Happy weekend, comrades! Over in my corner of Brooklyn it’s been a two-birth kind of week, the kind of week that leaves me feeling every kind of emotion it’s possible to feel as a human, the kind of week that brings me to my knees in awe of the strength of the families I care for.
It’s been a really wondrous experience returning to birth after having Hanif; I can feel each birth I’ve attended inflecting my midwifery and mothering and humanness in new ways, while at the same time I’m bringing to those births a version of myself as midwife that is newly inflected by my experiences gestating and birthing Hanif, too. I’d never given birth while a midwife, and if you’ve read my birth story you know how important my midwifery was to my birthing. Conversely, I’d never attended births pregnant or so newly postpartum1. It’s been vulnerable and intuitive and tiring and breathtaking and hard and easy and All The Things.
In any event, after an entire pregnancy and postpartum where I only wrote one birth story save my own, I’m beginning to feel ready again, so perhaps someday soon you’ll hear more about the four incredible births I’ve attended in the first three months of Hanif’s life. In the meantime, my offering this week is a singular and — I think at least — beautiful project I undertook with a client a couple of years ago. We wrote separate accounts of her birth simultaneously, without reading the other’s. What resulted was a fascinating juxtaposition; where the stories overlap and intersect and where they diverge and fill in each others’ gaps is, I think, really special. Since this birth involves a common obstetric complication (hemorrhage), I’m happy to fill in any clinical gaps and answer any questions in the comments! I hope you enjoy and I’ll see you, hopefully refreshed, next week!
Love,
Robina
The birth of Seba: Robina’s version
I was walking over to my daughter’s homeschool coop with birthday cupcakes when I received the call. The surges were mild, still; we talked about rest, and hydration, and ways to bide the time until things became clearer. I wondered to myself if her baby would share my daughter’s birthday, and I do believe she wondered it too, and I do believe she asked her baby to wait till nightfall. Because that is who she is. And because it wasn’t until my busy, festive house quieted and the cake and wrapping paper were cleaned up that things became more consistent.
When I arrived, her husband was snoozing with their daughter -“trust me,”she said,“ it’s better he sleep as long as he can”- and so we four women - her, her mother, myself, and my birth assistant - sat in the dimmed light, in the same vigil people have been holding here and there forever, and yet this one, like every one, was particularly our own, inimitable and distinct. We listened to music, softly murmuring about outdoor concerts between contractions, softly humming about going to Carolina in our minds. We listened to her joke about labor, softly agreeing that the whole process was stupid and hard. We listened to her as she moved from birth ball to toilet to floor, as she offered us food, as she wondered aloud whether things were really happening, as she released her membranes, as she quaked with transition. We sat, four women in a circle, perched in the sky, our own speck of light amongst the others that twinkled down on concrete, so different from the stars of her native Hawaii twinkling down on the sea and yet we were there, too.
We were here, tiny, and we were there, infinite, as she birthed her baby; as she looked up in amazement at her husband, who we had woken up; as she leaned into her mother with relief; as she marveled at the fact of her son.
And we were here, and we were there, when her birth became a hot red current. Because birth is a river that goes where it wants and sometimes that is where it flows.
It was manageable, and we managed it, but as I prepped the IV her mother worriedly hissed, “do you see the color of her lips?”
And I wanted to say, Yes. I see the color of her lips. Yes, I see her. I see her wry sense of humor and I see the way her eyes flash with a wicked gold when she wonders aloud at the cruelties of the medical industrial complex and I see the way she flicks her long braid over her shoulder like a punctuation and I see her adoration of her baby brother and I see the way she encourages her daughter to call me Aunty Roro. I see her and I love her and I am here with you in this and nothing is going to happen here. Because.
Because we are mothers and daughters, we are daughters and mothers, and we are together in this.
After the river had been staunched, I stayed for hours, watching her breastfeed, watching her as she dozed, watching her as she ate steak, watching her as she breastfed some more. I watched as she walked to the bathroom, my hands out to receive her if she needed me. I watched as she introduced her daughter to her son. When her daughter’s face crumpled as the baby cried, I bent down and I said, “that’s just how babies talk because they don’t have big words like you,” and she looked up at me, eyes brimming, and I took in her sweet little face and her red pajamas and thought, we are in this together too.
Nothing happened, and everything did, and we were here and we were there, walking the shadows and the in-betweens so many others have walked, too many others to count or know, and yet it was our own, and it was us who were there together. This is what it’s like to be mothers and daughters sometimes, expansive and particular. A worried tremble in the throat, bright and watery eyes, a laugh startled and magnificent, a steady hand open to receive. A pin prick of light in the dark of the night, a wide open sea, all of it, none of it. Everything.
The birth of Seba: Kulani’s version
My first birth was more or less what I had planned: an unmedicated vaginal birth. There were, however, things that transpired during and especially after that when dwelled on for too long filled me with regret and resentment. This time, I told my Libra brain, our na’au was going to lead. Na’au in Hawaiian language and culture is your gut; the thing that whispers shallow in your ear and churns deep down in your body. Your na’au is powerful, and I battle every day to see it more clearly.
The window shades were drawn. People always write these gorgeous things about the early morning sunlight at birth. Not us. We were cocooned. Music. Contractions. Moans. Sways. In between I made snarky jokes about the pile of shit that is labor. They were funny only because we all knew it was both true and not. Labor is Fire and Rain. Struggle and Triumph. Terrible and Magnificent. Past and Present. Breaths. Contractions. Heartbeats. What time was it? Was the sun even out?
Their body slipped out into Robina’s hands and then into mine. He was there. Just like that. Everything before left this world as he entered it. It truly is a miracle how that happens. There was only joy and relief and wonder.
Then I felt the first gush. She gave me pitocin and worked on my uterus. Another gush came. Neither were huge but they required action. We needed my placenta to come out. We did the things and it came- though we wished it had come sooner. I moved to the bed. She gave me cytotec. I shivered. I needed to empty my bladder. Walking to the bathroom I was weak, pale, and battling back the encroaching grey around the edges of my vision. Stay conscious, I told myself. On the toilet, vulnerable and starting to worry I looked up at Robina and asked, “Am I going to have to transfer?” No, she told me. She seemed so sure that she made me sure. That’s a midwife my friend, that’s a midwife.
Though I continued to feel faint and feeble, I never once thought after that moment that something more might happen to me. But my mom was scared, probably more than scared. She’s an ER social worker, a saint and top-notch caregiver. But working in the ER means you see trauma, or at least the possibility of it, in everything. My mom was fire, Robina was rain. We harnessed both. For hours she stayed and checked on me until she was sure it had stopped. She stayed as long as she needed to, and then she left quietly as she’d come. I don’t even remember if we said goodbye.
So much of the appeal of home birth, for me, is the glorious after birth: in your own home, in your own bed, with your own people. No one to poke and prod your baby or wake you up. No one to tell you something’s wrong when you know it isn’t, or not listen to you when you know it is. Nothing but you, your baby, and your na’au. The birth was so smooth. A part of me wishes my after birth was too. That it wasn’t muddled with low blood pressure, cytotec trembles, or worry. But it was. Fire and Rain.
The truth is I would’ve bled that much in the hospital. I would've been given the same drugs and IV- I just wouldn’t have been able to sleep. (Please someone tell hospitals to let postpartum birthers sleep). Perhaps no one would’ve believed me or paid attention. More likely, they would’ve already had an IV with pitocin in my arm before I had even pushed him out. Maybe that would’ve been better? Probably not.
In fact, I’m pretty sure looking back that I did bleed that much with my daughter in the hospital. That’s how I looked and felt after her birth and for days afterwards. When they broke my heart into pieces and took her from me for “jaundice” and I went back and forth, back and forth, not 48 hours postpartum, between a nearby friend’s apartment and the hospital to bring her my expressed milk. When I was on the toilet, truly terrified and sobbing to my partner because I passed, what I considered to be, a large clot at home 5 days later and the only thing I was told was: “As long as it's not bigger than a fist.” Who’s fist? Mine? His?
I went through what now seems to be my kind of “normal.” A normal which requires medication and half a day’s worth of intimate attention. And there’s only one place you can get both of those in this town: home with a midwife.
Last time, no medical caregiver ever checked in on me in any meaningful way. This time, I was watched over in all the ways that could ever be meaningful. Fire and Rain.
I started midwifery school pregnant with my third, and she was around 15 months when I started attended births.
Love you!
Beautiful stories, thank you for sharing. I wish you a restful post-birth week.