giving birth is easy! (if you're on drugs)

It’s Christmas!  So today I am going to recycle something that I wrote a year ago, a few weeks after my son was born.  It’s the story of how I became a mom.  Don’t worry, no blood and guts. To kind of get the mood going, I thought I’d start out with some pictures of my belly when I was pregnant and then go from there.

31 weeks

and 38 weeks

(see how my stomach is just kind of hanging off the front of my body?  Believe me, it felt as creepy as it looked)

November 2004

It's been three whole weeks now and it still hasn't completely sunk in yet that I am a mom.  Mostly what I can't believe is how much energy I put into fearing childbirth and how little time I spent thinking about what happens after.  I think I was convinced, even until the very end, that something would go wrong.  How does a person who is pregnant for nine whole months still not get that at the end of it there will be a baby?  Even in the hospital when they were explaining the security system to me, and they showed me the wrist bands that Eli, the baby and I would be wearing for our stay, I kept thinking, yeah, well, at least they're there if we need them.

Complete denial.

I took every labor story I've ever heard and focused only on the ones with the worst outcome.  It was easy because it seems like once you're pregnant everyone likes to scare you with the worst stories they can think of to tell you.  No one tells you about the friend they have who had a short, painless labor.  It's always the stories about jaundice, episiotomies and emergency c-sections.  Toward the end I was positive that something would go wrong with either me or the baby.  And I know that this is what happens when you don't deal with your shit.  I had an ectopic pregnancy two years ago and I never really worked it out.  I mean, I thought I did but really what I really did is tuck it away in a dark corner and tried to never think about it. 

At my 12 week exam, during a conversation about my medical history, I told one of my doctors about the ectopic.  She asked me if I'd had any therapy for it and when I told her no she suggested that maybe I attend a meeting to talk about it with other couples who have had a pregnancy loss.  And all I could think about was how stupid I would feel sitting there pregnant with all these people who maybe couldn't have children, and mourning over a baby that was never meant to be for us.  I thought I should just try to focus on this pregnancy; the one that was working out.  But now I get what she meant.  Maybe if I had dealt with it and worked through it I wouldn't remain convinced that the worst case scenario will always and forever be my outcome when it comes to reproduction.  Maybe I could have spent months gleefully planning for my baby and shopping for my baby and talking about my baby without the moments of cold fear that would grip my heart until I could barely breathe reminding me that I was just kidding myself. Don't ever get too secure because something is going to go wrong.

Anyway, I had my baby and it was the most moving, emotional, painful, and important day of my life.  I don't know if it was the drugs (natural birth is for suckas!  I had every drug they would give me.  I got a sleeping pill the night before, drugs in my IV, an injection in my ass and then when that still wasn't enough I topped it all off with a big fat epidural), the short labor (3.5 hours), or the enormous realization that my body, over the period of a few short months, had made a whole new person, but when my baby was born I lost my mind. 

I was hoping I wouldn't be a screamer, but you never know what kind of things you'll do in labor until you're there.  Turns out I am not a screamer, I am a crier instead.  I swore a couple of times under my breath and I told the nurse not to bother calling the anesthesiologist for the epidural, and being sweet she said, "why's that, honey?" and I said, "because by the time he gets here I WILL BE DEAD!"  But then the pain became so fierce I didn't have the energy to carry on and throw fits.  I curled into a ball on the bed and wept.  I just checked out.  It's kind of funny to me now to think about it.  I was not strong like the women who give birth on TV, I did not grit my teeth and just breathe through the contractions like a champ.  I didn't even yell and scream and try to hurt Eli like I thought I would.  No.  I broke the fuck down, and I wept through my whole labor.

My labor was induced so maybe that's why it was so excruciating.  I've heard of people who aren't affected by pitocin, but it turns out I am not one of them.  I was happily eating a bagel in my hospital bed at 8 am when they started the pitocin.  Eli went home to have a quick shower since we'd stayed in the hospital the night before for cervix ripening and fetal monitoring.  There was a medical student assigned to me and she stayed with me in my room and talked to me while Eli was gone.  We talked about having babies and school and our medical histories.  I told her about my ectopic, she told me about her miscarriages.  It was all very surreal but it kept my mind off what was happening.

Which was nothing, really.  My doctor came in at 8:30, frowned when he saw the smile on my face and told me he was going to take my smile away. He broke my water and immediately I started to have cramps and from that point on everything quickly got horrible.  I'd brought all kinds of things with me to the hospital to help me get through labor.  I had a birthing ball, magazines, books, a deck of cards...I briefly thought about bringing my Playstation, but I figured they wouldn't have the right hookups for it.  It's painfully obvious to me now that I had no idea what labor is like.  You don't read or flip through magazines during labor.  And you certainly don't play fucking cards. The only thing I was able to do while I was in labor was try not to die.  That's it.  My birthing ball never even made it out of the trunk of the car.

Right after my doctor broke my water, the nurse suggested I try to sit in the rocking chair and suck on a popsicle.  I know I wasn't in too much pain at that point because when she asked me which flavor I wanted, I was able to give her a hierarchy of my favorite popsicle flavors from most to least favorite (red, purple, green, orange). I staggered over to the chair (I will spare you the details of what happens when you stand up after having your water broken, and just say that it was quite the journey from bed to chair), she handed me a red popsicle and that's how Eli found me when he showed back up a few minutes later.  The look on his face was priceless.  When he left I was sitting in bed with my bagel, watching TV in no pain at all and when he came back an hour later I was doubled over in the rocking chair fighting through a contraction.  I think he thought I was playing a joke on him.  But I dilated 6 centimeters in the time it took me to eat half a popsicle and toward the end someone took it away from me which was smart because I probably would have tried to use it as a weapon.

When the nurse suggested an epidural soon after, I was confused.  For some reason I thought I'd have to have contractions for at least a few hours until it was epidural time.  I had no idea how fast things were moving and I was convinced I was supposed to have pain all day and then my baby would be born in the night.  Anyway, I'm glad she had the good sense to call for the epidural when she did because when the doctor showed up to do it only a little while later I was out of my mind with pain.  I was convinced that a contraction would hit while he was putting it in, I wouldn't be able to sit still and he would sever my spinal cord.

Anyway, after the epidural started to work I came out of my pain coma and I was able to talk to the people around me again and I got so relaxed I even fell asleep for a few minutes.  And because now I know, I will never understand why anyone would ever turn down an epidural.  Before the epidural, I didn't care about anything except turning my mind off from the agonizing pain I was in.  It turned me into an animal.  I didn't care that I was having a baby, I didn't care that my life was changing forever and I was about to meet a whole new person that I grew in my body for nine months who would be my child, my SON!!! I wouldn't have cared if the bed, the hospital, the WORLD, exploded into a fireball all around me, all I could think about was this pain ripping through my body and that it was definitely going to kill me.

He was born just after noon and he was perfect.  I know every mother thinks their new baby is perfect, but mine really was.  Okay, maybe he was a little slimy and blue for a minute or so, but he avoided that squashy, scratched up, conehead business so many new babies suffer after a long labor.  Since he was born so quickly he didn't spend too much time getting smashed up in the birth canal and he was beautifully symmetrical right away.

Eli and I held hands and cried while they cleaned him up.  We couldn't take our eyes off him and his cries were like sweet music.  They are becoming less sweet the more time he spends outside the womb and we spend most of our time now trying to figure out ways to make him stop it.  Anyway, the hormone dump hit me pretty hard after the birth and I spent a week or so just staring at him and crying.  Or thinking about him and crying.  There was even one night when the little sucking noises he was making as he chewed on his pacifier sent me into a flood of tears.  I couldn't get my mind around the fact that I made a person.  And for the first few days along with the intense weepiness, I also went through the worst, most hideous anxiety about his safety.  I was convinced someone was going to hurt him or drop him and I even almost smacked my own mother when she wasn't paying enough attention to him when she was holding him and he looked like he might roll off her lap.  I was like a mother hawk ready to swoop in and kill anyone who even breathed on him the wrong way, and thinking about it now I wonder why no one took me aside and told me me to SETTLE DOWN or at least had the decency to slip a muscle relaxer into my diet coke.

The mood swings are leveling off slowly.  We even went out to dinner the other night and left the baby with my parents and I didn't die of anxiety.  And as I start to come out of this post-partum hormone nightmare I am realizing what an ass I've been and how hard I've been making this on myself and everyone around me by being crazy.  It's getting easier though each day as the baby gets a little less fragile and I get to know him a little bit better.  I'm sure the beginning is rough for everyone, because if you're a decent person, you want your baby to be happy.  But there is nothing worse than sitting in your living room at 3am with a screaming 5-day old baby and wanting more than anything in this world to be able to make him feel better but not knowing what in the hell it is he wants and trying to reason with him tell me what you want, anything, I will do it, just please be more clear with me because I don't understand you! but he won't cooperate and just keeps on screaming until he makes you cry right along with him.  So as a last resort you pull him out of his blanket and pick him up to hold him against your chest, close to your heart, thinking that maybe it will remind him of the womb and calm him down and as you lift him close to you and you touch his back you realize his sleeper is soaking wet because he peed through the side of his diaper and it leaked all over and he's cold.  Hmm.

This is what it's like.  And everyone tried to tell me and prepare me for it, and I took care of the pretendbaby egg in high school so I thought I knew what's up. But what I didn't get was how much I would love this baby and how much I would care about doing right by him.  I tried to imagine every scenario and how I would handle things before he came, but the babies in my imagination were much less complicated.  And quieter.