What's Your Birth Story?

Think of childbirth as one big curve ball coming at you at top speed in slow motion, and you’re wearing a blindfold and holding a cardboard bat - and you're naked.

The audio version of this post is embedded here, with the text version below. Enjoy!

Everyone has one. You have one. Your partner has one. Your kids have them – everyone has a birth story, and in our family, retelling birth stories is part of the tradition of birthdays (including climbing into the parents’ bed first thing in the morning to get cards and gifts).

Birth stories connect us to each other. Sometimes they’re cautionary tales, sometimes they’re subjects of wonder, or envy, or tragedy, and almost always of joy. Birth stories bring with them a sense of belonging to a community, being part of a vast and diverse club of experiences, expectations, and examples. Birth stories are not right or wrong, true or untrue, and not a single one is the same as any other. In the whole history of humanity there isn’t one single birth story exactly like any other, and each one is part of the unique story of ourselves. It’s the beginning of us, chapter one in the story of us, and it deserves to be shared.

Birth order within families can have a statistical impact on IQ (firstborns can have +2 points on average than their siblings), on average blood pressure (firstborns are also potentially +3 points higher – not a shock), and on a person’s tendency toward delinquent or criminal behavior (statistics which are directly proportional to parental time investment), but does birth order affect a person’s birth story, or does a birth story affect a personality?

Our two children have dramatically different birth stories, and I have no idea what effect, if any, their births have had on them. But I do know that our first birth story had a huge effect on our second, and the stories of our friends added dimensions to the way we reacted to curve balls in the moment (think of childbirth as one big curve ball coming at you at top speed in slow motion, and you’re wearing a blindfold and holding a cardboard bat – and if you’re the one giving birth, there’s a train coming around the corner and you’re on the tracks).

So I share the stories of our children’s births not because we did anything right or wrong (judgements about birth stories are pointless – we did what we did and that’s all there was to it), but because each story adds a color or hue to the limitless spectrum of experiences that make up childbirth, and one never knows what might give another person a bit of confidence, or relief, or a moment of understanding, acceptance, or peace with their own story.

Connor was born the day the second Matrix movie released in theaters. I guess that means it was a Friday, because when I woke up at 6am with the earliest contractions, I rolled over, woke Ed up, and said “If we’re going to see The Matrix, it needs to be the first show.”

We lived in a rented house in Hollywood within walking distance of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, which, with its exotic revival architecture built in 1926, was our favorite place to see movies. And everyone knew that if you could walk to Grauman’s Chinese, you did, because parking was expensive and hard to find. The first showing of Matrix 2 was at 9am, and adding a touch of gritty realism to our hand-in-hand, this-is-the-day-we’ve-anticipated walk was a pause at the Hollywood Gateway Sculpture to puke in a trash can. We called our mothers from the theater to let them know their grandchild’s birth would probably happen that day, but no rush, we had a movie to see first. My own mother’s labor with me had lasted 15 hours, so we had lots of time.

Connor had other ideas. Halfway through the movie I shifted into active labor. I still have no idea how that movie ends, and instead, my most vivid memory is of scanning the traffic as we walked home, looking for any taxi or bus we might beg for a ride.

At home, I decided I needed a shower while Ed did whatever he did (probably made more calls), and when it was time to go to the birth center where our midwives worked, I balked.

“You need to drive me there,” I insisted.

Ed looked astonished. “It’s literally 200 yards away from our house. It’ll take me longer to find parking than it would take to walk there.”

“I don’t care. Bring the car back to the house if you need to, but I can’t walk one step more.”

So, with the wisdom that comes with nine months of partnering a pregnant person, he did as I demanded and drove me across Sunset Blvd to our birth center.

One of the couples from our birth group was in the big room, resting up from their own birth when we arrived, so Tai put us in the waiting room after checking to see that I was only three centimeters dilated. It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard – three centimeters wasn’t nearly enough for the laboring I’d already done. About forty minutes later Tai came back in to tell us the room with the bathtub was ready for us, and because she happened to witness a contraction, she measured again. This time it was seven centimeters, which made much more sense to my pain receptors.

I have no idea how long I labored in the bathtub (which I failed to appreciate, given how much I’d been looking forward to it). I had a distinct memory of Connie, the other midwife, cautioning me that my baby (and the firefighters in the station next door) could hear my screams, and might I want to tone it down a little? Then my water broke, and with it came meconium – the dark brown/green baby poop that comes out of distressed fetuses. So, up from the water I went, and then down onto a birthing stool I sat, with Ed behind me, supporting me with his hands. He later said that my grip during contractions was so strong his hands ached for days afterwards. Despite the calm, quiet efficiency with which the midwives worked, it became clear that they were worried, and after one long contraction during which the baby’s heart decelerated, Connie told me that if he didn’t crown with the next contraction, they’d have to transport me to the hospital.

Apparently, those were the magic words, because two contractions later, he was out, and from that moment on everything, from the room to the exams to the baby was calm and peaceful. Connor was given no shots (he’d get them later from the pediatrician), no silver nitrate drops in the eyes (I didn’t have gonorrhea), and no bath (he was wiped down with a warm soft cloth). He breastfed immediately, fell asleep on me while I was stitched up (I tore, as one does with giant babies), and I’m not even sure when he cried for the first time. It wasn’t that day though.

Within about three hours I was ready to go home.

“I’ll get the car,” Ed said. “From our driveway.”

“Good. Then my sister can take me home and you can walk with the baby.” We hadn’t installed our car seat yet, so it only made sense that Ed should wrap our tiny newborn in a sling and wear him across Sunset Blvd. He was, after all, the one who had wanted to walk there in the first place.

Logan, on the other hand, was breech, had the cord wrapped twice around his neck, and broke his water three weeks early to get out. He’s our dramatic child and it does beg the question of what the dramatic entrance might have inspired.

At our 37 week appointment with our midwife’s back up doctor, we were told that the baby was breech, which in this case meant he was butt-first when he should have been doing a headstand. Dr. Kline sent us away with several anecdotal options to convince the baby to turn on his own, otherwise the doctor would attempt to manipulate him into position, sort of like trying to turn a turkey from outside the oven with the door closed and the heat on. So, I put on my bikini (the only swimsuit that still fit) and did handstands in my neighbor’s pool (an image I’ve been told will never be fully scrubbed from their memories). I also did yoga and went to a chiropractor who specialized in pregnancy. The chiropractor’s efforts must’ve made some difference, because that night the baby kicked his water out, and the midwife confirmed that he was still breech.

“You need a non-emergency C-section,” she said. Ready or not, the turkey was done cooking.

I had no choice but to have an epidural, and never even felt contractions with Logan. My doctor and his partner and I talked about the latest (last) Harry Potter book which had just come out while incisions were made and organs were moved, and then the baby was out, and despite the cord he’d been wearing like a scarf, he was pink and breathing just fine. I was stitched up again (though in a different spot) and whisked away to recovery while Ed stayed with Logan to say “no.”

“We need to put silver nitrate drops in his eyes,” a nurse said. “He wasn’t exposed to gonorrhea,” he answered. “You’ll have to sign a form,” she warned. “I’ll sign them all,” he said, as this test and that shot were offered and declined.

I wasn’t technically allowed to hold my baby until I could wiggle my toes, but Ed cheated and held him to my chest so he could feed. I spent exactly one night in that hospital with my baby next to me in my hospital bed while nurses looked the other way, muttering about forms that needed signatures. The next morning Logan’s pediatrician came in and said he was discharging the baby. “Go home,” he said. “You can do the same thing you’re doing here, but on better sheets.” So I did.

If I looked for them, I could probably find personality indicators to attribute to my children’s birth stories, but despite being the first chapter of the story of their lives, their births say more about us as parents than they do our kids. We thought we’d planned for everything, but each birth threw us a curve ball we didn’t expect. We kept our eye on the ball when we could – by saying “wait” to things we’d determined weren’t necessary yet – and surrendered when we needed to without feeling like we’d failed when the plan changed. Having a birth plan had been a great intellectual exercise, but when it came to the actual births, the plans were tossed out the window. Through it all, and ever since, we’ve relied on instinct, communication, and the trust in each other that we were aligned on the things that truly mattered.

There’s no “right” birth, there’s only birth. Life, like every story, must begin to continue, and the thing about birth stories is that no matter how prepared you are, or how much you’ve researched this way or that thing, they’re all stories that tend to write themselves.