[in 2015 I posted this to a since abandoned tumblr account. my plans for this wordpress (as of right now) include a lot of parenthood essays. becoming the mother to a donor conceived child in the year 2022 was a journey that has affected me emotionally more than i ever anticipated. but before starting those blogs i find it only appropriate to go back to my intro to motherhood nearly a decade ago.]

It was Saturday, January 24th, and I was wide awake at 5 am. Maybe to some of you this hour doesn’t sound remarkable, but for me it was. It was the first day in a lifetime of five in the mornings.

Ok, so I wasn’t awake that morning because I chose to be, I was woken up by a nurse who was there to drain the water balloons that had been on both sides of my cervix for the past twelve hours. This water balloon contraption, called a foley-bulb catheter, was the first method used to jump start labor by dilating my cervix to four centimeters. After draining the balloons the nurse did what I’m sure was the roughest cervical check in the history of cervical checks.

I’d been “checked” before. This is what they call it. They want to “check you.” You means your cervix. You are your cervix. “Check” means stick a hand inside of “you”—your vagina—and measure how open your cervix is. They do this with their fingertips, because that is where we’re at with science in 2015: We use fingertips as a unit of measurement. Then you are pronounced whatever number of fingertips wide the gap in your cervix is.

“You’re a five,” she said. Great, I thought, a whole extra centimeter wider than what the doctor hoped for. I was already one centimeter ahead of the game, an overachiever if you will. The nurse told me she’d be back in an hour to start the pitocin drip, so I was free to shower or walk around if I wanted. I have not gotten far enough into adulthood where I wake up at 5 am for self-betterment, which is one among many things I thought I would master before having children. Add to that: having a career, getting married, working out, finding a lipstick color that doesn’t wash me out, getting up early. As I got closer and closer to childbirth I still held out hope for a few of them. I went to Sephora and Ulta; I downloaded the Couch to 5k app for the tenth time. Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. 

Anyway, it was 5 am and I was wide awake and staring at the shower wall.

Then ow.

I stood there for a minute with my mind racing and then, again, ow. I had another one. Another “thing.” Ow. I was kind of smiling at them at this point. I had experienced menstrual cramp-like contractions the whole night before, but nothing like this. My boyfriend Michael was sleeping on the sofa next to the window in my hospital room or else I probably would have called out to him. I braced myself against the shower wall and rode out a couple more of these “things.” In all of the blogs and books I had read about natural childbirth everyone was always raving about the magic of hot showers. I suspected, or feared, that their soothing powers were not as good as advertised. Ow. I got back into my hospital bed and lay there naked and huge under my flimsy hospital gown, staring at Michael sleeping, waiting for him to wake up. I kept having a few more ows, I wasn’t hooked up to the heart rate monitor so I was unable to see how strong they showed up on the strip; I’m not even sure if that’s what the strip stands for.

I grimaced; I cringed. So far the pain was about as bad as a stubbed toe. It was a “Damn!” pain, but it was still amusing. I was kind of proud of it, too, of my body. It had finally kicked itself into gear.

Michael woke up and we chatted while I laid sprawled out with my hair wrapped in a towel turban. When the nurse finally came back to start the pitocin drip she also informed me I’d be hooked up to a drip of what was essentially sugar water. The purpose of the sugar water was to keep my blood sugar maintained all day while I was unable to eat. I think it was at that moment that it finally hit me that I wasn’t going to be able to eat or drink for the remainder of the day, a safety policy of some sort in case I ended up needing a c-section. I ate half of a protein bar after she left the room anyway, fuck it, I was already at 5 cm as far as I was concerned I could pop that baby out in the next two hours. One protein bar never hurt anybody.

Two hours, then three hours, then four hours, went by and I most certainly was not close to popping out a baby. My contractions were still not timeable and I had made no further progress from when the nurse had checked me for the first time earlier in the day. Sometime throughout the morning my OB came in and broke my water. I didn’t hear a great popping sound like I had read some women hear when their water breaks, I heard and felt nothing except the warmth, spreading all over and under me. It was beyond pee. And it kept happening for hours. I’d shift and more soup. It did make me feel plentiful. My body contains multitudes. Of amniotic fluid.

The day went on and I walked, I sat on the edge of the bed, Michael rubbed my back, I peed approximately five hundred times. I kept waiting for the reeling, bent-over-the-bed, can’t-talk-through-them contractions that so many women talk about but I never got past that “Damn!” pain. I felt them, I breathed through them, I talked through them, I bounced on my exercise ball through them. Despite the lack of immense pain, I was tired. 

I learned that it didn’t matter how many books you read, how many Been There Done That moms you talk to, or classes you attend to prepare for labor, you never really can prepare for the exhaustion that sweeps over your entire body. Here I was, bouncing on an exercise ball and pissing around on the internet on my phone, but I was tired. I was so, so tired. 

“I think I’m going to call the nurse and ask for the epidural,” I told Michael. “Are you sure?” I hadn’t wanted an epidural for a few mostly ineffable reasons. Stubbornness, yes. Over-achieverishness, too, sure. I wanted to experience it, I guess, this most human/female/whatever experience- to know I could do it. But mostly: fear. Fear of someone sticking a thing into my spine. Fear of being punished for taking the “easy route.”

I pressed the call button to the nurse’s station. “Hi, uhm, can a nurse come in my room? I think I want an epidural now.” The nurse came in and brought the epidural consent forms with her. I asked her, one more time, “you said earlier that an epidural could possibly help me progress, I think I’m ready for that.” I looked at her, pleading with my eyes. “It might. You’ll be able to relax and possibly even lay down and sleep.” That’s all it took. I signed the papers without hesitation.

The nurse left the room again then came back and handed me a tiny paper cup, the size of a shot. She warned me it would be truly horrible, but it was meant to fight off heartburn. Only as I write this am I hit with how ridiculous this was, worrying about heartburn before they shove a needle into my spine. I had been in labor for 20 hours at this point. I am a fucking warrior. Heartburn? If you told me now that it was all a lie and it was really a sedative, or something to keep me from having a full-on fucking heart attack as I had been tachycardic all day (“She’s tacky!” nurses had been whispering)—well, that would make more sense.

The medicine was disgusting but I didn’t care. And at the time it just felt thoughtful, like someone was caring about my comfort. What seemed like only 15 minutes later the anesthesiologist came into the room wearing dark blue scrubs. He had the blue net covers over his sneakers and a handlebar mustache. He did not look like the cool anesthesiologists on TV shows. For one, he was old as shit. The very word “epidural” still filled my entire body with a cringey panic. As if he knew, the anesthesiologist talked quickly, seeming drunk on power and slightly manic. The energy in the room immediately shifted.

After he came in, it felt like my body was a thing to be beaten, a war to be won. In that moment, it felt right.

After the anesthesiologist prepped the room behind me, the nurse had me curve my (very pregnant) stomach over a pillow as she held my arms into place. I bored my eyes into Michael and broke a sweat, I think, from fear. I felt as if I were in some kind of war (I was). I felt like this was my moment, my big test, and I was rising to the occasion. Except I wasn’t. I was doing the most banal thing in the world. I was giving fucking birth. The doctor spoke to me over my shoulder, “Okay I am going to put in the needle now. You should feel pressure but you might feel a shock go through your legs, almost like you put your finger in the electric socket.”

What.

“Okay,” I said, weepishly, curled over the pillow. I never did feel the electrical shock. They taped it all up—a tube! Snaked into my spine! Taped onto my back. I was supposed to just lie down on top of it, to not even think about it. But I did. For the first time in 20 hours I could finally relax. My legs were, at this point, giant meat sticks attached to my body. I looked to my right and saw where I was having wild contractions, up and up and up and up and down, and I didn’t even know it. I rolled over and closed my eyes. 

And then I knew.

Suddenly there was the soul-crushing pain everyone spoke about. And boy was I crushed by it, gripping the bars of my hospital bed as if I could pull myself away from it. I was still numb in my abdomen, but, rather inconveniently, not my vagina. My legs weighed nine hundred pounds so I couldn’t move them, I was stuck in bed. I had gone through the personal nightmare of getting the epidural, I had mentally exited the battle of contractions, and yet here they were, chasing me down. It was like going through the pain of breaking up with someone and just when you thought you were free, they show up at your house in the middle of the night, and, I don’t know…start throwing knives at you? I asked the nurse to check me again because I was 100% sure I was crowning and giving birth right there. I felt so much pressure I was sure my asshole was falling out.

“You’re about a six.” Six centimeters. That was it. I had only progressed one whole centimeter all day. I had walked, I had bounced on an exercise ball for hours, I’d had my water broken with some huge hook contraption, and I had gotten an epidural but I had only progressed one whole fucking centimeter.

I was never going to give birth. I was going to die in this bed before I gave birth. I cried but no actual tears were coming out. I writhed as much as my heavy meat body would allow me to writhe.

“The epidural isn’t working,” I told the nurse. She asked me if I was feeling pressure and if it hurt. My body was shaking like a leaf, a side effect of labor exacerbated by the epidural apparently, and I wanted to scream “YES!” but instead I barely choked it out. I wished for a way to communicate pain more precisely than a scale of 1 to 10.

“But the scale is subjective,” I longed to say. We have no way to know. I hated this. I said 7, 8. I didn’t know. It was the worst pain I’ve ever felt, but I have never had my arm cut off. That was what I always imagine to be the worst pain: having a limb chopped off. I saved 10 for it, out of respect.

I wanted to save 9 for the moment the baby tears its way out of my vagina. So what’s left is 8. I wanted to seem brave, so I said 7, but then I worried they wouldn’t understand the immediacy of the situation, so I came back with 8.

The old anesthesiologist came back in the room. He pushed some buttons on the epidural drip as high as he said he could without “overdosing my spine.” He gave me a little talk about how sometimes people have a “blind spot” to pain coverage and no amount of epidural will “cover” it. He made a couple other jokes, Michael laughed, I glared at the both of them. My legs got heavier and number, but still, the pain “broke through.”

Epidurals cover pain, not pressure. I still haven’t quite wrapped my head around that. I still have my doubts. But there it is. I was numb everywhere except my pelvis. “Just knock me out!” I cried. I was joking, but the joke was that I said it out loud. I had never asked for something more sincerely in my life.

“We’re not going to do that,” the anesthesiologist chuckled. I peered at him from across the room as he started to exit the alarm on my heart rate monitor sounding off at him better than I ever could.

“This is normal,” Michael said. Did he know what this was? This was not normal, not by any definition of it. This should not be normal. This should be illegal.  

Wanting to go without the epidural was one thing, getting it then having it fail was quite another. It was unjust. It was traumatic. My stupid body, I thought. My stupid fucking body. My awful gender. The limitations of medicine. Of sex. Of humanity. Fuck it all. I don’t deserve this. And I meant that. I still mean it.

This is the thing about labor, it’s something coming for you, if not one thing than it’s another. People talk about riding the waves of contractions, submitting to all of it. And I think that’s true, it’s necessary if you want to do it, but I was washed up. I was a dehydrated corpse out in the middle of the ocean, bloated with saltwater. Hook me up to a buoy. Helicopter me out.

My OB finally came in to “see how I was doing.” He said I was doing beautifully. I asked him what would need to happen in order for him to give me a c-section. He assured me he would do everything in his power to prevent giving me a c-section. He suddenly became the enemy. I wanted him to knock me out and cut that baby out of me so bad. I wanted it like you want a glass of water at a stranger’s house, but you still feel like you should demur. I wanted it the way I wanted someone to stick a finger in my butt during sex, but would never ask for it. I was thinking like a woman. I was in the most essentially oppressed, essentially female situation I’ve ever been in and I was mentally oppressing myself on top of it.

The heart rate monitors kept sounding off, our heart rates accelerating then decelerating, then stabilizing. My OB stared at the monitors for about two minutes in silence before putting on a glove to check me. He groped and prodded and shoved things around inside of me trying to see where the baby’s head was at.

Oh yes, the baby. She was in there through all of this. The thought of that now seems bizarre. It felt so much about me, my body, my pain. She was still so abstract. We’d never seen her face, or heard her cry. I continually reminded myself, near the end of pregnancy, that I was going to meet her soon. She was still a corporeal reality. She would not disappear into me, as it seemed she might. It was not all a dream. She could not be taken from me. Despite the truth of this, she remained unfathomable, her existence a mere idea, a source of anxiety. The potential for heartbreak.

After he finished with the cervical check he announced that the external heart rate monitors were no longer sufficient enough alone and an internal monitor would need to be placed on the baby’s head. On her head! An internal monitor! I don’t know why the thought of having an internal monitor placed inside of me seemed like the worst thing in the world but there it was. An antenna looking monitor was inserted inside of my vagina and placed on my baby’s head to pick up her heart rate for the remainder of my labor.

It was inside of me, sticking out between my legs, just waiting to get ripped out and probably scalp my baby. I laid in that miserably uncomfortable bed for what seemed like hours. I think I begged every nurse that walked in my room to check my cervix, hopeful that I had suddenly progressed so much and could start pushing. I tried to breathe through the pressure but it’s hard to breathe through a pain that is constant and unceasing.

You cannot “become one” with a pain that does not let up under any circumstances.  

I looked at Michael, he offered to hold my hand but I didn’t want to hold hands when I was surely on my death bed. I repeatedly asked him to check the sheets underneath me to make sure I wasn’t pooping on myself, turns out I wasn’t, I was just slowly releasing blood and more amniotic fluid on a slow-leak. Being in labor was, maybe, the first time in my entire life I was truly unselfconscious. I was laying on my side in the bed, gripping the side bars, my bare ass exposed to every single unsuspecting nurse that walked into the room. Blood and, possibly, shit was gushing out of my body during every contraction. And I did not care, not even a little.

Another thing I did not care about was the advice of every nurse that came into the room telling me I need to stop pushing. Pushing during my contractions was the only thing that relieved even a fraction of the pain but it seemed like every single person in the room with me did not seem to care about my comfort during this time.

“You have got to stop pushing, you’re not ready, you’re making it worse,” Michael said. He said this gently, but without the empathy I thought it required. He, too, became the enemy.

“No,” I said, crumbling. I was crying out of desperation. I needed a fix. I felt unheard; misunderstood. This was much different than physical pain. This could not be, I thought. It just cannot be. I wouldn’t make it that long. I’d never make it.

“Maybe,” I thought, “I just have one of those rapid labors. Maybe I’m close. Maybe I have this sudden urge to push because the baby is already through my cervix and she’s coming out all on her own.” I sobbed, hopeless. “That happened to someone on Babycenter!” I thought.

A nurse walked in, I told her I was sure this baby was in my vagina and ripping out of me. She checked me and told me I was at an 8. I started crying, sobbing actually. “So I’m almost done?” I choked out. She laughed, not in a laughing-at-you way but in a I-feel-sorry-for-you way, as she said “yes, you’re almost done. You’re doing great.”

I writhed in pain for what felt like another life time, probably busting huge hemorrhoids in the process before another nurse came in the room and I asked her to check me too. I don’t even know why I was asking nurses anymore, they should have just known to glove up as soon as they walked in the door.

But this time was different. “I can feel the baby’s head,” the nurse said. She sounded excited which in retrospect comforted me but I couldn’t articulate that yet. She rolled me over onto my back and told me to give a couple “practice pushes” to get the baby to get even closer. I pushed with every contraction with such jest I felt the baby was going to fly out of me.

Michael let me know that I shit on myself and the nurse had to change the chuck pad. Whatever.

A nurse broke down the bed and put my feet in the bed stirrups after 2 or 3 “practice pushes.” I’m not quite sure if the stirrups are only there for decoration or what their actual purpose is because I am here to tell you that there is no way anyone can push out a bowling ball sized human-being with their legs that low without the baby already being on the verge of falling out.

With every contraction the nurse and Michael would hold my legs up, my knees practically resting on my collarbones, squashing my huge pregnant belly in the process. I was choking down ice chips between pushes. I did my breathing, dutifully, skillfully. I was crying in pain and I moved around rhythmically, alternating between belly dancer and mentally disturbed person slamming her head against the bus seat in front of her. Every push was, theoretically, getting me closer to birthing the baby inside of me but it seemed like it was never going to happen. I was slapped with the realization that some women do this for hours, legs pushed to their chest and pushing for one, two, three hours before the baby ever comes.

“Just give me one more push! You can do this, just hold the push for ten seconds and then you can rest!” I held the push and then I was told to stop while my doctor was across the room gowning and gloving up.

“I CAN’T,” I shouted. I was no longer desperate, I was determined. Telling me to push and then suddenly telling me to stop was cruel, so I didn’t. Fuck that, I had officially reached the point where I didn’t care if I had to go Kourtney Kardashian and catch my own baby as she came out, I was pushing whether my doctor was there or not. I gave one last push just as my doctor was sitting down in front of me.

And then I heard a cry.

What I felt then, above all, was recognition. This isn’t possible, it’s an incorrect feeling if feelings can be described that way, but this was the part of my brain that lit up. Her cry was a familiar face in the crowd. I was lying on my back staring at the ceiling, shaking, with tears streaming down my face. Her cry, I was surprised to find out, sounded like her. She sounded like her own person, distinct. Before then all baby cries sounded the same to me, but her cry was a voice. A self.

My OB asked if I wanted to hold her. “No!” I answered too quickly, I panicked. He removed the alien antenna off her head then handed her off to a nurse. The nurse took her over to the warmer to weigh her and scrub her body down with a towel to clean her. She wrapped her in a blanket, then she handed her off to Michael.

There was a nurse tech standing beside my OB, handing him his tools. They whispered so that I wouldn’t hear them which meant I imagined they were whispering something like, “She’s bleeding out, what should we do?” “I don’t know, but look at this gigantic tumor here!” or “Wow is this girl fat. I mean I know she just gave birth but STILL!”

The room was spinning, Michael was over in the corner marveling and cooing at this new tiny human. What did she look like? I still hadn’t seen her. I watched as he looked at her and held her and I cried more than I already was. This tiny human, built from scratch, had just come out of my body and was now out in the world.

My OB kept repeating over and over how amazing this was. I was reminded why I like my doctor. I love him as a character. I admire him and I respect his opinion on most things in general. I would probably interact with him in a social setting. He always shakes my hand before speaking to me and tries too hard to be relatable; like a goofy dad trying to connect with his teenage child’s friends. He over-explains and my jokes are off-putting to him, but I think he likes them. Every interaction with him I am left feeling like, What was that?! Why was that so hard. Somehow, this helps me trust him better. The more he talked to me and explained every move he was making the calmer I became.

“You have a tear so I’m going to need to place some stitches and then I will insert some gauze to check for any internal tears,” my doctor said to me, matter of factly. I appreciated his honesty. The horror of it felt appropriate. I nodded, brave.

All of it felt right, actually; to become a mother like this.