not making a big deal out of my past. I had also heard through the grapevine that if my birth got intense she could get bossy if need be. “Good” I thought, “I need bossy because I have never had labor! I am new at this!” This pregnancy was completely different. My nausea disappeared after 15 weeks, praise the Lord! We decided to find out the sex and we were having a boy. This time we prepared for the birth by taking natural childbirth classes. I also read everything I could get my hands on about natural birth ( or re-read it, since I had already been reading about it for over three years!) I felt prepared. My daughter and I read a book called Mama, Talk About When Max was Born, and she started calling the baby in my tummy “Max”. She and I also watched tons of birth videos and talked about sounds I might make. ( I called them “special songs” that the mom sings to help the baby come out. I totally stole that from a friend but it makes sense to a three year old!) I also told her that she may see some blood, and that it was all normal. I wasn’t sure if she was going to be at the house for the birth but I wanted her to be ready too. We loved our checkups with our midwife Mollie, and playing “midwife” was a favorite pastime of Dani’s for a while! I started seeing a chiropractor that Mollie had recommended in the last trimester to deal with some pelvic pain, and some positional issues. All through pregnancy, we had been talking to baby. “Head down, baby! Head down!” Well, he listened to that but was being stubborn about getting stuck in a posterior position. I didn’t want to deal with an extra long labor or back labor because of bad positioning so we started going every couple of weeks and also doing some inversions and pelvic tilts at home. Later on in pregnancy, Dr. Kristen my chiropractor also had me start binding my belly up to encourage him to move anterior. 39 weeks rolls around and I am starting to get the daily phone calls from family members. “Nope, no sign of baby yet!” I would always say. Everyone was on baby watch except for me, haha! I literally did not think I was going to have this baby anytime soon. Or maybe I was in denial because I was feeling a bit nervous about labor even with all my preparation. The evening of my due date, my husband and I got into a huge argument over dinner about how we would proceed if I went longer and longer past my due date. I should mention that he is a 3rd year medical student and was doing his OB rotations at the same time. I angrily texted my midwife that Craig was being horrible and I couldn’t stand it!! She patiently talked me down and gave me some wonderful birth affirmations to read and write down. Little things like that make me so glad I chose a midwife for this pregnancy. I think texting one of your patients about marital strife at nine PM and offering advice is outside the realm of most OB’s! So off to bed I went. In the morning I was planning on making a bulletin board with some affirmations written on it. Haha, yeah right!! That night at 3 AM I awoke with regular contractions that were too annoying to sleep through. “Gasp!” I thought. “Could this be it? What an idiot I am for getting into an argument with Craig about going later than 42 weeks!” According to our birth classes I was supposed to go back to sleep and rest up for the long haul of labor. If only I could!! The contractions were already too strong to sleep through. Craig got up at 3:30 to get ready for his day at the hospital and I was so excited. “I think today is the day!” I told him. Contractions were pretty irregularly spaced and some were stronger than others. I lost what appeared to be a mucous plug and then had some blood when I was using the bathroom. Awesome! So I sent Craig off to work and hunkered down on the couch with some nice relaxing techno music. (Relaxing to me anyways!) Nope, lying in the couch sucks. So I was up swaying my hips and humming along through each contraction. Sending Craig lovely texts like “Whoohoo, just had diarrhea. I think this is real”. I’m sure he was on pins and needles for the next text!! When Dani got up and the sun came up, things slowed down. My stepdaughter Sarah and I made breakfast and then went for a walk with Dani. Ugh, that walk was awful. It was hot and humid, Dani cried the whole time because I couldn’t carry her, and then the contractions picked up so it took like 20 minutes to go one block to get back into air conditioning. Whose idea was this for me to be due in July in Texas? Oh yeah, I forgot it was mine. So the morning proceeded along, I texted my midwife a couple times and then called her to tell her I was in labor. “Rest” she answered back “You are just warming up for tonight” So when Dani laid down for a nap I tried a hot shower and laid on the bed. Sigh. Ahh, so comfy. OK, here comes a contraction and I am scrambling out of that bed so fast. The only thing that felt good was to be standing up, leaning over on something, swaying and humming a low sound. My mom came over and I started a roast chicken. I figured I would need something to feed everybody later. By this time it was after lunch and I was having some pretty good back labor going on. I texted Craig that I was going to need him before he would normally get home at 6pm. He got home around 3 PM and started putting pressure on my lower back, ahhhh that was better. We send my doula, Julie, a message to give her a couple hours to get ready and find someone to watch her kids. I also have a friend who was using me for a photography project so I texted her as well. My texts by this time were getting shorter and shorter! We all headed back to the bedroom to watch Craig inflate the birth tub. When it was full of air, Dani attempted to run around the house inside of it like a gerbil in a wheel. I figured she might be getting cabin fever when she started jumping on the bed and shouting “I want Max to be born RIGHT NOW!!!!” so we called my mom to come get her for a few hours. Julie came over and started doing some relaxing things with her rebozo, like lifting up my belly and jigging my whole body. “Its hard to be tense when you are getting jiggled” she said, and it was nice! Sarah, Craig and Julie were all taking turns putting pressure on my back during contractions and warming up a hot pack to keep on there. I was getting a bit tired by now since it had been so long since I could lay down and rest. Like Ina May Gaskin suggests in her book “Guide to Childbirth” I tried “smooching” Craig during a contraction and that was actually very relaxing and a nice way to take some of the intensity away. Also laughing was wonderful. I would be laboring on my birth ball during a contraction and my cat would race in the room, do a circle around us at full speed and race out again. In the middle of sounding out a contraction I would just burst out laughing at his antics and it really helped the intensity. The hot shower was nice to run over my lower back too. Our midwife texted and suggested that we call Dr. Kristen to come do a house call to work on my back labor. When she got there I was in the “walking around in your underwear stage” of labor , I must have been making progress! When she asked me to lay on the bed I may have looked horrified at the idea, since contractions on the bed are from the devil, but once she got out her activator and started adjusting me I felt soooo much better. I was almost able to take a tiny nap!! And my back labor was GONE. Just like that. However, once my back labor was gone the first contraction I had was WOW. Different, and STRONG. I grabbed Craig’s face and stared in his eyes just to focus on something besides this crazy contraction. He looked at me like “What the hell??!!” “Don’t move!” I told him. Then phew it was over. Dr. Kristen said when your contractions change their nature, the first one is always intense because it’s different than what you have been dealing with. So after she left we decided that our midwife could come over, since things were getting a bit more, “Exciting” shall we say? I was still bouncing around on my birth ball and cracking jokes between contractions but they were pretty close together and pretty strong. I think she got here around 8 pm. By this time I had been in labor for 17 hours. She checked me and I was 7 cm dilated! YES!! I could do this! I was overjoyed. Mollie said, “Rachel if this is how you labor then you need to have 12 more kids!” My Mom came back with Dani and I was so happy, “Mom!! I am 7 cm!” (Fill in the blanks with “And I don’t even feel one of need for pain meds! Whoohoo!!” ) I think I was secretly waiting for our midwife to get there because after that, things get hazy and foggy, I must have started transition. I had been smootching Craig, and hanging off his neck for hours by now, and I started cracking jokes about how “I was sorry, but I was not going to make out with anyone else but Craig.” Akward! It sounded so funny in my head at the time. At some point my mother in law came over and was showing me some baby clothes she bought. It was all like a weird dream. My underwear had disappeared long, long ago and I hadn’t even noticed. Somebody must have gotten a hold of Mae, my photographer friend because she showed up and started snapping pics. Mollie told me that her normal person that she calls to back her up at VBACs was at a birth and so were two others so she called Dr. Kristen to come assist her. “Cool” I thought, “She was awesome earlier” Dani was so cute she kept coming in to check up on me. She was handling things great, it was like old hat to her! You would think she had seen her mommy give birth several times. Once she announced. “I’m not gonna cut the ‘bilical cord Mommy, I’m just gonna watch” This is with me being extremely vocal, I was impressed with my little 3 year old! I got into the birth tub but just couldn’t get comfortable. It felt great until a contraction hit and then it was too shallow for me to be on all fours and have the water where it felt good, so I got out after only a few minutes. All this time I was talking to my body and the baby. “I just want to open up and let this baby out” “Relax shoulders, relax legs, relax my mouth” Etc. Around 11 pm my groaning and mooing started having some long grunts at the end. I could hear Mae’s camera snapping away and I felt like a movie star in my head! A sweaty, crazy hair, mooing movie star. Mollie checked me and said I had an anterior lip of cervix that she moved and then my water broke. I was really feeling pushy but not really getting anything accomplished at this point. I think around midnight we really got down to business. I have to say, I really liked being in labor. I liked relaxing, being close to Craig, visiting with friends and family and being surrounded by supportive people. I thought I would like pushing too but not so much. I might have liked the first hour or so. I should say, it was too much like exercise! I hate exercising!! Our doula and Sarah were keeping me supplied with honey and coconut water since I had stopped having an appetite hours before. We were trying all different pushing positions. I was on the bed, playing tug of war with my doula with a knotted sheet. “You’re so strong! You’re practically pulling me off my feet!” She said. That was really encouraging to me because even though we had just started pushing, I was already pretty tired. All of a sudden I said, “I hate that sheet!” Of course, the sheet was making me work too hard! In my head, it wasn’t this birth, it was the sheet that was making me work! Mollie was using pressure on my perineum to help me know where to push. “Push here, push my fingers out” OK. After a while I said, “I think I’m getting good at this!” Then we moved to the floor to see if Dr. Kristen could get the baby into a better position through some contractions. I was past having any rational thoughts at this point or decision making skills, so whatever they were telling me to do I just did it. I was bent over on the birth ball, then Dr. Kristen would use her hands pressed into my pelvis, then when a contraction started I was supposed to rise up on my knees suddenly and push with my back arched like a cat. Whew! This is KILLING my attention deficit! I remember yelling “I don’t like this!!!!” but I could feel baby moving around in there and moving down. I didn’t know until they told me later that we were trying to get Max’s shoulders unstuck from high up in my pelvis. Then we did some other pushing like hanging off the end of the bed, and then using Craig for support while I hung off of him. Probably hours went by like this but I just kept taking it one contraction at a time, and I had no sense of time at all. Somehow we ended up on the floor, with me laying back on Craig and holding my knees up to push. It was getting exciting! Mollie had her flashlight out and her business face on, and I could hear packages being ripped open, I assumed to get something ready for baby’s arrival. I thought I was seeing the “sparkly lights” that people talk about when you are high on endorphins, but it was actually Mollie’s flashlight. Dang it, no sparkly lights for me. I knew pushing would be hard work but I was amazed at the sheer physical exertion of it, and that I just had to keep going, push after push. I was running out of steam so I started praying aloud for strength. During one contraction, I felt a calf cramp starting. “Oh Hell no!” I thought. “I can handle ANYTHING this labor throws at me but if I get a calf cramp I am going to scream like a little girl!!” What came out of my mouth was a caveman grunt- “Leg. Cramping. Someone rub it” Somebody said “She needs more potassium” and shoved another drink of coconut water at me. That seemed to help, and also Sarah rubbed it as I was pushing. Mollie kept updating me. “ I can see this much head!” Holding up her fingers in a little circle. My shaking hand almost didn’t cooperate to reach down and feel it. How cool! My son was almost here! I heard Mollie instructing someone to put some oil in a peri bottle and then Craig telling whoever it was, where the coconut oil is kept. “I can see this much head now!” A bigger circle. More and more pushes. OK. Lets get this done! The next push I could feel a light stretching. Not the infamous “Ring of fire” more like the “Ring of pushing for almost 4 hours so everything is pretty much numb down there”. I see Mollie squirting coconut oil all over the place down there. ( In my head, I thought, “use for coconut oil number 482: perineum dousing during crowning!”) “He’s out up to his hears!” came Mollie’s update. I reached down and felt since my body was getting little breaks in between pushing. WOW. That is so amazing. My boy!!!! I could feel his feet pushing up on the top of my uterus as he was waiting to come out the rest of the way. He was getting excited to meet us too! The next contraction his head came out, then Mollie was working on getting his shoulders out, then I felt a whoosh as he slid out all the way! Sarah took him from Mollie and put him on my chest, Oh the elation! He was all hot and slimy and limp. He smelled wonderful. His full head of hair was tickling my chin. He took a second to make a sound, then I heard his sweet cry. All I could say over and over was “I did it! Craig we did it! He is beautiful! Thank you God!!” I felt like I was in love with everyone in the room. I guess that’s why they call oxytocin “the love hormone”! I looked up and my mom and Dani had come in right as he was born. Dani said the baby woke her up, but he hadn’t made a sound yet. My Mom thinks the Lord woke her up to come see her brother be born, when she told me that later I got chills. I was bleeding a bit so Mollie gave me a Pitocin shot in the thigh while the baby was nursing on my chest. I could hear my boy just guzzling down colostrum. His cord pulsed for 30 minutes or so then my placenta was delivered. I had a second degree tear but I never felt it. The only part of labor that actually “hurt” was the lidocaine injections to get stitched up, I felt like such a baby practically jumping off the bed when my poor midwife was trying to take care of things down there. The baby got a bath from Daddy after he cut the cord, then his newborn exam. 9lbs 1 oz and 19.5 inches. Almost an inch shorter than his sister was and a pound heavier! I have to say, he looked and felt A LOT bigger to me!! Time of birth, 4:01 AM, almost exactly 25 hours since I had woken up with contractions the night before. He had a tiny skin tag over his spine, and I must have been SO blissed out on endorphins because I giggled and said “My baby has a tail!” His ears were also squished flat from his trip through the birth canal so then my crazy brain thought “How cute! He has monkey ears and a tail!” Everyone else looked worried so I figured I should try to be serious after that. ( We had it ultra sounded and it is nothing more than a skin tag) Just goes to show how amazing your body is at providing pain relief (in a relaxed, comfortable, low light situation) to a laboring Mommy and baby through natural hormones because I felt so, so drunk. After I took a quick bath we all got tucked into bed, then somebody said the sweetest words I had heard in 30 hours: “Latch him on and go to sleep” Dani climbed into bed with us and we all zonked out. Some things of interest- never once during labor did I have thoughts of fear or worry about what was going on, or if my scar was going to hold. One time I did think, “Hey, I haven’t thought about my scar!” but that was it. Even when things were getting pretty intense I had complete trust in my birth team and I was never afraid. I think I said at some point “I’m scared!” but I couldn’t really articulate what I was feeling. It wasn’t actually fear so much as the fact that my body was doing some really powerful things and I wasn’t in control of it at all, which was pretty intimidating. I wouldn’t describe this birth as “painful”. Powerful, intense, and exhausting to be sure but on the whole not painful. I had a handful of painful contractions but it was all positional related (one on the bed, one halfway in and out of the bathtub, etc.) I am also so glad we had the baby at home. It was so comfortable and stress free ( for me at least!) and so wonderful to crawl into my own bed afterwards. And what an awesome birth team! Being at home also meant that I didn’t need to drive somewhere which was a big plus. I truly truly believe that if we were in a hospital our birth would not have been as gentle for either Max or I. The next day my sweet girl said “Mommy, you had to sing A LOT of songs to get Max to come out!” My Grama sent me a letter a few days later and told me right around the time I was laboring, she was reading a book and came upon this quote, which I just love: “How the wind had howled and the seas had tossed, and inside the great house, in the grand bed, his mother had borne down like a warrior and shot him out into his father’s waiting arms with a laugh.” Mae's blog post with her beautiful pics can be found here: http://maeburkephotography.com/blog/?load=blog_detail&page=38433&item=663&fb_action_ids=10151966600335263&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_source=timeline_og&action_object_map={%2210151966600335263%22%3A10151070683199297}&action_type_map={%2210151966600335263%22%3A%22og.likes%22}&action_ref_map=[] Hanging out in the tub.