A Natural Birth?

Mark the midwife delivered me to Meg the midwife at 42 weeks and 3 days pregnant. Meg was young and cool and unassuming and she was assigned to the delivery suite. I liked her a lot. In the suite there was a bed and some space and a private toilet and shower. In the corner was some medical stuff that made me feel nervous so instead I concentrated on the curtains on the window. It felt almost homely. My husband soon arrived and we were reunited on the 7th anniversary of our wedding day. You couldn’t make it up. I wouldn’t let go of his hand and I asked him to sit on the bed. Not on the chair, not leaning against the wall. Right there by my side, where he should have been all along. We talked through the plan of action with a lady who didn’t seem to fit. I don’t know her name or her job title but I remember she wasn’t wearing a uniform and I thought that she could simply have been a passer-by who they’d wheeked off the street to deal with the awkward lady. Me. But when she started talking about a cord prolapse I thought, “Oh. She must be very important indeed.”

By breaking my waters the team were hoping the baby would shoot down into my pelvis, putting pressure on my cervix. There was a risk however that the umbilical cord could get in the way and be crushed by the baby’s head. Then the placenta wouldn’t continue to be his life support. That would be a category 1 emergency. Someone would press an emergency buzzer, people would flood the room and take me to theatre for an emergency c-section. Brad would miss the birth.

“Is that OK? Do you understand?”

Throughout the very detailed explanation I had somehow managed to get into a lying down position on the bed. My bottom half was naked and my legs were in stirrups. There were now 7 people in the room including me and Brad and our baby. No-one could see the baby, but we could all hear his steady heartbeat. I know that I definitely got myself into this new position as everyone has been very impressed at how easily I’d thrown my legs into the air at 42 weeks and 3 days pregnant. There were jokes at that point.

But after the cat 1 emergency chat I was thinking, woah woah woah. To be quite frank, everyone could just back the fuck off. That scenario did not sound like one I wanted to be in. I would kindly put my vulva away and me, my husband and my baby would just hang out in here, I thought.

That’s not what I said though. Instead, I wiggled my hips a bit and realised there was no way I was getting out of the stirrups as easily as I’d got in them. I said something along the lines of, “No thank you, that won’t be necessary. Just book me in for a c-section at whatever time suits you.”

There were shocked faces all around.

The passer-by/very important lady calmly told me that she really didn’t think the cord was going to prolapse. Although breaking my waters might hurt a bit there was gas and air available and this really was the best chance of a natural delivery, she said. She made me feel better but I couldn’t help but feel like there was nothing natural about what had happened to me since I stepped over her threshold at 42 weeks pregnant. She asked if they could proceed and I agreed. My husband held my hand while a man we’d never met entered my body and broke my waters. I used breathing techniques to cope as I wanted to save the gas and air. Everyone told me how well I’d done but I’m not really sure what all the fuss was about. It was just like an enthusiastic smear test. There was a gush of water but it was nothing like what you see in the movies. When the 4 professionals left the suite I had a wire coming out from between my legs where a clip had been placed onto my baby’s head for monitoring.

I now had a drip attached and Brad coached me through very definite contractions using the breathing techniques that we had practised for months. We played Fleetwood Mac, ate whole foods and drank Lucozade exactly like the books had told us to.

Soon I was dutifully having 4 contractions every 10 minutes. This was active labour. It felt like I’d been rushed to it, simply because my notes read T + 17. No complications, no signs of distress just a schedule to keep. But despite the rush, I loved it. There were a few unfortunate incidents with bodily fluids but it’s safe to say that having babies is just messy business. Meg left us alone but popped in now and again to check all the machines were bleeping accordingly. I remember breathing through a pretty heavy contraction when Meg slipped in and placed a tiny woollen hat in a plastic cot that I hadn’t noticed in the corner of the room. That tiny gesture meant the world to me. It told me that Meg believed that I was going to have a baby. A baby who would leave my body and be naked and who might need a tiny green hat. I love that hat.

A few hours later with Fleetwood Mac on repeat it was time for the shift change. I think the new midwife’s name was Tracey but I’m not really sure. She was different to Meg’s quiet unassuming presence. She told me that I would be having my baby before she left her shift at 7am the next morning.

I’d been in hospital for almost 4 days at that point and had accepted that the one huge benefit to not birthing my baby at home was having access to shit loads of pain-relieving drugs. Somewhere along the line I’d decided that I’d quite like to try anything they were willing to give me. In for a penny, in for a pound and all that. I had managed the contractions through breath and tried to stay mobile. I was unexpectedly quiet and introverted, not the loud show off that Brad and I had imagined. It wasn’t easy wheeling the drip around with me, terrified of ripping the clip off my baby’s head with my vagina. I moved onto gas and air and I got the giggles. Brad tried it too and we spoke about getting head piercings to match what we imagined would be a hole on our baby’s head from the clip that I hadn’t wanted him to have.

But the jokes only took me so far and my body was tiring from the contractions and the previous nights of poor sleep. So I asked for some pain relief. An epidural was suggested but in the interim I accepted Pethidine as a short-term fix.

Pethidine is an injection administered by a midwife and for me it was a bit like being equally drunk and high at the same time. My words were slurred and my limbs were heavy but the whole experience was in high definition. I was hyper aware but not in control of my body. I wanted to tell a story about a fridge but it all got mixed up so instead I told a joke about a vampire. It wasn’t very funny at all. The anaesthetist came and I had to lean over so that she could stab my spine for the epidural but I really didn’t feel like I could hold myself up. I kept saying that I was going to fall and so Tracey held me up. I fell into a deep and drug fuelled sleep for an hour and a half whilst Brad pressed my epidural button every 20 minutes and my womb continued to contract.

When I woke, I had no idea what time it was or what had been going on. The Pethidine had worn off and I was able to make some clear and rational decisions despite being unable to move my body. In my head I had been setting little targets. I now needed to know how well the drugs and wires had managed to make my body do what I knew it was capable of doing, had it just been given more time. The team around me needed to know too. I accepted a vaginal examination. My heart was set on 7cms. 7cms and I would go another couple of hours and push this baby out on our wedding anniversary. Seen as I’d forgotten to get Brad a card. Brad hadn’t forgotten. He’d given me a card which had eggs and bacon on the front and he’d drawn a tiny little baby baked bean between them and labelled them us. I opened my legs for Tracey and she told me the news. 3 centimetres. Enough to push a tiny baked bean through. But not a baby.

Tracey couldn’t tell me if I would ever get to 10 centimetres and I was spent. Physically and emotionally. It was simply time for me to meet my baby. At the time I felt like I’d failed but now, I’m proud. I avoided trauma, I stayed strong and I requested a c-section when the time was right for me. I soon learned that the consultant who would perform the operation was the one who had stood at the end of my bed 2 nights previously and tried to scare me into theatre before I was ready. When he handed me the consent form, I signed it. Consent is a very powerful thing.

Being wheeled into theatre was wonderful. My husband was wearing scrubs and there was a whole cast awaiting us, all in their variously coloured costumes. Initially, I was frightened by their shining silver tools, lined up on the props table. I told my husband and he told me to focus on him, so I missed the curtain being lifted at the start of the show. Someone asked if I could feel any sensation and I said I couldn’t. These lines were rehearsed, that is what you are supposed to say when they ask. But then I thought I could feel something so I told them and they took an early interval. We were off script now.

“We’ve just made a pretty big incision. You’d know if you could feel it.”

Everyone was calm. It was pretty how all these people danced around us in our own private theatre. I was centre-stage and my husband whispered a private score in my ear.

And then it was over. My baby was crying and he was held up high in the air and I saw his bright blue balls between his legs. It was the most beautiful thing. There were no fireworks, no applause, not one singular moment of still. He was placed on my naked chest and I held him amongst my wires and I told him over and over again, “I’m your mummy. I’m your mum. I’m yours.”

Now, I can look back and see those moments for what they really were. Leading up to Atticus’ birth I had been thinking about what it would be like for me to have a baby. For him to be mine. Some mothers bond with their babies instantly after birth. For others it takes weeks or months. For me, it was about a day or so before I began to understand it. Maybe it was when we broke out of mama jail, I mean hospital, together. But that’s another story. The moment my son was born at 2.37am on the 11th of August 2020 was the moment that I was given my place. Giving birth wasn’t about him being mine. It was about me being his. I belong now. I belong to him.

And that is the most natural thing in the world.