The Birth of Maya Amrita

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Maya was due on March 17, 2006. But I was two weeks
overdue, and extremely impatient, hoping to go into
labor. Ted and I had decided that we wanted it to be
just us in the delivery room, no other family. On the
other hand, I had NO experience with babies; and I
wanted my mom to be there to help with her when Ted
went back to work. So, we decided she would fly the
almost 4,000 miles from Juneau to Philly one week
after the due date, so she would be there to help us
as much as possible.

Since she was 2 weeks late, our plans were obviously
not working out as we had hoped. My mom was there,
ready to help. But no help was needed for a week before
Maya’s birth, which was fine actually. It was nice
to have that time together. I couldn’t tell you the
last time we had spent a whole week together, no work,
no school – probably never. Certainly not since the
last time we had gone on vacation together when I was
a kid.

On March 27th, I had my last exam. The midwife told
me that if I didn’t go into labor on Thursday, I
should check into the hospital Thursday evening, after
a light dinner. Um…what? Spend the night in the
hospital? I hadn’t really gotten that far in my
thinking, and I wasn’t happy about it. But I wasn’t
effaced at all, and they would apply some goop to my
cervix, which would help efface it, and it might even
start some contractions.

I couldn’t see any sense in
Ted and/or my mom staying at the hospital with me.
There was nowhere for them to sleep, and it seemed to
me that we were in for a long day on Friday. The
more rested we all were, the better. So I was
admitted, put into a fashionable robe, had the goop
applied, a device strapped to my belly so they could
monitor the baby’s heartbeat, and that was that. The
midwife said they would hook me up to the pitocin at
9am, and that usually it takes a while to get going, so
we decided that Ted and my mom should come back at 10
the next morning. They went home, and I stayed
behind. The goop did start some very minor
contractions, like bad menstrual cramps, which came
about every 10 minutes. I dozed throughout the night,
waking with each contraction, trying to get
comfortable while hooked up to the fetal heart monitor
and listening to hospital sounds.

At 7AM, my water broke. I buzzed the nurse and told
her.
"Are you sure you didn’t pee in your bed?" she asked.
"Huh? Does that happen often?" I asked.
"You’d be surprised," she said.

The indignities of motherhood were just becoming
apparent to me.
It was my water breaking, however, not pee. At 8AM,
they started the IV of pitocin, a whole hour early. I
settled in to wait. OUCH! the pain, amazing, scary,
what-was-I-thinking PAIN started pretty much right
away.

A couple of words about pain. I don’t like it.
However, I like needles even less than I like pain,
and the sight of the needle at childbirth classes had
made me rethink the epidural, and try for a natural
childbirth. And part of natural childbirth is pain
(any childbirth, actually…I have yet to hear of one
that is painless, natural or not.) My midwife had
told me that one way to look at it was that the pain
of childbirth was a natural pain, as opposed to
breaking a leg or rupturing an appendix, and that
usually what determines whether a woman needs an
epidural is the duration of the labor. My family
tends to have embarrassingly short labors, so I was
hopeful that I could get through without seeing that
dreaded needle.

The midwife kept asking me if I wanted to call Ted and
tell him that contractions had started in earnest. But
my addled brain was afraid; afraid that in his
panicked state, he would get in a car accident on the
way over to the hospital, and then he and my mom would
be dead while I gave birth, left alone in a strange
city to raise my baby. Too many Hans Christian
Anderson stories in my youth, perhaps.

At 10:00, I was standing next to the bed, trying not
to murder the resident who kept trying to take my
blood pressure. She couldn’t get an accurate reading,
because my contractions were too close together, and
the cuff tightening around my arm made me homicidal.
I think I was in the beginning of ‘transitional
labor’. I could hear my mom talking loudly as she
walked down the hallway. Ted said he heard someone
yelling, and he thought, "I hope that’s not Julie."
They opened the door, and yeah, it was me.

Ted said I was making "animal noises", like an animal
that was trapped and in pain. That pretty much sums
up how I felt, too. I looked at my mom’s face, and I
was sure she needed to be in the waiting area. I
wanted this to be me and Ted, and if she were there, I
would want mother’s comfort, which wasn’t going to
help me right then. So I told her to go. I think her
feelings were hurt; and she had been hoping to watch
Maya come into the world.

I think mine was a "back labor," meaning the pain was
low down my spine, and laying down on the bed was
excruciating. What helped the most was for Ted to
rub my lower back while I rocked back and forth on my
feet, and for him to remind me to relax my shoulders,
that they shouldn’t be up by my ears.
Eventually, that scary needle wasn’t seeming quite so
scary, and the idea of relief was sounding pretty good
to me. So I asked for an epidural. The
anesthesiologist was at lunch, but they told me he was
busy with another patient, probably because I would
have lost my mind if I knew he was grabbing his only
chance at a sandwich while I was crazy with pain.
They said he would be there soon, and that they needed
to examine me to make sure I was far enough along
before he came anyway. Up on the table, and
oops…time to push. I had been told that I would be
moved from the "labor" room to the "delivery" room,
but thankfully the midwife left that decision up to
me, because the thought of being pushed down the
hallway in nothing but that gown, looking like crap,
screaming and scaring the other moms didn’t appeal to
me at all.
So I pushed. I had been told what a relief that was,
how good it felt to finally push. Nope, it hurt like
hell, and I was SO scared. I remember wondering if
there was a way to sneak out of there, grab a taxi, go
home, and pretend the whole thing had never happened.
My fear came from knowing that they weren’t going to
let me out of there. So I pushed.

After about 15
minutes of pushing, out she came. Ted said, "Honey,
LOOK!" But I didn’t want to – I was afraid to see
myself all gross and bloody down there – so I said,
"No! It’s GROSS!" He said, "No, it’s our baby!" So I
opened my eyes, and I can tell you, I don’t know what
I THOUGHT was going to come out of me, but nothing
prepared me for it being a real, live, BEAUTIFUL baby.
Her lips were all stretched out, and I remember
thinking, "Uh Oh, here comes a supermodel," but
luckily they didn’t stay that way, and her resemblance
to Mick Jaggar was fleeting.

Ted got to cut the umbilical cord, and we got to hold
her. That amazing rush of endorphins, relief, and joy
overcame me. I was on top of the world. No one had
told me that the pain stops the second the baby is
out…I guess I had thought it would wane. THANK
GOD the pain just…stopped.
After we had a few minutes with her, they brought my
mom in. Her jaw dropped to the floor, too. They had
just told her that I wanted her, not that Maya had
been born already.

Overall, I know that I had a very "easy" labor: Four
hours from when the serious contractions began to the
end. It sure didn’t feel easy, though. It was the
hardest, scariest, most wonderful thing I had ever
done. After that day, whenever something seems
difficult or scary, I just think to myself, "I can do
this…I’ve given birth."

"J" is a work-at-home mother in the San Francisco Bay Area. She works
as a tax compliance analyst, and finds more fulfillment in writing her
blog, "Thinking About", which can be found here. Her daughter,
Maya, is 10 years old.

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