I Gave Birth By Myself

By Michelle Singer

Photo: Margaret Michniewicz

Here’s what I mean by alone: no one else was present when I birthed my son into the world in my own living room. My mother, the only other person in the entire house, was downstairs. After I lifted my child from the water and calmly called out “Mom?” she came up for the shock of her life. The thing about birth is that you never know where you are in it. Twenty minutes earlier, I was essentially not in labor. I was standing at the door getting ready to go out for a cup of coffee.

Actually, I had labored the entire night before, with contractions eight minutes apart. But as time crept on and active labor loomed before me, I started to panic. The painful contractions only reminded me of what was to come, more painful contractions, worse and closer together. I lost my nerve and the labor stalled. For four hours I walked, thought, and my labor slowed to a mere contraction every thirty minutes, seemingly timed to when I would think Okay, maybe I can do this. Inevitably I would then have another contraction and I was back to, Oh, shit I can’t do this.

For those four hours I gave serious thought to going to the hospital for “the epidural.” When I called the midwives to tell them so, they stopped by my house instead. In very typical laboring woman fashion, I told them I couldn’t do it. They sympathized and told me I could, but I meant it. I had lost my courage. The midwives massaged my sorry body for an hour and gave me the pep talk: “You can do it,” “You can do anything for one day,” “You’ve done it once before, you know you can.” It all went in one ear and out the other, but the massage got me out of panic lockdown. Before the midwives left, they told me to do something else: Go out and get your mind off of it. This seemed like a brilliant plan.

As they left, I contracted. No one had realized how dilated I was.

I made plans with my husband and daughter to go, of all places, to the coffee shop. (During my first pregnancy I was so offended when Rachel on “Friends” drank coffee through her pregnancy and wore high heels, but second pregnancies are a different animal – I found myself at the coffee shop every week when I should have been at pre-natal yoga).

I contracted again while getting ready to leave. My hand was on the doorknob ready to go on my now routine trip to Capitol Grounds coffee shop in Montpelier when I had yet another contraction. I thought, if I have one of these in the car, I’m going to be pissed off, so I told Josh and Ruby to go ahead without me and bring me back an iced coffee. I went upstairs, stripping as I climbed, and was naked by the time I got to the warm birthing tub.
I watched my husband and daughter pull out and then sit on the road. Ruby didn’t want to go without me. You know how kids know. They sat for a minute or two and I watched them, standing in the tub naked. I raised my hand to wave them in, thinking maybe you should come back, but as I lifted my arm, they pulled away. Josh says he’ll never forget my silhouette in the window, the last time he ever saw me pregnant.

When I gave birth to Ruby, three years before, it was in the exact same style tub, at home, and I was on my back, neck braced on the rim of the tub. The first contraction in the tub this time was like re-experiencing Ruby’s birth. I said, Oh no, I can’t do it like that again and I rolled forward to my hands and knees. As I did, I had an amazing sensation of opening. I found the two stones that I had picked up while walking a few days before the birth and had placed in the tub. Their round smoothness had drawn me to them as I prayed for that smoothness in the process, the water shaping them as I hoped it would inspire me. I put one in each fist and they stayed in my hands as I began to birth my son, Jaden, resting on my fists and knees.

My second contraction sent me into this conversation with myself: Surrender. But not to this! Surrender. But surely you can’t mean to this. I began sinking deeply into my body. I closed my eyes and the world outside fell away. My last worldly thought was, I’m not getting out of the tub now. If I start in, there’s no way I’m getting to a hospital.
On the third contraction my body starting bearing down. Let’s be clear: I didn’t do anything. My body started to bear down; I grunted and then I realized in an instant where I was in the birth. One part of me gave an inner nod: I had guessed, prepared, even secretly wished for this. I let the thought to call to my mother downstairs slip past without grabbing onto it. In that moment, I let myself have the experience of birthing alone. Because birth forces you to be utterly present, I didn’t have to ask the question am I going to be okay, is the baby okay? I knew, in the way the deepest part of you knows, that this is where we had been headed all along and that everything was totally safe.
On the next contraction my body squeezed everything – I mean everything – out. With the next two I felt the top of my baby’s head. It was soft and spongy. I was beyond thought. There were no words in my mind anymore. I was also beyond emotion. Not fear, not even joy. I was watching myself from a silent place. In the next contraction his head emerged and time seemed to slow down. I rocked back on the balls of my feet, and held myself with one hand while I kept my other hand on his head. It seemed like forever between contractions now. I began to think, Should I try to push the rest of him out?  I shifted slightly and that movement with his head half out just felt wrong. I stayed still. The next contraction birthed him and I lifted him from the water.

You have this assumption that when you birth a baby, you will automatically recognize that person you’ve been carrying and have a very sentimental moment. I looked at this baby, my baby, and thought vaguely that I didn’t recognize him. I simply didn’t recognize the pinched, blue-from-not-taking-his-first-breath, faced creature I was now holding. I was relieved when he started to cry about 15 seconds later. I did the only thing I knew to do. I put him to my breast.

I was calm to my core. As soon as he was in my arms I called out, “Mom?” just as I have a thousand times in my life, as if I was going to ask her if I could spend the night at a friend’s house. She said later that her brain could not connect what she saw to what she was expecting. From the birthing tub, now sitting on my placenta which birthed itself rather easily, holding Jaden who was crying but not hysterical, I walked my mom through the phone calls to the midwives and Josh’s cell phone.

The midwives arrived first and let me continue to encourage him to nurse, helped me out of the tub and to the couch. Jaden didn’t leave my arms for another twenty minutes. Josh got home right after the midwives and seeing him was my first real hit of emotion. Ruby, in true three-year-old fashion, didn’t think it was such a big deal. Oh look, there’s Jaden! she said. And not too long after that my Dad got home from work. Jaden was 7 lbs 8 oz, 20 inches long, in perfect health. No real tearing for me, bleeding was fine. And there we were. Hundreds of miles away, Jaden’s great-grandmother Eleanor declared “Bingo!” and won a $2 bill at exactly the same moment.

During the last weeks of the pregnancy, I saw Jaden’s birth very much as a story that was being written, about which I was constantly asking, “How is this going to end?” It all led to the 15 minutes and ten contractions of his entrance into the world. I had looked for guidance in books, but there was nothing I could find that spoke to the second experience of childbearing, in its disquieting uniqueness. In the end, guidance came from what surrounded me: my job, my girlfriend-moms who spoke to me during the mikvah ceremony weeks before labor, my process of working with the midwives, my doubt and the vastness of the unknown. During that time, I knew all the storylines pointed to something but I didn’t know what.

Now, we can’t wait to see what kind of person Jaden is with such a birth story as this. What will it say about him? We all thought for sure this little guy was going to be an introvert. But now, at nine months, he’s as happy and social as they come, just like his sister. And if I felt like I could do anything after I gave birth the first time, I certainly feel that way now. I consider it a gift to birth like women have birthed throughout all time, to know intimately the primitive instinct, the trust, and the sacred rite of passage in perhaps its purest form.

I also believe it is a gift that Jaden gave himself. The intricacy of the plan that allowed that thirty minutes to be ours alone is beyond human engineering. There are four adults living in our home, in-laws who drove from Pennsylvania to be there, midwives hired for a homebirth, and even a photographer whom I had wanted to hire for the event who just didn’t call me back and was therefore not present. Everything pointed to this ending, but I couldn’t know that until it wrote itself and I sat on the other side of it, writing it down for you here, now.

Michelle A.L. Singer lives in East Montpelier with her mother, father, husband, daughter and son (no dog). The family is getting ready to celebrate Jaden’s first birthday; you can send questions, comments and birthday wishes to jmsinger98@hotmail.com.