I've never written a birth story in blog form before, but I'm going to try now.
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6:45 pm, Thursday, January 28.
I am getting a lot of attention, because I am nine months pregnant and I am vigorously exercising on a stair-stepper at the YMCA. I have exercised three times a week through the entire pregnancy, but this is a first for me, and apparently also a first for the staff and everyone around, because strangers keep coming up to me and expressing their amazement.
"Wow! When are you due?"
"Today."
"WOW."
I am climbing today because my homebirth midwives suggested I climb steps to encourage my posterior baby to turn around before he engages in my pelvis. Supposedly the side-to-side swaying and rotation will shake him up a bit and let him find the slightly more auspicious way out. I am more than a little worried about the posterior presentation. I know that babies are born posterior, that it is common and not normally something to be concerned about; but I have a history of babies with "sticky shoulders" at birth, and I am unhappy about suboptimal positioning of any kind. Climbing stairs at home is boring. Hence the Y and the stairclimbing machine.
I'm really throwing my hips into it. Mark stops by between weightlifting sets to see how I'm doing. "Surprisingly good," I puff. "I wish I'd tried doing this earlier, when I first had to stop running. It feels somehow more comfortable than walking — something about the kind of hip movement. No waddling." He laughs at me and goes back to his workout. I finish — twenty minutes seems like enough — and head for the showers.
I love a good hot shower, and the showers at the Y are powerful and never run out of hot water. It's in the shower that the first strong contraction of the evening grips me. This is a neutral event, because I have been having contractions for many days. They have never settled into a regular pattern. And the regular pattern is what we are waiting for, the one-minute-long contractions spaced regularly apart. This according to V___, the younger of my two professional, traditional homebirth midwives. This makes sense to me, because I remember that pattern from my three previous births. The regularly spaced contractions, when they appeared, were the ones that led to a birth.
V___ attended the last two of my births as an apprentice to J___, one of the most experienced midwives in the area, and a "traditional" midwife through and through. J___ has been my midwife for all of them. I asked V___ to join my birth team as a second midwife because, after 2 births complicated by mild shoulder dystocia, I decided I had to assume we'd see it again — that it's not so much the babies' sticky shoulders, but rather my own sticky pelvic outlet. Serious shoulder dystocia is less likely to happen at home where I can move freely, and J___ has proved her competency twice, maneuvering my mildly-stuck babies over the threshold. So I'm still headed home, not to a hospital. But I'm still cautious — so I've got two midwives, including V___ who lives quite close, because with that history I do not want an unassisted birth. I'm especially glad this week to have two, because by chance J___ has attended two difficult births in the last couple of days, and we know she is probably hoping to get some rest.
We arrive home, make bedtime snack, send the children upstairs, and start cleaning the kitchen. The contractions keep up. I am not really paying attention to the spacing. They are short, strong contractions. I begin to have trouble paying attention to the cleaning up. I am pacing around the house, unsettled. Should we call the midwives? Should we call my friend Hannah, who comes as a sort of all-purpose supporter? I have trouble with this question and want Mark to make the decision. We eventually decide the pattern is not strong enough, so we go to bed around 10.
Mark drops off almost immediately and I lie in the dark for a couple of hours, feeling the contractions. They <em>seem</em> more regular, but I'm not sure. <em>Data, I need data</em>, I remind myself, and so I look at the clock and try to time them. But something seems to be wrong with my memory, because as soon as a new one starts, I can't remember what time the last one started. I need pencil and paper, but somehow the thought of going to find these tools overwhelms me. So I lie there, breathe through contractions that I can't quite get a mental grip on, and getting more worried about the "Should I call the midwives?" question, and at the same time am dimly aware, and frustrated, that I can't seem to think rationally. I get up to get a pencil, but all I can do is pace back and forth. The tension rises in my chest and my throat and tears prick my eyelids. I decide to wake Mark.
"Mark, please — you have to time these for me, I can't do it myself."
Mark does not wake up well. "Give me a minute," he mutters at me, grumpy at being awakened. I suddenly want to strangle him. I have been through this before, I know he doesn't have full control of his faculties until he wakes up, I know that this will pass, and I bite my lip so I don't yell at him. And he does stop grumbling, he does wake up (petulantly, I wish he would apologize). He sits up, finds his glasses, squints at his watch, and I tell him: Here comes one. And again. Here comes another one. And again.
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