i spent the past 10 months dreaming and planning the ultimate natural birth. we worked with midwives, took hypnobirthing classes, and read ina mae’s guide to childbirth. we watched youtube videos of waterbirths in preparation of our own, hired a doula, and signed up to have my placenta turned into capsules to fight post-partum depression and help my milk come in. in the end, most of my plans fell to the wayside.
laboring at home and then moving freely about the hospital was not an option when my water broke and we saw meconium in it. i ended up in the hospital just a few hours into early labor and was immediately put onto 24 hour fetal monitoring. the meconium also meant i was no longer a candidate for the water birth i had spent months fantasizing about. despite all of my practice and hours listening to hypnobirth cds, i am not sure i ever made it into the deeply relaxed state of self-hypnosis during labor. i remember crying, shaking, and telling herb and our doula that i couldn’t do it. i remember a lot of this. though the midwife and nurse pushed the boundaries as far as they could, i was ultimately induced. once i began labor, i already had two sleepless nights in the hospital under my belt. after 12 hours of laboring and falling asleep (like, the kind of sleep where you are snoring) between contractions, i literally begged for an epidural. this was not in the plans that i had filed under “my bad ass natural hypno-water-birth is going to knock your socks off”.
at the end of three sleepless nights in the hospital and 29 hours of labor, i ultimately gave birth to my beautiful daughter, not in a warm pool of water or in a dimmly lit room, but rather on my back in the operating room. with bright lights. and forceps. and about 15 people hovering over my lady parts. even my placenta encapsulation plans flew out the window when my midwife gently told me that it was stained with meconium and had to go straight to pathology. i was later told that i cheerfully replied, “well OF COURSE it was. why would that work out? nothing else has.” i wasn’t bitter or sad. it was almost humorous at that point.
as for the actual birth, i am convinced that i was able to wake up enough to do the pushing the doctor needed me to do only because there was a surgical table next to me that just about everyone in the room was ready to move me onto and perform the c-section they all thought i should just consent to. it was pure fury and determination that allowed me to wake up enough to sit up, grab my legs and get that baby out in three rounds of pushes.
in the end, i had my vaginal birth. almost nothing else went as planned. but my baby came into this world through the vaginal canal. the ultimate goal was achieved. i think what i had was a natural-ISH birth. ish is a term i embraced a few years ago when a dear friend left a beautiful children’s book entitled ish on my front porch. it is about a little boy who fancies himself an artist until his brother makes fun of his paintings and says they look nothing like what the little boy intended them to look like. he was ready to walk away from life as an artist until his little sister picks up the paintings. his picture of a sun is “sun-ish”, she says. and that tree is very “tree-ish”. the little boy decides that ish might just be okay and continues to paint all sorts of ish things.
since we have been home, things continue to be ish. to add to my unending list of natural mamma dreams that have flown out the window, my breast milk still has yet to fully come in. so we breast feed-ish and then my huge, beautiful daughter down 2-3 ounces of store bought formula. from a bottle. and then i sit in a chair hooked up to a breast pump, begging my body to please just cooperate with me on this one thing!
i can only imagine that parenthood is going to be a long list of ish. and for better or worse, i have been thrown into the deep end-ish from the beginning. but there are a few things that are anything but ish. a few things that are solid. like the deep love i feel for this tiny human girl. the admiration i have for my husband. the appreciation i feel for my mother. and the courage i see in myself.
EDITED to make time of labor accurate. mommy brain got the best of me when I typed 50 hours.
from the book 
