Jacob's Birth − 16 February, 2006

I had been having painless contractions during the day on February 15th, not unlike most days for the last while, so I didn't pay them much attention. Into the evening I started feeling a little off, so we decided to start timing them somewhere around 8 pm. They were pretty regular - around 7 minutes apart, but still not hurting. That lasted for a while. We settled in to watch a movie, but I couldn't focus on it. I said to Peter "This baby will be here tomorrow", but I didn't really believe it as I said it.

To be on the safe side, we threw a few things into my hospital bag and at 9:45 pm we paged our midwife to let her know what was happening. She suggested that I take some gravol and have a bath and that I call her if they became more regular and painful. I skipped the gravol and went straight to the bath - where I shaved my legs ... you know, just in case. I was expecting the contractions to taper off since the contractions weren't hurting and we were still a couple weeks before our due date. I tried to keep track of the contractions in the tub. 5 minutes apart, 7 minutes apart, 8 minutes apart, 4 minutes apart ... always 30 seconds long. I was pretty confident that the fluctuations meant that they would eventually stop. Certainly this could not be "it" because if this was "it" I was laughing all the way to the maternity ward. What a piece of cake.

I headed back downstairs and tried to finish watching the movie, but a couple hours later they had gotten worse. I started to groan through them as they got down to 4 minutes apart. Peter paged our midwife again and she said she would just meet us straight at the hospital instead of coming over first. So we called my mother to come and pick up Ben, who was sleeping, and take us down. Mom and Sarah showed up a few minutes later and I was still in denial that I was actually in labour. But the pains were coming now so that I had I could not walk or talk through them, I would just freeze and wince and wheeze through them as I held my swollen belly.

The drive to the hospital was awful. I had to make my mother slow the car down during the contractions, which were now coming even faster, because every dip in the road just made things worse. Mom and Peter took me into the hospital while Sarah drove Ben back to their house. Peter wheeled me up to maternity - I felt sort of ridiculous in a wheelchair, but I also didn't want to walk. The triage nurse just waved us through because she didn't think we would have time to fill out the forms. By the time that we got into the birthing room, which was a little after midnight, it was really hurting.

The pain of the contractions was such a strange sensation. I don't know what exactly I was expecting - but I thought somehow I would be able to... I don't know. Be one with the pain or something ridiculous like that. I knew it would be the worst pain I'd ever felt, but I had told myself throughout the pregnancy that it wouldn't last, and that afterwards I would have my baby. I guess I got the impression that it wouldn't be so bad from all the stupid baby story TV shows, but I bet all those women who could still talk while they were in labour had damn epidurals and besides, the shows are only 30 minutes long, so their labours only seem to be 10 minutes long. Nothing is very bad when it's only for 10 minutes.

Well, anyway, it was nothing like that. Once we were at the hospital, I lost all sense of time. It just stopped existing. The midwife examined me when she got there and told me I was about 3 centimetres. It was so discouraging. Oh my god, I wasn't even halfway. I wanted to check out. Forget it, I'm not doing it. Seriously. I thought for sure I was, oh, I don’t know … seven … ten … a thousand centimetres? Alright, trying to keep things in perspective. She showed me a diagram of three centimetres. It was puny. But ten was easily the circumference of the Earth itself. Okay – not doing that.

She asked me to rate my pain on a scale of one to ten. I thought a thousand but I said six. I knew it would get worse, so I couldn't make myself say that it hurt too much. Although I'm sure I wasn't fooling anyone. I moved from bed to rocking chair to bathroom back to bed. Peter said, "my god, it's going fast, it's 2 am". It had both been a moment and an eternity. I had no comprehension of anything but the pain. There was so much and they came so quickly that it made me nauseous and I threw up while Peter held a garbage can under my face. In the moment or moments in between the contractions, I wanted nothing other than to sleep. I was exhausted and my body would flood with endorphins. My eyes would not stay open. But there was never enough time to rest before the next one was on me. I'm not sure how to describe the pain except to say that it left my body in a sort of shock between contractions - it was the sort of pain where your brain turns to stone and your mouth hangs open while you slouch in the rocking chair, not caring if you are drooling, and you make awful moaning sounds that you cannot, cannot, cannot stop. All I can say now is thank god that bit of attractiveness isn't on video haha.

At the hospital, they stop offering epidurals at 11 pm. We had arrived just after midnight. I didn't actually want the epidural, in theory. In practice, I would have happily traded any unnecessary organ for it - a kidney, an appendix, my lungs ... After a couple hours, I deliriously believed that if I actually asked nicely enough, they would concede. Surely they didn't expect me to continue enduring such torture. Turns out, they did. Jerks.

I was pretty sure I would be the first woman in history to stop labour simply by sheer willpower. At some point the room collapsed in on me - the entire world, the past, the present, the future, every moment, every person, every possibility at once bearing down on me as though existence and emotion and memories and hope were all a balloon I lived inside and someone was letting the air leak out. I was more attuned to my body than I had ever been in my life. I couldn't stand any more sensory input. I didn't want to be touched or spoken to. I could not even bear to open my eyes. The world was shrinking to just my hospital room, to just my own body. Nothing existed outside of me.

It was okay if they held my hands, but I didn't want them to squeeze. I didn't want my face touched at all unless it was with a cold cloth. I didn't want to be massaged or stroked. The smell of all the stainless steel was unbearable. I didn't even know where I was in my body. Everything was so unreal. Pain makes you honest and liquid and confused. As though you are drunk. I didn't know what I was saying most of the time. I think I apologized for wailing. I answered both yes and no to the same questions. I asked for my mother. Words were thick and hard to form. The time and contractions worked their magic though, and fast. I hit transition like it was a train. But it was inside my body. I would have given anything to escape. I would have buckled and asked for an epidural. But I was too late. There was nothing I could do and there was nowhere I could go to get away from it. It roared in my head, the light of it filled me up, it barrelled through me. I said "I can't do this, I can't do this, it's too much" and my midwife said I must be close. It was a pain that I couldn't cry through, it was so far beyond tears. I couldn't open my eyes. My midwife offered me nitrous oxide, but I couldn't take it. I was too confused and I couldn't make sense of what I wanted or what they wanted from me, I just wanted someone to take the fucking baby out. It was unworldly.

And then the pain changed again, suddenly, and the pressure built like a landslide down my body. It was tremendous. I could feel the landscape of my body changing inside. My midwife asked if I needed to push and I didn't know but my body began working on it's own. I just had to follow and endure. I held onto Peter and my mother and threw my head back, as if I could escape it somehow. I wanted to escape it. I wanted to find a place in my mind where I could go and be safe, but the pain was everywhere. My midwife told me to pull my chin down to my chest, and the effort of it was tremendous. There was so little about my body that I could control. The contractions were immediately on top of each other. They said to breathe slow and deep but it was an impossibility that I could not have even comprehended. I breathed like the air was on fire. My midwife said my membranes hadn't ruptured, but I was almost completely dilated. She wanted to break my water herself. I was blubbering. "No" was my only word. No to breaking my water, no to the labour, no no no no. I was terrified. I did not want her to break my water, because then I would have to deliver a baby. Oh. My. God.

Even as she leaned forward to break the membrane, she was too late. My water broke in that instant and and my sweet little child became the train inside of me, barrelling down the track of my spine - the sound, the light, the pain of it filled me up, and I wondered if anyone else could hear this locomotive until I realized that the roaring was me, and that oh, yes, they could. It was 3:15 in the morning. I uttered some long, deep cry through each contraction and I was someone else, someone I didn't recognize. I was hearing them around me, but not understanding anything, except that they wanted me to slow down. But my own body was so much louder. There was so much pain that it was a part of everything. My midwife asked if I wanted to touch the baby's head as it crowned, but there was no time. Already I was being rocked by the next contraction. And the next. My midwife said "slow down" and I would have thought fuck you if I could think at all. I heard her mention alerting NICU, but I couldn't digest what that meant. Later Peter told me that it was because the baby's heart rate shot up to 207 and then dropped to 96. It was because it was happening too fast. I wonder what my heart was doing.

I didn't know how much time passed from when my water broke to when he was born. I found out later it was 9 minutes. Jacob was born at 3:24 am. The relief I felt when he finally slipped out was so intense and so immediate that I began to cry. Finally. My body shuddered from effort and exhaustion and adrenaline. It was so fast that I had torn in two places. There was no time for my skin to stretch. Being sutured was a whole other kind of pain. A sharp pain, localized, where the contractions had filled up my whole body. This pain made my eyes open, it was the sort of pain where you see stars. I took the nitrous oxide for this, but it did nothing. The midwife tried to freeze me first, but it didn't seem to take. I just tried to grit my teeth and bear it. After everything, I just wanted it all to be over. I wanted to rest. I wanted my baby. But it was almost over then. And then it was. And I had made it through somehow, and I had felt everything and that made it somehow more primal and incredible and awesome. It may have been horomones, but I could have walked on air after that, if I could have walked at all. But I couldn't do much. When I got up to pee about an hour later I dropped into a dead faint. It has been the only time in my life that I have ever fainted. At least Jacob can say that he came into the world making women swoon.

Jacob was 8 lbs and 19 inches long. Heavier than Ben, but not quite as long. During the entire process of labour, I couldn't even think of him. I couldn't wrap my head around the fact that at the other side of all this pain, he was going to be there. But then there he was, and when I saw him, it was like stepping and finding no ground and I fell hard and fast in love with him.