Birth Story

This is a birth story one of my doula clients recently wrote and shared with me (copied with permission). Both parents are writers, and I am particularly awed by how wonderfully this story is written from the dad's perspective. I laughed out loud when I read how they described me. I loved reading a story I was a part of. They were a really great family to work with.

Flashback: The Birth Story
January 27th, 2011

“This we know: The baby won’t be born tonight,” I said a few hours before Jennifer went into labor.

I thought I was making a safe assertion. Jennifer was almost two weeks away from her due date, and we had been warned that first-time mothers begin laboring slowly. They can have infrequent contractions that come and go for several hours, sometimes days. I figured, if Jennifer were lucky, her labor would last no more than 24 hours. I was preparing myself for longer.

So, when I said it — no baby tonight — Jennifer nodded in assent. Our friends Ryan and Shelana, who were hosting us for dinner, figured I was delivering an infallible lecture on third trimesters.

For dinner, Ryan had prepared an Argentine beef dish called mata hambre, the hunger killer, a flank steak rolled with spinach, onions, chimichurri sauce, and pine nuts. We devoured the beef. We methodically worked our way through a few bottles of Malbec. Jennifer even had a ceremonial glass.

At 2 a.m., two hours after I stumbled into bed, Jennifer woke me with a steady voice. “Scott, you need to get up slowly. I think my labor has started.”

I stumbled out of bed, with an aching head. I knew it was late (or early?). That’s all I knew now. I found Jennifer on her back in the bedroom, holding her belly and ailing. The ceiling light cast a low yellow tone on the room. Frida, our normally chatty cat, stood respectfully at the door, wondering what the hell was happening.

For an hour before Jennifer woke me, she had been timing her contractions: She said she was having a thirty-second contraction every two to three minutes. This stumped me. These were the numbers we were told to expect when Jennifer was about to give birth. I charted times for forty-five minutes and came up with the same baffling, end-of-labor numbers.

“Are you drunk?” she asked me.

“No, hungover.”

I took two Tylenol, drank six glasses of water, and shut my drunken mouth. She labored on.

At close to 3 a.m., I made my first call to our doula, a level-headed, clear-skinned stocky woman who had been coaching us during the pregnancy. Her name is Jennifer Heystek, but I will call her Heystek. No story can have two Jennifers.

Heystek told me to distract Jennifer, to give her water, to try to put her to sleep. In planning for the birth, I had come up with several ideas to distract Jennifer during early labor: watch episodes of The Wire; take a walk around the Berkeley Marina; or, if all else failed, strip her naked and have sex. She wanted none of the above. Jennifer — lover of water — didn’t even want to take a hot shower.

We kept the lights low in the bedroom. Jennifer labored on, first on all fours on the bed, then on the floor. She moaned during the contractions. The worse the pain got, the stronger she gripped my hand. I kept clocking the same baffling numbers with the contractions.

Nausea gripped Jennifer’s body. I assisted her to the toilet, where she stared into the water. Puking is one of her biggest fears. She would rather bleed. She would rather faint and break her fingers and chip her teeth. The clear water in the bowl turned brown as she expelled the mata hambre with three wretched bursts.

“Throwing up is the worst thing,” she said after I got her back to bed.

“It is,” I said.

She gave this a second thought: “Throwing up while having a contraction is the worst thing.”

“Actually, that is,” I said.

A little after 4 a.m., I called Heystek to report on the past hour: all contractions, no distractions. Heystek wanted to speak to Jennifer, but Jennifer refused to get on the phone. This was the sign. It was time for Heystek to come to our house. There was no turning back. This we knew: A baby was on its way.

In an hour, Heystek was at our house, skillfully digging her palm into Jennifer’s lower back. I was hustling around the house putting final items into the hospital suitcase. Things I did pack: the camera, Tylenol. Things I didn’t pack: water, food that Jennifer could easily chew.

By 6:30 a.m., Jennifer was almost exclusively moaning and yelling. Our doula said, “Be this loud at the hospital. You’ll get a room fast.”

Jennifer announced she didn’t want to go to the hospital. She didn’t want to move. She said she couldn’t make it. There was no way she wanted to labor in the car. She became the Woman Who Refused to Be Moved.

Herein is the conundrum of a birth partner: How does one be empowering and supportive while also conveying the need to “get the fuck in the car now, please”?

Repetition helped.

“I can’t do it,” she would say.

“You are doing it,” I would counter.

I can’t. You are.

In almost every regard, this was true. Jennifer was doing the hell out of it. She was battling a level of physical pain that I will never experience, one I can’t even comprehend. Her body was being torn apart, without pain medication, slowly, the kind of infliction one expects from medieval torture devices.

The one thing she was not doing was getting in the car to go to the hospital. This was becoming a minor problem.

So what really helped, more than repeating declarations of support, was ignoring her protests. Heystek dressed her in pajamas, a flimsy T-shirt, slippers, and a gray raincoat. I coaxed her to the car. She slugged my arm. I coaxed her again.

A winter dawn brightened the sky; there was an exhilarating chill in the air. Ordinarily, I am irrationally disdainful of sunrises and cold weather (Who wants to get up that early? If I’m seeing my breath, I’ve seen too much), but we were journeying out into a beautiful morning. This was so obvious that I almost needed to yell.

Jennifer got on all fours in the back seat and ordered me to drive. All the windows were fogged up by the chill. I rolled down my window, stuck my head outside, and did as I was told.

During the drive, Oakland looked old. Someone needs to scrub this town, I thought while Jennifer entered another excruciating contraction. I took the main roads, Telegraph to 51st to Pleasant Valley. As we waited to cross Broadway, a sports car idled next to us at a red light. I was thrilled and scared having a woman with a dilating cervix howling doggy-style in my backseat.

I parked the car in the emergency room’s unloading zone. Do I bring the suitcase? Do I leave the hazards on? Do I lock the doors? In the run-up to the birth, I spent some time debating the minor logistics of the situation. I had forgotten anything I had previously concluded. I started bringing the suitcase.

“What are you doing?” Jennifer said and pulled on my arm, now doing her own coaxing. She labored through a contraction on the sidewalk. Quite quickly, we became the scene.

“Do you need help?” a nurse asked me.

“No, we’re fine,” I said.

Another nurse brought a wheelchair, which Jennifer promptly refused. She wanted to walk, and I wanted to honor all her wishes. So we started walking, past the staring security guards and the staring patients in the waiting room and a cluster of idle E.R. nurses and doctors who were, of course, staring.

Jennifer had another knee-buckling contraction, this time against a wall.

“She’s not walking,” another nurse said. An orderly swooped in with a wheelchair and took us to the labor and delivery wing, the high-security fourth floor of the Kaiser Oakland hospital.

Our first stop was triage, where a nurse would check Jennifer’s cervix. If it had dilated past three centimeters, the hospital would admit her. If it hadn’t, the nurse would send us home, tell Jennifer to puke some more, and come back when she felt more fully dilated. Besides puking, being turned away was one of Jennifer’s biggest fears leading up to labor.

I had expected triage to be full of howling, laboring women — seven Jennifers growling in chorus — but, like I said, one Jennifer per story.

The room was quiet. The triage nurse, who wore her graying hair in beautiful dreadlocks, brought Jennifer to the back bed. There was a woman on the other side of our curtain. She was having a relaxed cell phone conversation with her mother. Later, Jennifer said, it sounded like she was doing her nails.

It was time for Jennifer’s first vaginal exam, for the all-important cervical measurement. The triage nurse covered her hand with a blue glove and reached into Jennifer’s vagina to deliver the fisting. Puzzled, the nurse asked Jennifer to rotate to the side.

“I think your cervix shifted to the left,” the nurse said. What she was saying was she couldn’t find the cervix. There was a good reason for this — why when she checked again, she still couldn’t find it. Jennifer’s cervix was almost entirely gone.

A doctor came into triage, fisted Jennifer too, and confirmed this: “You’re a rock star. You’re already eight centimeters.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jennifer said.

Jennifer curled into a ball and started shivering. She had entered transition, which I had read about the previous week. I was so far behind on my reading. If pregnancy were a graded class, I would get an A for attendance and a D for homework. Fortunately, 95 percent of the overall class grade depended on the final exam.

Jennifer cried. She moaned. Fear and delirium contorted her face. I kept my hand in her bone-breaking grip, as Heystek massaged her lower back.

I was shocked too. How had labor moved this fast? We were seven hours into this and the birth of our child (boy? girl?) felt imminent.

A nurse with Goldilocks curls took us from triage into a small delivery room. She apologized for its size. Apparently, it was half the size of the other delivery rooms, but this was the last thing we cared about. Jennifer would have given birth on a bedroll in the hallway. She didn’t need the Marriott, she wanted closure.

Once in our own room, Jennifer was offered pain medication for the first time. Nope. And that was that. She had come this far; she was going all the way. She would rely on ice chips, Heystek’s honey sticks, yogic pain management, and her scream. Jennifer’s resolve was never questioned by anyone. She was a rock star. Everybody knew it.

Her water broke, a full gush drenching the bed. The water was stained with meconium, the baby’s first bowel movement. Another vaginal fisting showed Jennifer had stalled at seven centimeters. Contraction, rest, double contractions — every three minutes, there was no letup. One hour later, maybe she hit eight centimeters, maybe. There was one last lip of the cervix that wouldn’t go away. With the next vaginal exam, the nurse tried to open it with her hand, which added an excruciating pain on top of an unbearable one.

The nurse wanted Jennifer to labor more. Heystek wanted Jennifer to begin pushing through the lip, a proposal that the nurse shot down. So, Jennifer labored on, losing energy fast. Another hour, and it was clear the birth was stalled.

“Your baby will be born this morning,” our nurse said. Was this encouragement or a fact? Jennifer and I looked at the huge industrial clock on the all. It was close to 9 a.m.

“I don’t believe you,” Jennifer said. Neither did I.

Another hour. Jennifer saying she couldn’t do this. Me telling her she was doing this. I can’t, you can, I can’t, you have to. Whoops.

She was scared, she was tired, she said she was finished. At ten o’clock, it was time, finally, to push. And she pushed and she pushed, getting redder in the face on each exertion. Capillaries were busting on her face and chest. Each push seemed to go nowhere, to wear Jennifer down more. She was drenched in sweat, crying, defeated, hating everyone.

The nurse brought out the labor mirror so we could get excited by Jennifer’s progress. On each push, the nurse tried to encourage us by showing that the baby’s head was crowning. All we saw was a black spot the size of a penny in between Jennifer’s vagina. Coming close to two hours of pushing, Jennifer said she needed help.

A team of doctors swooped in: the senior resident, the first-year resident, the overseeing doctor, the anesthesiologist, the neonatal nurse, even the triage nurse came in.

The confident senior resident, Dr. Chin, took charge: “We can give you assistance down there with a soft-vac. This applies some suction to the baby’s head. While you’re pushing, I will pull with you. First we’ll run a catheter into your bladder to give you more room …”

The tools were being laid out by the first-year resident. The spotlight was put into place. This was happening too fast.

I began stalling, giving Jennifer time to think, asking questions — chief among them was the million-dollar inquiry: If the soft-vac doesn’t work, will Jennifer need an immediate C-section?

The answer, as I expected, was yes. For the first time in eleven hours, panic hit me. This is when everything falls apart, I thought. This is the proverbial slippery slope, where a natural birth becomes major surgery. I trusted the doctors’ abilities. They were confident that the soft-vac would work, but they weren’t guaranteeing us anything. Your baby will be born this morning … somehow.

Jennifer elected to get the soft-vac. On the first push, the room roared for her. Stay with it. You’ve got it. Dr. Chin affixed the suction cup on the baby’s crowning head, covered in black matted hair. On the second push, the room roared louder. Go, go, yes, yes, go. The suction cup tightened on the scalp.

On the third push, everything she had, the pull, the push, the pale alien face of the baby, then the body slipping between Jennifer’s pelvis bones, the baby’s wail, the big nose, the penis, the baby on the chest, one thousand internal holy shits.

Jennifer looked at me, our first clear gaze that day.

“Should we call him Samuel?”

“Yes,” then the tears and the calm and the proud new life.

Our baby will be born this morning — at two minutes past noon, on Christmas Eve, Samuel Ernest Steinberg, alert, frightened, mad, twitchy, filthy, and beautiful.