Birth Stories

We All Begin…

in “Fetal Position”

An Exchange of Change

I once met a Greek woman

who asked me calmly and without pressure

(but with the epitome of invasive interrogation)

who I was to become in my cosmic journey.

Alongside my singing-a-song-maybe-following-through, hope-to-carry-out and into the day I do 

what I keep on saying I will say and do,

she took my shifty claims into a tingling parade 

to keep me from playing a tune 

of frivolous frowning, flip-flopping

against the broad beliefs of my mouth. 

She mutilated my doubt, 

blending our words into concise grit and grout,

holding my tiles in place with her spear,

her questions welded my ears,

as though happenstance and present glance

couldn’t be any more near 

than all this change 

I keep talking about 

-her prophetic spindles 

piercing my skin  

with inner rehabilitation,

generously jilting 

the dawning of masks-

Only to return home with more bread.

~

“An Exchange of Change” was written in the years that followed my brother’s death~ sometime between 2011 and 2012~ when I lived in San Francisco as a nanny by day and a spoken word artist by night. I processed my grief by writing, painting, and performing a slew of confusing but impactful poetry in local tea shops and warehouses. What remains of this distinctly artistic phase is a flimsy, faux leather briefcase stuffed with a hundred or so poems and a small collection of paintings.

“An Exchange of Change” was written the moment I returned home from a taxi ride after the driver altered my emotional trajectory between the Mission District and my Inner Richmond neighborhood. She was blatantly and proudly Greek, and at the click of my seatbelt, she zeroed in on my soul and drew me out of the back seat.

I hugged my purse against my hip and fingered a loaf of bread while she asked me what my purpose was, why I was breathing, and where I was going.

Initially, I fumbled in my answers, alluding to my grief like an overarching excuse,

but she was as patient as a doula,

and by the time her car turned onto 11th avenue,

I knew there was more to my madness

than being angry and sad.

So I thanked her with praise,

feeling full and ready

to pursue my life

instead.

~

I’ve included the poem, “An Exchange of Change,” in the Birth Stories issue of Mother Crow because it signifies how uncertain but hungry I was to feel my own pulse in the years that followed my brother’s death. I was nauseated by my own voice, and completely clueless to how it had been conceived, but I knew I wanted something more than my self-loathing, self-harming habits. I lapped up any insight available to me- from therapists and shamans to bench dwellers and taxi drivers. I felt incessantly fragile as I traversed the city looking for myself, writing and performing poetry in my frantic and child-like language. Poetry was my attempt to unearth the true me from beneath the rubble of my grief and crises.

Metacog-Nascence

Puberty delivered a guttural urge to have children.

It was complex, military, and fueled by trauma.

I wanted to glue my family back together with my own materials, from my own design, and in my own voice, but my voice had been buried like an unwatered seed, and I battled the soil and sun,

until the day

I was reborn

a mom.

One Week Past Due: I was anxious to meet my unborn child, so I hiked up a mountain to jumpstart my cervix. Perhaps it did the trick, or maybe I was simply too pregnant to go another day, because the next evening at the stroke of midnight, when I got up to pee for the 11th time, my water broke. Instead of sounding the alarms, I snuck back into bed to quietly contract. I hoped to give my husband as much sleep as possible before he possibly never slept that many hours in a row again. At 4 am, though, I couldn’t mute the imminence of an all-out labor any longer; it was time to go.

I don’t remember loading myself into the car or driving to the hospital, but I do remember sitting in a hospital bed, drinking ice water out of a very large, plastic jug. After stripping down, peeing in a cup, and dressing in my birthing gown, a nurse asked me if I wanted an IV inserted… just in case.

Did I?

I was shaking with adrenaline and I was too scared to answer incorrectly. I planned on pursuing a “natural birth.” If it were up to me, I’d skip the unnecessary IV. But self-doubt led me to freeze-up, so I looked to my husband for an answer.

Just in case.

They inserted the IV, which surprisingly did not phase me.

I sat in my hospital gown smiling like a nervous child, collecting my wristbands as we waited in triage. I had been managing the first phase of labor just fine, and I was gearing up for the more brutal rhythms ahead. I imagined the ring of fire to be like a hot rush of acid surging through my thighs in the last stretch of a marathon. I was hankering for that oxytocin rush at the finish line, but the most I had ever ran before was 12 kilometers. Naturally, I was terrified of how badly it was going to burn to run so much further to finally meet my baby.

At around 6am, the starting pistol fired, and we were escorted into the birthing room. The hospital offered me a volunteer doula, whom I happily accepted the support of, and I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember her name. She came and left in the heights of my labor as a soft and kind presence. However, I am a pathological people-pleaser, and she was a stranger to me. I fell into an old pathos and desperately sought her approval. In all my naked vulnerabilities, I needed to impress her; I didn’t want to let her down. She was there to help me accomplish my dreams of becoming a birth warrior, but as each hour passed, I felt more and more like a birth failure. We tried every technique in every position, from applying ice and heat, to massaging my lower back and spending hours in a shower. Sitting on the toilet brought on the most dreadful of contractions, but it was unacceptable for me to become dehydrated, so I continued sipping from that big, plastic jug of water despite knowing where it would soon seat me.

My back labor was accompanied by aggressive cluster contractions. Even the word excruciating doesn’t give justice to that kind of relentless pain, but I was determined to birth my baby without the help of drugs. My “flexible” birth plan would not allow it. But as my labor grew increasingly unbearable, I developed a secret desire to receive an epidural; shame grew alongside that secret. I fluctuated in and out of feeling like a capable, super mom to feeling weak and pathetic for ever thinking I was strong enough to see this through.

At one particular low point, I paused to witness my husband silently crying, and I knew without a doubt how much he loved and cared for me. He later told me how hard it was for him to see me in such agonizing pain; I received his quiet tears like acknowledgement for enduring it.

I was at the halfway mark- sixteen hours since my water broke- when I finally gave in and asked for a break, “Is it ok if I have an epidural?” I hyperventilated to a nurse, defeated and ashamed.

Next thing I knew, I was lying on my side with an anesthesiologist attempting to insert a needle into my spine. I have a tattoo, though, of a fertility goddess on my lower back, and because of her imperfect symmetry, it took him about thirty minutes to insert and reinsert the needle until it was finally in the right spot to administer the epidural. I withstood this cruel charade during the worst of my contractions while attempting to keep my body as still as possible. After the 35th jab, the needle finally stuck, and within moments, I was starting to feel a euphoric sense of relief. For the first time in twelve hours, I took a pain-free breath. It was so delicious and cozy.

At some point between asking for the epidural and receiving it, the volunteer doula had slipped out, but not before reassuring me that my choice to medicate was a perfectly acceptable one. Then, a woman came in to fiddle about with my cords. She left the room while casually saying that she had just added some fentanyl to my cocktail.

Enjoy!

Fentanyl? Hey, I didn’t ask for that!

But wooooooh, I guess my body did; I was flabbergasted she did that without my consent, but I was also starting to giggle.

My mom and sister cruised in to find me looking droopy-eyed and a bit too calm. My legs felt like a pile of glue, and the chaos of the past twelve hours was like a distant memory. I wasn’t going to be able to participate in the delivery of my baby in this numbed-out condition. Getting some good rest brought with it some fresh perspective. I was there to do one thing, and one thing only: bring my sweet little sunshine into this world.

I had to try again. In my mind, it was high time to get this show on the road after what felt like a very long and unsuccessful day. I asked the anesthesiologist to lower my dosage in order to have better control of my muscles along with some more sensation in my legs. Eventually, I could feel my womb contract again, only these contractions were nice and diluted. I could roll over and pull myself up onto my legs, so I hugged the back of the hospital bed in a deep squat. I balanced my weight between the top of the bed and my arm pits as I did everything in my power to hold my body up and bare down.

For two hours, it felt like the baby’s head was crowning! It felt like progress… But when the doctor returned early Sunday morning, she creeped her fingers inside of me and rolled her eyes. “The baby hasn’t budged,” she sighed, seemingly annoyed I was still there from the day before. I felt like I was inconveniencing her with my unproductive labor on her weekend, but I found out years later, after running into her and her toddler at a grocery store, that she had been a couple months pregnant at the time. But after pushing unsuccessfully for two hours, I had embodied her prenatal exhaustion as my own maternal shortcomings, and I fell into a tragic tailspin.

After all that, the baby hadn’t descended; it was no use. I was incapable of getting my baby out. Failure coursed through me as I sat in the hospital bed and bawled. My husband was worried about my mental state, so he left to retrieve my sister from the waiting room. When my sister entered, she attempted to console me, but after what I had just been through, her positivity made me angry. I asked for my husband to return to his spot by my side. I felt deeply bonded to him as he could testify to the tribulations of my labor thus far, and he understood why I felt so demoralized by it all. He knew how much I deserved that dark hour.

The nurses gently reminded us that we had surpassed the 24 hour mark since my water broke, and we needed to expedite the process so as to not risk any infection. Talk of a C-section began, and I was mortified at the prospect of it. When planning this birth, I left no room for epidurals or c-sections, and I had already crossed one of those boundaries. 

Why couldn’t my body do this? It was supposed to be able to do this. My mom had five children, and my grandma had six. Why couldn’t I have one?

I dramatically recoiled from the idea of surgery, so a high risk birth specialist was asked to come in and assess the situation. They referred to him as “the guy they called when things go wrong.”

At 6am, he walked in, calmly introduced himself, inserted his fingers into my cervix and asked me to push. I pushed; he said, “You can do this.” I immediately felt energized and confident, and I agreed with him. I could do this. He explained to me that he was going to use a vacuum to assist me in delivering the baby, but that a gurney was ready in the hallway just in case.

When the next contraction began, so did we.

I pushed while he pulled. He heaved and I roared.

Good. Good.

I was doing good.

Take a break.

I caught my breath and adjusted my upper body for some more traction.

Here we go. Get ready! …and Push.

I grabbed the bedrail to my left and my husband to my right; I inhaled like a violent squall and I exhaled like an animal as the baby's head exited my vagina, taking the first breath---

Only for the vacuum to slip off and for his head to get sucked back in again.

The room erupted with panic. Nurses swarmed in.

The doctor screamed, “PUSH!” as he reached inside of me with both his hands.

In slow motion, I saw my sister in the background, hugging her knees, rocking back and forth in prayer, so I looked in between my legs, and I became the sounds of a bear… right before everything went, POP!

Like a cannonball, my son was born.

According to my husband, he was blue. He describes the next twenty seconds- believing that our newborn was dead- as seeing a “golden, ethereal mist” lingering after the “flotsam and jetsam” of my body settled.

The nurses had immediately whisked our baby away, and I was in an odd state of consciousness, so before I knew it, I heard crying. They placed my baby on my chest to latch, and I wailed, sang, and laughed hysterically in celebration.

We did it!

I was mesmerized.

My husband was pale and visibly petrified.

But I was jubilant!

I swooned and cooed and slurred some lullabies as my baby and I bonded by sweaty skin and oxytocin.

About thirty minutes had passed with me in this blissful state when the doctor looked up from in between my legs and said, “All done.”

I was stunned to learn he was still there!

“All done with what?” I asked.

He paused uncomfortably. “I’ll let the nurses fill you in,” he said as he grimaced with sympathy.

I had sustained a 4th degree tear through my rectal wall; the doctor had been sewing me up through layers of muscle, tissue, and skin. I was oblivious to this surgery as I breastfed and snuggled my blood-splattered newborn. My baby didn’t exit my vagina one shoulder at a time as expected and intended. He was born by the width of his two shoulders, his arm, and a grown man’s two hands. His birth wasn’t gradual; it was explosive, and my perineum became debris in the wake of his entrance.

One of the nurses said it was the worst tear she had seen in all her twenty years of working on the Labor and Delivery ward. It was shocking to hear the news of my torn lower half because I still couldn’t feel much of anything. I reached my hand down to discover unimaginable foreign territory touching my fingertips back. My vagina felt like Frankenstein’s biceps- all swollen and stitched up with a catheter draining fluid from somewhere inside of it.

I attended physical therapy for the next year because I was completely incontinent. It took me three months to sit without wincing, six months to regain control of my bladder, and a year to teach my rectal muscles how to hold in a bowel movement again. I felt completely obliterated by the experience of becoming a mother. I had strode into that birthing room pregnant and ready to squat, bounce, and sway my way through the ring of fire, but a day later, I rolled out in a wheelchair, incapable of doing any of those things, let alone sit. And the term ring of fire took on a whole new meaning after my first postpartum bowel movement. Now, more than three years later, living with painful sex, rectal spasms, and inflamed scar tissue is a new norm I’ve come to accept.

My son’s birth was injurious for him as well. When the vacuum slipped off his head, it lacerated his skull; and 4 weeks later, I discovered benign tumors growing in his neck. The trauma of being yanked from my birth canal caused him to develop an extremely rare medical condition called bilateral fibromatosis, resulting in a case of torticollis and limited mobility on his left side. He needed several months of physical therapy to help stretch him out. Eventually, the tumors dissipated into his neck muscles, and the only lingering effect is an aversion to climbing at the playground.

My son and I fought his way out of my womb with a nasty case of shoulder dystocia; we were both wounded, but we arrived victorious in the end. As I reflect on his birth story now, I remember the strength it took for me to labor unmedicated for hours upon end, to keep my body still through the contractions in order to receive an epidural, to lift my drugged up lower-half into a reverse squat to push for two hours, to give up entirely only to try again like a beast and both survive the blast. Over the course of my thirty hour labor, a series of snapshots were branded upon my memory- all of them are concentrated, most of them are distressing, and the very last one is perfectly sublime.

~

I wrote “A Birth Story” because it’s only one of so many. Most new mothers strive to celebrate motherhood and their postpartum bodies with pride, confidence, patience, and intuition, but the reality is, birth is synonymous with trauma. Of course, some births are more traumatic than others, but with every birth, some degree of damage is inevitable, and far too many mothers are expected to repair themselves in sacrificial silence.

Re-telling my traumatic birth doesn’t re-traumatize me the way telling other stories might; sharing “A Birth Story” reminds me that I deserve the title, Birth Warrior. Despite giving in to the epidural, despite needing the assistance of a vacuum, and despite opting for a c-section my second time around, I am undoubtedly a birthing champion; I have the children and the scars to prove it, and I will never regret signing up for the fight to become a mother.

~Sophia Elizabeth