Labor was hard.  My family was all around me, and that helped a lot, as well as my midwife Robin and my doula Terri who were both very skilled and very reassuring.  I really loved the birth tub.  That first night, I was sure he was ready to come out -- oh, how wrong I was!  I was only around 6 centi 

meters.  My midwife was really hands-off, so I wondered why she checked me, but I didn’t have time to think about it.  I don’t really remember the pain, just the fear and frustration.  I remember tapping my headboard when the contractions were ending.  Once, I punched the sturdy coffee table in our living room, and another time I hit my husband with the stainless steel placenta bowl.  I felt really bad, but he said it didn’t hurt.  The double hip squeeze felt good, but only if it was done just right.  Mostly I remember wanting things to get moving, wanting my contractions to get closer together.  It felt like things were going agonizingly slowly.  Finally by morning, they gave me a wine cooler which I drank half of and I got a little bit of rest.  When I woke up, suddenly I felt water pouring over my legs, and I called out for help from my mom and my aunt.  Why did I feel so helpless?  My water had broken, about 24 hours after labor began!  Then, I felt much better, like the pressure I’d been feeling for weeks had been relieved and I could breath again -- but soon things got harder.   

My midwife made me go for a walk outside with my husband and my family, taking the 2 flights of stairs 2 steps at a time.  It was cool and crisp outside, and it felt refreshing.  I think I wished I could labor outside.  Back inside, I was in and out of the birth tub, but it was really slowing my contractions down, so I stayed out of it a lot. Later in the day, I made a bargain with my midwife that I could get in the tub if I walked the stairs twice, 2 steps at a time again.  I did it and then stripped my clothes off almost before I was in the door as I headed for the tub.  I really liked putting my back against the heating element.  It hurt so much and I just wanted to sleep.  I had tried to eat some of my favorite tofu dish, but I think I threw up afterwards.  They kept trying to give me honey straight on my tongue, and I refused until my husband did it to show me it was okay, and then I figured I had to.  I was hungry, but didn’t want to eat at all.

When the sun set on my laboring for the second time, I thought, how much longer can this go on?  Finally, in the dark middle of the night, my midwife checked me and I was nearly 10 cm.  Later, she said she's never seen anyone so coherent during transition.  What was the deal with me?  When would I feel the urge to push?  Would I ever?  Part of me, or maybe most of me, believed that I would push and push and nothing would come out.  We would have to tell everyone, oops, it was just a bad bout of gas.  Sorry!   

Well, finally, after a lot of leaning on the birth ball, I started to feel pushy.  For hours, I pushed in every possible position: straddling my husband's lap, sitting on the birth stool, sitting on the birth stool backwards (that’s when I heard the pop that I later learned was my tailbone, ouch), squatting, side-lying, on all fours, it goes on.  We tried the towel-pull, and we tried having me on all fours pushing against my poor husband's fists on my butt.  Someone kept saying the baby was just trying to get past the pubic bone.   

Finally, exhausted, my husband broke down.  Suddenly I noticed our bedroom was empty but for the two of us, and as I looked at him to ask where everyone was, I noticed he was crying.  "This is too hard," he said.  "This is how it's supposed to be," I said, in a moment of calm between contractions, "labor is just hard, but the baby is okay."  I was squatting on the birth stool and I reached up and hugged him and touched his face.  How could this be harder for him than for me?   

Something happened to me at that moment, in our quiet, dark bedroom looking at my husband suffering for me, and I knew it had to happen soon, for all our sakes.  I thought of his love for me and I felt so much empathy for his suffering, and without really knowing it, I resolved to do this for him.  Then, afraid and not able to comfort him, I called for the women, my mother, my aunt, my doula, my midwife.  I don't remember how long it was, but soon I was on the bed on my back and my doula was checking my baby's heartrate which was perfect and my midwife was explaining fundal pressure to me.  She was telling me (or was that earlier?) that I had to give this everything I had.  I remember the upward arc of the contraction: beginning to push, using all my strength and feeling like I had nothing left, and then visualizing all the women in the world, all the strong birthing women, and I asked them for their strength.  And I asked God, whoever you are, if I ever needed you, it's now, forget the rambling confusions of theology, this is our only moment.  And I drew down the whole universe, the spinning galaxies and the blue expanses of stars in the edgeless blackness, and the sun and the whirling planets, and every woman who ever lived and I pushed with all that strength, hoping and pushing away the thoughts that this was all too ridiculous to be helping. 

I am a labor doula, so when they started telling me they could see my baby’s head, I thought to myself, “Yeah right.  I’ve said that, too, when the baby’s not even crowning yet, you can’t fool me.”  Still, I was excited.  At least it was more than just gas!  Then they could see his black hair, under what my midwife called, “the membranes of steel.”  I don’t know how long it was, but their excited words reached a crescendo and they said “Just one more big push!”  “Yeah, right,” I thought.  Then another big push, and another, and my midwife was doing her thing at the top of my belly, and my mom was catching and all of a sudden I felt the most enormous sense of relief, and my midwife was down with my mom and I was collapsing next to my husband in our bed.  “One more push,” she said, and then something like, “reach down and grab your baby.”  I don’t know how I did, but I bent forward and grabbed him under his tiny arms and felt him slide out of me as I pulled him up above me and gasped, “it’s a boy!”  I settled him, or he collapsed, into the crook of my arm, his long body along the side of my now flat belly, and said, “he has his daddy’s lips!”  And that was just the beginning. 

-Jenney