The wild and wondrous birth of Hanif Insaaf, Chapter 4
In which she knows she is going into labor...or doesn't
This is Chapter Four of a 7-part story. Need to catch up? Previous chapters can be found here, here, and here.
I did not mind hitting forty weeks, honestly. Week 39 had been the first week in a month where I could live in my house normally: it had been a construction zone for weeks. I had attended my last birth at 37 weeks and continued doing prenatal and postpartum visits until 39 weeks and 2 days. My kids had a performance I wanted to attend at 39 weeks and 3 days. My friend Brittany was having a baby shower at 39 weeks and 4 days, And on and on. I had wanted to prepare stews for postpartum and drinks for labor and get my bikini line waxed. I had spent weeks emotionally preparing to be okay with not getting all of this done, but I had done it.
And then, by Thursday the 26th, one day after my due date, I had nothing to do.
It was not an eventuality I had prepared for, and I was having trouble reorienting myself emotionally. I worked out, had a truly excruciating contraction after some burpees, did some taxes and some work admin. I wrote, and posted, a 40 week pregnancy journal entry on Instagram. I tried my best not to be in a bad mood. By Friday, my friend Kate – whose birth I had attended 2 years earlier, in the height of lockdown, my heart expanding and contracting as I saw her 3 big kids rush in to meet their new sibling, so sure this was nothing I’d ever experience– sensed my ennui. She took me out for breakfast; we laughed at how I considered cod as my first meal of the day (I chose, instead, breakfast gnocchi with eggs and greens). Andy bought me candles at the Park Slope Food Coop. One was shaped like the Venus of Willendorf. I took a nap. It was a beautiful day.
When I awoke I was spotting. Glorious pink-streaked mucus on my toilet paper. The angels sang.
I smiled to myself, self-assured. This was how two of my other labors had begun. I was a multip1. I knew what spotting meant. Spotting meant labor, probably tonight.
I went to my sister Saadia’s house to pick up Jo, who had been playing with my nieces. My nephew Haji was also there, and the day before he had asked if he could “see and hear” my baby so I brought my doppler, and we listened to the baby’s heartbeat together, the first time I had done so since late November. My brother in law came to pick him up, but even after they had left I lingered, chatting with Saadia. Eventually I stood up from the couch and yelped, thrown off by the sudden, distinctly bizarre sensation of fluid leaking out of me. I giggled, said something about what I had felt, did not stop to take in my sister’s and the girls’ reaction before running to the bathroom. I inspected my underwear: nothing. I peed. I inspected the toilet paper: just a little more pink mucus. Inconclusive. I washed my hands.
My nieces and sister and daughter stared at me when I returned, some combination of confusion, curiosity, excitement, and horror on each of their faces depending on which one I gazed back at. I shrugged. “I don’t think it’s anything,” I said.
I returned home, attempted to get some fluid onto an amnicator – essentially, a sterile Q-tip made of pH paper - and rubbed it on my underwear. It turned yellow. So it’s just mucus, not my water, I thought.
I puttered around the house. Illy had friends over, and the three teenage boys huddled over a computer together. I walked back into the bathroom, lifted the lid. The Q-tip sat there, blue.
So it IS my water, I thought.
In retrospect the amnicator could have touched something in the garbage; this was hardly a sensitive, controlled experiment. It was my last one, so I couldn’t recheck. But I wanted it to be my water, and so I believed what the garbage amnicator indicated, because this was exactly how Wren’s birth, fifteen years earlier, had started: pink spotting, followed by my water breaking, followed by labor shortly thereafter. I thought I knew what such a progression meant (despite the fact that in Wren’s labor, it was clear my membranes had ruptured, with a large gush of fluid and some sustained leaking for hours thereafter, something, it would turn out, notably absent this time). I was filled with giddiness – I was going to meet my baby tonight – and I laughed out loud. Another small bit of fluid emerged, this time cloudier. Vernix? I thought.
I left the bathroom, texted Kate. I told her, I had a good feeling about our breakfast. I chattered to Andy. I told him, maybe I was waiting for the Venus of Willendorf. I realized I was contracting, gently but perceptibly. I laughed some more: could I really be having labor signs in a house full of teenage boys? I knew I wouldn’t go into labor in front of my own kids, let alone someone else’s, but I decided to get into the shower to perhaps slow down whatever was happening, just in case. I texted my friend Mary Catherine, also a midwife, from the shower, something like “I swear I’m not going to go into labor right this second, but ya girl’s a multip who is contracting and was called to get into the shower.” I was joking, but also not: with my history of fast labors, I knew things could turn quickly. Still, I was sure I would not labor until my kids were asleep – which with my teens meant likely 3am – so in my head I strategized how to bide the time between now and then. I luxuriated there for 45 minutes, noticing the waves of tension (I couldn't rightfully call them contractions, but they were something) in my uterus were coming regularly, probably around six or seven minutes apart — until they weren’t.
By the time Andy left to drop the teenaged boys at home, and I got out of the shower, they were barely there at all. I put on comfortable pjs, took a picture of my silhouette in the mirror: probably my last belly picture, I thought.
Andy returned and we decided to watch Lego Masters with the kids over pizza. I heated up chicken soup for myself. Better labor food than pizza, I thought. The contractions slowed. Because I’m laying down, I thought.
Despite my best efforts, the chicken soup made me nauseated. The contractions that had both come and gone in the shower were not returning. The littles went to bed. We watched Schitt’s Creek with Wren. The nausea got worse. I succumbed to taking meds, passed out, slept through the night save for one wake up to pee at 1am. When I got there, Illy was in the bathroom, and I heard Wren playing guitar downstairs. I felt nothing. The fury was starting to build. I will never fucking have this baby, I thought, in a house where there’s always a teenager awake and around. I went back to sleep and didn’t wake again until the stark light of day shone down at my arms, empty and babyless, through the curtains.
Shorthand for “multiparous” - someone who has given birth one or more times.