Iris, A Water Birth Story
My baby is almost nine months old. As I think about how she was inside me for nine months and has been outside of me for almost nine months, I think about the transition, our birth.
Iris was born on a sunny Friday morning in May. On Thursday, May 20th, 2004 I had gotten fed up with going to school. I was tired of my medical student classmates coming up to me in between each hour of lecture and asking me when I was going to be induced. I was five days past my due date at that point. I dreaded going to school in the morning because I knew as soon as people saw me they would say, “You’re still here!?!?” And I would have to smile and be polite and say, “Yes, I’m still here.” Then they would ask me about being induced because 1. they didn’t know I was planning a homebirth, or 2. they didn’t know anything about homebirth, or 3. they didn’t understand that the idea of having to be induced in the hospital and subjected to the whole cascade of invasive events that follows induction was heartbreaking for me to think about or 4. medical students like invasive procedures, it is exciting to them. So I went home that afternoon, and went on a long walk and decided that I would skip class and just study at home. Then I had a good cry about it when my midwives came for a visit. Then I called my massage therapist and asked if I could come over. While I was peeing just before getting on her table I noticed some spotting. I called my midwife and got excited because she was excited. I had a great massage from Peggy with two or three contractions during the session and drove home even more excited because the contractions were continuing.
After I arrived home Troy started filling up the tub, I ate some supper and we tried to sleep but the contractions just kept coming. Around ten or eleven we called the midwives and they arrived shortly thereafter. When I think back on the process of our birth my memories are a little fuzzy. Laboring women really do enter into a world of their own. I remember laboring on the couch for a while. I had always thought that I would walk a lot in labor but I didn’t need to because the contractions were coming frequent enough that I just wanted to rest in between. I remember going to the bathroom a few times and leaning on the dryer during contractions, then back to the couch. I asked my midwife when I should get in the tub and she said “when you feel like it.” I guess I felt like it and that was why I had asked her.
I remember being in the tub for a long time, mostly kneeling and leaning forward on the side, and squatting some. The warm tub water was essential for me. I felt at home in the water, safe and ready for my baby to come. I remember hearing the muffled, soft voices of the three midwives sitting at the kitchen table. Occasionally I would hear them stoke the fire in the woodstove or heat water for the tub. That is one of my favorite memories of our birth. I liked that the midwives were sitting at my kitchen table quietly talking while Troy and I labored in the living room. I knew that they were nearby and listening to me but they were also giving us space to experience the birth. In between contractions Troy would hold up a glass of water or juice for me and rub my shoulders. (Ever since the birth I have been addicted to using straws for my cold drinks.)
Taking sips of water in between contractions was pretty automatic. I didn’t need to be disturbed out of my in-between-contraction world to sip water. I’m not sure where I went during those times but I know they were not part of my conscious everyday world. I only remember one thought that I had during one of those in-between times and it was “now I finally get to have a baby,” something I had wanted for a really long time.
Like the last question I had asked of my midwife, my next question was answered similarly. “How do I know when to start pushing?”
“When you feel like it.”
Something had changed and my body was starting to push. I definetly felt when I needed to push. I guess after this the midwives started hanging around closer. They started listening to Iris’s heartbeat more frequently and suggested changing positions now and then. It was morning now. The sun was shining and I had pushed for nearly two hours. One of my midwives suggested I think “down and out.” That worked for me. Someone brought me the birthing stool and put it in the water. And that was how I pushed my baby out into the water. When Iris’s head came out the pain was drastically reduced. I remember feeling a surge of energy from the decline in pain and for the first time I wanted the next contraction to come sooner. Iris’s head was really slippery feeling I think because her membranes were still intact. They broke when I pushed her body out. My midwives caught her and lifted her up out of the water to me. I remember what her gray, rounded neck and back looked like. We turned her over and the midwives dried her, suctioned her and put a hat on her. And I greeted my baby for the first time face to face. I said “Hi Baby.” Troy stood over my shoulder and took everything in, trying not to be overwhelmed.
Sometime after that I got out of the tub, delivered our placenta and got ready for the next part of my life that I am so lucky to have.
Isadora's Water Birth
The cure for anything is salt water-
sweat, tears, or the sea.
- Isack Dinesen
The three months leading up to Isadora's birth were filled with grief and stress, beginning with the sudden, tragic deaths of two close family friends at summer's end. Then in September, planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. I thought the world was coming to and end as I listened to the radio. The towers collapsed, thousands died, people were filled with fear and rage. And then George W. Bush declared his 'war on terrorism" by targeting Afghanistan, and he began bombing the hell out of a country already in ruins. I imagined all the women- the pregnant women, the women with children, the women in labor. What was it like to give birth with bombs falling around you? And then in October my mother went into the hospital with what looked like lung cancer.
On a visit down to Cape Cod to see my mother, my son George got croup, and I stayed up for two nights with him, carrying him in and out of the bathroom, steamy with hot shower water. I sat on the toilet in my parents' bathroom, struggling to keep George on my lap, as I was hugely pregnant. My husband was back in Maine and my son was sick and so was my mother and the world was in ruins and people were dying violently and I was so tired. I was scared. I cried a lot.
I continued crying on a daily basis-at least for a good hour or so for the next three weeks. It felt good to cry. But I felt guilty about it, as if my sadness for the world were somehow seeping into the little life that was iin my belly and doing damage. I worried aloud about it during a childbirth relaxation class my husband Craig and I took at the Ballard House. When the instructor asked me what my pregnancy story was about, I told her how sad and scared I was and how I felt bad about feeling this way, for the baby's sake. "Why feel bad?", the instructor asked. It's just the beginning of this baby's story.
On Monday night, November 19th, which was my son George's fourth birthday. I lay in bed, having contractions and crying. When I slept, I dreamt that I was having a baby. I kept trying to calm my mind down, but I was having the rushing thoughts that signal labor. The next afternoon, I was sitting on the couch with Georgge and my water broke. The gush of warm, salty water was familiar and yet surprising. The little soul inside me was ready to come out and be in the world.
I called Rae, my step-mother-in-law, who was going to fly in to support me during the birth, and I also called my midwife, Brenda. Because my labor with George was fast, I anticipated that this one would be even faster.
But it wasn't. It was a slow and lolling labor. As the night wore on, I made two huge pots of soup, got the house ready, and gathered up all the birthing suppies. Midnight came and went. My in-laws arrived as did Brenda with Kelcy, her apprentice. Brenda set up the Rubbermaid tub and began to fill it with hot water. Craig and I walked the streets of our neighborhood in the dead of the November night. I rested and slept a little, but not much. I was too excited. My labor continued, soft and hazy and gentle all evening and into the morning.
After George was safely off to preschool, Craig and I went for another walk. While walking, my contractions became much stronger and closer together, but when I came back to the house, they slowed down again. So we went back out with Brenda and Kelcy for another walk at around 10:30 am. By 11:00 or so I was really rolling, having to stop and lean against Craig for some powerful contractions every three or four minutes. As we were walking I began to feel euphoric. The neighborhood looked so beautiful! The blackness of that tree against the bright sky was amazing! My body was manufacturing its own very potent painkillers. I felt ecstatic.
My body was preparing me for opening. The slow and gentle trickle of salt water between my legs comforted me. And I felt safe in the hands of my birthing team. We went up into the bedroom where the tub was set up . The room was cozy and safe and quiet, and I knelt in front of an armchair because I wasn't ready to get into the tub. As I knelt and Brenda and Craig rubbed my back, I felt and intense rush of grief bubble up from the deepest part of me. It seemed to come up my throat, and I was able to let it come up -all the sadness I had felt for all those months. I sobbed and moaned, salty tears trickling into my mouth.
I knew it was time to get into the tub after I cried all the tears that would come. The warm water felt so good, and I sunk in as deep as I could. I floated and relazed between the contractions, I floated and looked into my husband's eyes, and he wiped my neck and face with a cool cloth. I breathed. And then a contraction would come and the wave of it would take me up and rock me until I thought I would surely die from the pain, the searing, clenching strength of my uterus. And then as the pain became its most unbearable, it would begin to let go. As it dissipated, I would float and breathe and look at my husband. His eyes were electric and filled with love.
The midwives knelt next to the tub, encouraging me through the contractions, listening for the baby's heartbeat, and giving me sips of water. Rae stayed in the back of the room, quietly documenting the experience by taking pictures. I was surrounded on all sides by great energy. I felt loved and taken care of.
I was in the tub for a few hours, and the contractions kept getting stronger, coming one on top of another with barely any resting in between. I was awash in the most intense pain, and I hung over the side of the tub, sweating and panting, unable to focus on anything. The sweat poured off me. I needed something to do with all that pain, and I kept asking Brenda if I could push, thinking that at least I could push through the pain. Brenda told me that I would know when I needed to push, that my body would take care of itself, but that I still needed to let myself open up to let the baby through. She said that she thought something was holding me back from completely opening up.
With those words, I realized that I was holding back out of fear. I was afraid-afraid of the pain, afraid of the unknown, afraid of splitting open, afraid of letting my baby into this world, this world that is so horrible and so beautiful, so rich and so painful. I suddenly knew that I needed to stop trying to control the pain or struggle against it and instead to open myself to it, to let it wash over me. I went deep inside myself and found that dark, quiet place and pictured my cervix as a flower that needed to bloom. I let it bloom, and the pain washed over me, and my body was transformed. I got on my knees and the next contractions brought a powerrful, wracking spasm, a physical recognition of the depth and vastness of my openness-the pushing was my body's own response to that deepest feeling. I reached down and felt Isadora's head, like a sweet fuzzy peach. And with the next contraction, she slithered out of me completely, into the warm water. Brenda passed her to me, and I lay back in the tub and held her and told her that I love her.
Isadora is a water baby, a healing baby, a love baby. She's like the warm salty seawater she emerged from-peaceful and calming but also intense. Her sweet soul comforts me when the world gets too rough and ugly. And I love to nurse her. It connects me to the powerful, perfect tug of life.
Nicole Chaison is a free lance writer living in Portland, Maine
Willow is born on a Spring Evening by Sokokis Lake
On May 4th at 8:30 pm, as I was getting Gabby ready for bed, I got hit with a pretty intense contraction. I continued to get her upstairs and rushes kept coming around every 10 minutes. After reading her a story and tucking her in I went to the bathroom. When i wiped there was a ton of bloody show. I knew this was it. After a few hours of contractions, I decided to check myself. I figured 4-5 cm dilated and 70% effaced. The rushes were starting to get more frequent, so I told A.J. that I was in labor. Of course he was excited but we decided it would be best to lie down and get a little rest while we still could. He , Gaige and I snuggled up into bed. I was able to sleep in between rushes until around 3am when they grew in intensity.
At around 4am I decided to call my midwife. She told me she would call the others and come right over. She got her about 4:30 am. She wasn't in the door more than 5 minutes and my contractions stopped. I knew it was normal and figured they would come back. I had a couple in the next hour and then the midwive's apprentice and assistant showed up. Then there was absoulutely nothing for a couple of hours. I started having them again every 30 minutes. The midwives decided they would all go for breakfast and see if my labor would get going again. I decided to lay down and my contractions started again, but I was able to sleep in between. As soon as the midwives came back they stopped again!
At around 11 my midwife decided that they would all go back to her house for awhile. They were gone about 30 minutes and rushes started again! They started coming at about every 20 minutes....then 10 minutes
The midwives got back around 2 and my contractions again went to every 30 minutes or so and after weighing my options I decided to take Black and Blue Cohosh. It started working and we too a long walk to Lake Sokokis. It was so nice there;we sat on the beach and talked for awhile. My contractions started coming stronger and closer together. Kelcy, my midwife's apprentice started massaging my back( She is a Massage therapist and does an awesome job!) Brenda, my midwife and her assistant midwife Deirdre rubbed my legs and feet. After about an hour or so we decided to walk back. At this point my contractions were really on a roll. We got home and they got even stronger and closer together so I decided to get in the shower. It felt wonderful. AJ sat on the toliet until I was done. I got out and decided I wanted to be in my bed for a bit . I would doze off between contractions. Awhile later, my midwife came up and suggested I get upright to get pressure on my cervix. Reluctantly, I took her suggestion. I started feeling a lot of pressure and asked her to check me, I was 7 cm and 90% effaced. I was slightly discouraged but knew the contractions would not get much more intense. I decided to get into the pool to ease the pressure, I stayed ther for awhile then went to the toliet to labor. I knew the pressure from her head would help/ I had tons of pressure and was trying to push with the rushes; it took everyone to keep me focused so I would not.
Brenda asked me if I wanted to have my baby in the pool or my bed....my bed sounded far more inviting. I spent the next few contractions hanging around Kelcy's neck while AJ rubbed my back. Suddenly, ther was no stopping me from pushing! I broke away and got on my hands and knees on the bed. I had one push and felt my water bag, pop and gush. Second push, I heard Brenda say " I see hair",, 3rd push and I felt her head come out...4th push, out came her body. It was 7:58 pm on May 5. Brenda passed her underneath into my arms. It was amazing she was here. Her apgars were 9 and 10! What an amazing experience her birth was and looking back I wouldn't have wanted it any other way!
thank you Jess, Mandy, Violet and Forest for this lovely heartfelt music!
Sacopee Valley Birthing Services
Providing the homebirth option to families in southern Maine and eastern New Hampshire for 15 years
