Yes this photo is AI generated but also I yoinked it from Google Images and I won't provide credit so in the end it's ethically neutral
January 9, 2025
This is a birth story. This is a story about a seven pound baby girl coming out of my vagina. I just want to say that in the upfront. If that already sounds like too much information, turn back now.
So here’s the thing about me: I’m a planner. I book all the family vacations and create a corresponding itinerary. I do not go to a restaurant without looking at the menu first. And of course, I had a birth plan for both of my children.
The birth plan is just a detailed list of things you do or do not want to happen while you’re in labor. It’s where you document stuff like “I want to give birth surrounded by lit candles with Enya playing” or “I will be taking the placenta in a to-go baggie.”
My birth plans weren’t complicated. They had two things on them: I didn’t want a C-section unless absolutely necessary, and I wanted every painkiller available to me. There’s no great way to get a baby out, but a C-section would mean a longer hospital stay and a more difficult recovery. And then I wanted the drugs for obvious reasons.
I almost died after giving birth to my son in 2021 (that’s a long story for another time), but the labor itself went really smoothly. I’d been terrified of the epidural because they inject it directly into your spine, but that fear dissipated when the contractions started to get really intense. I would have let the doctor punch me in the face if it meant I’d pass out.
They gave me fentanyl in my IV too, and I felt a little uncomfortable but mostly fine. I slept for three hours while actively having contractions. Then I woke up and had a baby. And that’s about all I remember.
My daughter’s birth was different. I remember everything from her birth because I was stone-cold sober. No epidural, no fentanyl, not even an ibuprofen. I raw dogged it. And not on purpose.
We did get pregnant with our daughter on purpose, but I’d be lying if I said my immediate reaction to learning about her wasn’t Oh shit. Oh shit I have to be pregnant again. Oh shit I have to give birth again. What if I die? Or worse, what if this one destroys my vagina?
So in the face of my anxiety, I clung to what I could. Things like: I already had a kid and it didn’t kill me! I almost died. Almost doesn’t count. I also took solace in my firsthand experience with the pain management available to me. I’d just ask them for “all the drugs” again. It worked the first time.
By the time the week of my due date rolled around, I was ready to get this show on the road. I was over it. My belly was huge, my ankles were huge, I couldn’t sleep or sit or put on my shoes comfortably.
And parental benefits don’t kick in until you have the kid, unless you are physically unable to work. A full-term pregnancy lasts for 40 weeks and I worked for 39 of them (not uncommon, but the people around me seemed surprised, including my doctor).
Now I’m not saying it’s impossible to do a desk job at 39 weeks pregnant, but I will say it’s impossible to do a desk job at 39 weeks pregnant without stopping to scream periodically. Luckily I work from home. (Or did until I got laid off on maternity leave. That’s a long story for another time, too.)
The baby was due on a Wednesday. I worked until 4:30pm the Friday before. I guess since I got shitcanned I can be honest with you here: at 4:30pm I lied to my manager and said I thought the baby was coming imminently, because fuck if I was gonna work until 5pm on my last day in the virtual office.
Not to mention I flew across the country for work meetings at seven months pregnant, a deeply uncomfortable experience that peaked when I had to Doordash adult diapers to my Manhattan hotel room because I couldn’t stop peeing my pants. I earned that half hour.
I digress. And for your information, I am no longer incontinent now that there’s not a baby sitting on my bladder. I would say it’s not your business but I did just make it your business.
I woke up the Saturday before my due date still pregnant, which pissed me off. Only one thing was going to help my mood: devouring a double Smokeshack from Shake Shack like a wild animal. I remember joking that I was going to eat until my stomach got so full it pushed the baby out.
Now I don’t have any hard data to prove that the double cheeseburger induced labor, but I did wake up in the wee hours of Sunday morning to contractions. So it didn’t not induce labor.
They started slow. Manageable. Gentle contractions. So gentle I wasn’t even sure I was having them. Then a little bit harder and a little bit faster. Still not too bad. I’ve had period cramps worse than those early contractions. I measured their frequency and duration for about an hour, until the contractions were five minutes apart. Then I woke up my husband and we headed to the hospital.
I’d practiced visualization with my therapist, even though I was sure I wouldn’t need it because who needs visualization when you have drugs. But just in case, I’d settled on imagining the contractions as waves swelling, one after another, as I bobbed along in the ocean. With every breath in I imagined coming up for air, my head breaking the surface of the water, before exhaling and diving back in under the surf.
As they were checking me into the maternity ward, I had a contraction that made my knees weak. In through the nose and out through the mouth. They led me to a triage area. I changed into a hospital gown. I climbed onto the gurney. A nurse strapped a monitor to my belly. I felt something pop underneath me and liquid spilled onto the floor. “I think my water just broke!” I yelled.
The nurses were moving in what seemed like slow motion as the contractions started coming harder and faster and I was no longer bobbing in the surf but instead being pummeled by a stormy sea
And I was squeezing my husband’s hand while he told me “Remember you get to have a margarita after this!” and I wailed and the nurses laughed even though he wasn’t kidding (I wouldn’t shut the fuck up about that margarita)
And the nurses kept laughing and joking as they poked me in one arm and then the other to try to start an IV line as each contraction came harder than the last and I started to squirm in pain and I couldn’t really control my body and I thought about how I had to be perfectly still the last time I got an epidural and that it seemed like maybe that ship had sailed
And the second they finally found a vein someone looked at the belly monitor and instead of putting any painkillers in my IV they rushed me down the hall to the delivery room and the nurse pushing me said to keep my hands inside the gurney so I didn’t get my fingers crushed
And I remember thinking maybe it would be a relief to get my fingers crushed and feel anything other than contractions and in through the nose and out through the mouth in through the nose and out through the mouth in through the nose and
It’s hard to describe the sensation I felt when we arrived at the delivery room but it was kind of like the feeling when you have to barf and there’s nothing you can do about it except in this case my body was going to push and there was nothing I could do about it so I yelled “My body wants to push!” and the room sprang to action
They rolled the gurney up next to the hospital bed and asked if I could transfer myself from one to the other on my own and they might as well have asked me to climb Mount fucking Everest but I did my best and I kind of flopped myself over onto all fours but then I couldn’t go any further so I asked the midwife “Can I just stay like this?” and she said I could do whatever was comfortable which is a funny thing to say to a woman who’s about to have a baby shoot out of her
And I looked up at the midwife with the most pathetic face in human history and asked “Is it too late for the epidural?” And oh sweetie, she told me, it’s too late for that because it’s time to push and also your baby has a beautiful head of hair and in that moment my husband said I looked like I was about to get hit by a car
And there on all fours in a room full of strangers (and also naked by the way because I guess I fastened my hospital gown wrong) I thought to myself “I can’t do this, this wasn’t the plan” and the pain was no longer coming in waves the pain was just there pushing me down and I was drowning and then
I took a deep breath in and then exhaled while pushing as hard as I could and using the power of visualization again to imagine the baby flying out of me and bouncing off the opposite wall like a pinball
Then I did it again, in in in out out out push push push as I visualized the baby zooming headfirst down a water slide
And then I pushed a third time and thought about that guy on TikTok who can rip a watermelon in half with his bare hands
And then on the fourth push one of the midwives got a little intense and started yelling at me like maybe she had a past as a fitness instructor and she told me to breathe in and and push while holding my breath so I pushed harder and longer and held my breath until I felt like I might explode and then suddenly
Relief
And someone pushed a baby up underneath me so we were face to face, her on her back and me crouching over her.
There she was. My daughter.
She did have a beautiful head of hair.
In the end, I was in labor for just under 4 hours. I pushed for 15 minutes. Even the nurses seemed kind of shocked. One of them told me she’d never seen anything like it. I was up on my feet and walking around within an hour. I went to the bathroom by myself.
And that’s our story. Is there a moral? I genuinely don’t know. I guess if anything, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that bodies are incredible and you are capable of more than you thought possible.
It’s not something I did on purpose and it’s not something I’ll ever do again, but hey: it made for a hell of a story.
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