a tale of two births, part שנים

Two days before my 40^th week of being pregnant with Petra, I slowly waddled over to Vardiya, a neighborhood of Haifa, to attend the usual Mommy & Me class with Declan. Towards the end of our time together with the other moms and kids, I went into the bathroom because I felt the usual pregnancy-induced leakiness…and saw, as I sat on the toilet, that there’s blood on my underwear.

Not wanting to make a fuss, but feeling slightly fazed by the unexpected sight, I mentioned seeing blood quietly to one of the moms as I sat back down next to her on the couch. She exclaimed with some excitement that it could be the beginning of my labor, and passed on the information in Hebrew to the other moms and the person running the class. They all told me to notify my midwife, but of course that’s the one day I forgot my phone at home. I told them that it’s no big deal, and I’ll call when I get home. They insisted on using their iPhones to search for Mindy’s number and declared that I catch a ride with one of them instead of taking my usual uphill trek home.

For a bunch of Israelis, for whom bombs and gas masks are just part of growing up, these moms got surprisingly worked up about my condition. One of them said that they could even drive me to the hospital; I said I doubted I needed medical care right then and there. Their reactions made me feel kind of funny, like “Maybe I am going into labor?” If I had been on my own, I would have just shrugged it off. As it happened, more blood came out later that day, and I was pretty sure at one point that it was in fact the mucous plug. Sometime in the late afternoon, I also started, well, leaking fluid. It wasn’t anything dramatic—no pops or gushes like with Declan. It was so subtle that I wonder if I’m just peeing a little due to being so pregnant. Daniel made me call our midwife and doula to update them on the situation, then he proceeded to go on a wild goose chase around the city trying to find a particular kind of sanitary pad that our midwife said could detect amniotic fluid. It turned out that everyone thought the pharmacies here sell them but actually they’ve stopped to do so a while ago. By the time Daniel returned home via bus, I was leaking so much that I was fairly certain that the baby’s amniotic sac had broken.

Here is where the differences between Declan’s birth and Petra’s really started to grow… Due to the distance between where my doula lives to me (40 minutes by car south of my city) and where I live to my midwife (40 minutes by car west of her city), my midwife told us to start heading over to her place as soon as I called to say I’m 90% sure I’m leaking amniotic fluid. Still, in my mind, I didn’t really believe I’m starting to go into labor. Mainly because, with Declan, I had already gone through a rather uncomfortable night of regular contractions before my water broke fairly obviously. With Petra, I didn’t even know if I was really having any contractions at all. This continued the whole car ride to Beit Lechem HaGlilit, where my midwife lives. It turned out later that I had in fact been having fairly strong and regular contractions that were actually visible to everyone else as Mindy swept the Doppler over my belly. The odd thing was these contractions didn’t hurt at all. Petra reacted so strongly to each contraction that it all just felt like a jumble of movements and tension. In retrospect, that was a great blessing given the bumpiness of our car ride.

After we arrived at the midwife’s, and everyone’s basically settled down in preparation for the event that brought us together, I felt a little sheepish that we’re all awake in the middle of the night (our doula picked us up around 8pm and we finished tea time at our midwife’s around 11pm) for my sake. I basically told everyone to go sleep until further notice. I spent the rest of the night listening to Les Miserables, Norah Jones, Adele, Bethany Dillon, and Gretchen Lieberum. By the last artist, I started getting contractions that actually hurt (heading into 5am). The sun came out around 6am and it was a beautiful, sunny day—like a Pittsburgh autumn day, exactly like the last good sunny (with cold, crisp air) day before the plunge into raininess, when Declan was born. Everyone else started waking up around 7am. Daniel, Offra (our doula), and I went for a walk around Mindy’s property on the moshav. There were orange trees, grapefruit trees, and pecan trees with pecans all over the ground due to the huge storm about two weeks ago. We cracked pecans and ate them, then Offra took an orange for me to scrape the rind continuously and sniff on; Orange scent was supposed to help the cervix open.

Daniel and Offra had planned to walk me over to the moshav’s market, but I cut our trip short and returned to Mindy’s because it was getting too uncomfortable for me to walk much. It’s odd but, around then, I was still feeling some doubt of truly being in labor and that at some point soon really giving birth. With Declan, I was surrounded by really close friends—Daniel and I had visited Julia and my god-daughter early in the morning just as they were waking up for the day, then we had breakfast with Jess and Taylor at Eat N Park. After that, we had headed over to Jason’s and Andrea’s house and sang praise songs together in the living room before my then-doula arrived. I basically had an entourage of good friends with me as we went to lunch. So the difference with Petra’s birth was that, while I was still fairly coherent despite the increasingly strong and painful contractions, I felt less at ease because I didn’t have the irreverent familiarity of my friends’ relationships to fall back on. As opposed to joking away the pain, I still felt constrained in my respect and high regard towards my doula and midwife. Maybe that made a difference in why I felt the pain to be so much more intense during this labor.

As we chatted about our families, and how the day also happened to be Mindy’s father’s 100^th birthday anniversary, I was slightly worried in the back of my mind of how social I was still feeling despite the magnitude of the pain during contractions. By the time I was starting to close off and feel irritated by other people talking towards the end of lunch during labor with Declan, my pain level was on par with how things are around 9:30am. Since Petra was officially born at 1:55pm, understand that from this point onwards at 9:30am, I was starting to realize that this second labor was not in fact going to be easier than the first, despite what so many people say about the nature of subsequent labors.

At least I no longer wondered about whether I was in fact in labor. The painful contractions became so frequent and intense that it was all I could do not to scream every time I started feeling the telltale tightening starting from below. The surge of pain would grow until it reached my utmost pain threshold—and then keep growing. During the height of each contraction, I thought I was going to be driven out of my mind by the intensity. I think for the last three hours of labor, I had my eyes closed the whole time as I leaned onto either Daniel or Offra during the worst moments. It helped for me to visualize whomever I was hanging onto as the physical personification of the pain I was bearing, so that I could actually grasp and move it as I swayed with either Daniel or Offra. At various points in time, I broke down in tears and started praying really loudly—in Hebrew, no less, mostly “Father, please.” (“Abba, bervakasha.”) I didn’t cry once during Declan’s labor, even towards the very end when I was pushing without the helpful force of any contractions. But this labor was so different. Singing, unlike during labor with Declan, didn’t help. Being submerged in water, unlike during labor with Declan, didn’t help. My original plan to have a water birth fell to the wayside as I realized that I needed a whole new bag of tricks for this particular birth. In a way, as I was praying in puzzlement as to why this was the case, I felt God was making a point to me, that He’s reminding me that I need to be relying on Him alone, not just on dear friends He’s blessed me with, not just on techniques and knowledge that’s proven useful in the past for me to carry on the task at hand. That I truly need to trust entirely in Him alone and not my own understanding or circumstances.

So this time, I listened to Mindy’s and Offra’s advice and gave up on comparing my two different labors with two different children. Strangely, the more I try to shy away from the pain—turning rigid as I wait for the contraction to surge and diminish—the less helpful. Still, I got so tired and started to panic a little as my resolve to just focus on surviving one contraction at a time started being undermined by the fact that they were coming in so close to each other that I wasn’t getting any time to regather my strength for the next one. This time, when I broke down crying (yet again), I told Daniel that I really need an epidural. Or maybe a c-section, since we’re not that far from the hospital. Nobody confirmed or denied my appeal; they just listened as I repeated my request for an epidural.

I’m not exactly sure what happened after that. It was a blur of my saying suddenly, “I feel like pushing” and the midwife checking my dilation rate and then telling me that she’s calling a second midwife and setting up for delivery. I remember stripping completely naked because I started sweating profusely. I remember dropping on all four and grunting as my whole consciousness centered around what felt like a ring of fire, the size of a universe. Burning, piercing flames that I needed to move towards in order for my daughter to come out of me.

I know now what the urge to push is, and how powerful and useful it is. It was tempting to just push blindly until the baby comes out in order to get everything over with. It’s what I did when birthing Declan and post-labor recovery was simply awful. I tore a great deal, got stitched up a great deal, and bled for days and days more than the usual amount. I also got 25 US dollars for becoming eligible in a study on bad post-partum tears. With that in mind, I slowed down and waited for the partnership of the contractions. I calmed down as I recited the Lord’s Prayer. While breath-shatteringly painful, the contractions made my pushes more effective, like I can track actual movements of the baby going outwards. At some point, I feel my limbs giving away in strength and both the midwife and I thought at the same time to put me on a birthing stool so gravity could help.  My own recollection was basically a lot of the same as detailed above, except now I’m sitting instead of on all fours. The ring of fire expanded and burned and I kept pushing through the cognitive dissonance I still have about the concept of a human being coming out a small hole of another human being.

That’s why when those around me encouraged me to touch the head as Petra was crowning, I adamantly refused. Just like when Declan was coming out and the hospital staff told me to look up in the mirror to see our progress. It’s just too freaky to me. It’s enough to hear people say that they could see the head, that they could see her hair. It’s also why I couldn’t bear holding Declan right after he was born and they placed him on my stomach, and why I needed to focus on pushing the placenta out after Petra was offered to me when she came out completely and I see her dangling in front of me, still attached to my insides by a really short umbilical cord.

Petra cried soon after she was born, according to the video Daniel took right after her birth, a lot more than I remembered from my own memory. Then she got really mellow for the rest of the time at Mindy’s. Unlike Declan, who screamed bloody murder when he was on the scale, Petra just looked around while she kicked her feet and compromised the integrity of the scale. (She was 3.9kg… heavier than Declan by about 0.6 pounds. Mindy doesn’t measure babies, so we don’t have that information.) I bled about half a liter of blood in all and basically lied down for two hours immediately after the birth until Mindy needed me to move around to check the bleeding situation. One of my biggest concerns about this labor—how Declan would fare with his mother and father absent—led to our decision to return home as soon as possible. Our good friend Or came and drove us home to Haifa while Kirsten’s babysitting Declan for the last day and a half drew to a close.

Home births are…amazing. No fighting with nurses about IV, blood tests, etc. No waiting in the reception area for a labor room to open up as the TV blared in the background (like when laboring with Declan). I basically did whatever I wanted. In a way, it was kind of scary how much freedom I had. Praise God for all that He did through this whole experience—not just the labor and delivery, but starting all the way back at the beginning with my having no clue about the health and prenatal/birthing system in Israel. With my breaking down into angry and disappointed tears after my first (and only) prenatal consultation with the ob-gyn doctor my Israeli health insurance assigned me. With my posting a query on an Israeli FB group about prenatal care and getting a three-page-long email plus personal visit from one of the moms who replied my query. With my coming to know Mindy and then Offra and Daniel’s support in my birth plan decisions. With a fairly healthy pregnancy all the way past week 37 and getting that onerous blood test finally done after multiple unfruitful clinic visits.

Just so many things. I was amazed, as I received well-wishes from Taiwan and the U.S., at the number of people here in Israel who’re just as warm in their congratulations and prayer support during my labor. My family had essentially started with nothing in terms of personal relationships when we arrived at 3am in Haifa exactly five months ago from Petra’s birth. Then, starting with Kirsten and Or’s generous friendship, here we are now. I am—my family is—richly blessed indeed.