Note: Finished this 7/3/24, but calling the proofreading done and posting today.
I think any pregnancy—especially pregnancy after miscarriage—can have stressful aspects. It’s a state that straight out the gate removes the blindered illusion of control. Mysterious unseen things are happening inside your body (as indeed they always are, but these things don’t feel so quotidian as the miraculous fact of our everyday corporeality) that command a hyper-focus, and while you can eat or not eat this and do or not do that, mostly you’ve got to sit back and let whatever it is happen.
It’s also a steep learning curve; you learn it as you live it, and it’s a tremendous amount of new. For someone like me who has struggled ongoingly with the whole control delusion, becoming pregnant meant ravenously collecting information in a fictive bid for it. My favorite book of several—and only full-throated recommendation—was Erica Chidi’s Nurture: A Modern Guide to Pregnancy, Birth, Early Motherhood―and Trusting Yourself and Your Body. Every aspect of the book resonated with me, and I really liked her take on so-called “natural” childbirth and the superior, judgmental, and/or self-punitive energies that can surround the concept of it, as well as the sometime over-emphasis on one’s own specific hyper-idealized “birth plan.” I did know I would rather have an unmedicated midwife-led birth if that was available to me, but I felt compelled to keep things very gentle and surrender-y and loose around the preference, and I appreciated that Chidi addressed some of the weird moralistic not-super-generous vibes people can bring to these questions. It was also in this book that I picked up the only rando pain-management strategy I actually employed once in the throes—but I’ll get to that. (Worth a mention: The First-Time Mom's Pregnancy Handbook: A Week-by-Week Guide from Conception through Baby's First 3 Months served as an effective jumping-off point for me, a concise overview that helped funnel the deluge of info into manageability.)
Intrinsic stressors plus my own innate cautiousness aside, my pregnancy with Jamie was by all means an easy one (all the evil eyes, all the gratitude)—in retrospect, two years and a second pregnancy later, it seems to shimmer, dreamlike, in its serenity. Our first Santa Rosa Birth Center appointment at nine weeks confirmed that there was indeed something “in there” to back up my positive at-home pregnancy tests (as opposed to my previous blighted-ovum pregnancy’s empty gestational sac six months before), and from there everything proceeded mostly without incident.
NIPT went fine—and Ram’s and my beats on the sex proved correct. At our twenty-week anatomy scan (which a medically trained fam member had framed for me as one of the last and biggest screening hurdles before achieving a comparative “peace of mind”) everything looked good; the only fly in the ointment of relief was that my placenta had a “marginal cord insertion,” which is when the umbilical cord attaches to the placenta at the margins as opposed to at the center. Because the cord is attached at a thinner place on the placenta with less tissue to support it, the flow of blood/oxygen/nutrients to the baby could potentially be inhibited. They would see us again at thirty weeks for another fancy ultrasound to make sure growth was on-point, just as a precaution. My immediate frantic car googling did little to relieve my panic—but texting with my two wonderful baller nurse-midwife friends absolutely did.
Friend One: “Yes no concern. Just where the cord is placed in placenta. I actually had this, but we didn’t know until the placenta came out—wasn’t seen on ultrasound! No worries, can contribute to SLIGHTLY higher chance of heavier bleeding if placenta is difficult to remove, but unlikely!”
Friend Two: “Marginal cord insertions are NOTHING. I personally think they’re a variation of normal and just something the patriarchal obstetric establishment likes to wield around to scare women. Any association with poorer outcomes is not supported by any strong data. So funny, I was just researching this last week.”
Week Thirty everything looked great on the follow-up ultrasound, and really the tech couldn’t have been more effusive about how wonderful the baby appeared/what an amazing scan she was getting/how good the heart looked/how perfect the head was. It was music to our ears. Another gnat-sized fly however: my cervix was measuring slightly short at twenty-two centimeters (less than twenty-five is considered on the shorter end). The concern with this is pre-term labor—even then though I learned that at thirty weeks survival/thrive-al rates for the baby are over an astounding ninety-nine percent. The lab technician assured us that the doctor was required to inform us but wasn’t actually worried, hadn’t ordered an additional scan or told me to alter my activity, even knowing I was still “running” (in heavy quotation marks—whatever you’d call the snail trudge thing it was I was doing at that point). I had a call with our midwife after, who had spoken with the doctor, and she reinforced that the doctor wasn’t concerned, and that my cervix measurements had varied and been in a grey range. She did advise it was perhaps time to lay off the running to reduce jolting downward pressure on the cervix—but hiking and walking would continue to be very beneficial.
I’m getting into these boring details for a couple reasons: first, to simply pass along information that was new to me. Also though, these probable bug-farts—even amidst so much hearty reassurance—made me recognize again the acute keenly cutting ultimate helplessness of it all (of which I well knew pregnancy was just the barest beginning).
Commence the nesting: the instinct definitely amped up in the third trimester. I’m by nature a person in pursuit of order (Virgo rising and I feel it), and in those last months I bigly kicked up my efforts. (A couple days before labor found me up to my nuts in the expired foodstuffs of our blown-apart pantry—subtly rancid nuts included). On the food front we heeded the ubiquitous exhortation to load the larder and went on a soup/stew/enchilada/lasagna preparing-and-freezing tear. Lasagna was the food I had selected as our comforting ready-to-thaw post-labor recovery repast; this is Ram’s and my go-to recipe, though after the first time making it I’ve simply used jar sauce and have added sautéed cremini to the veg mix. We crammed our diminutive freezer with as many scrut-replete casserole dishes as it could contain; Ikea has functional cheap big glass containers—not oven-safe but fine for storage—that were handily modular with our Pyrex.
As for gear, as ever it was a balancing act between my strong simultaneous inner pulls toward both minimalism and maximalism. I’d long dreaded all the gear and trappings and clutter and crap that accompany baby-having, and felt skeptical of unnecessary objects shilled as necessities to earnest and vulnerable first-time parents. On the other hand I hate being caught with my ass out, and there’s no doubt I have a Taurus-y instinct to surround myself with the comforts of pertinent—and pretty—Stuff. (When it comes to acquisition I am viscerally averse to compromise on function or on form; ugly things that find themselves in my spheres usually don’t stop bothering me, though out-of-sighting mostly smooths out the twangs of discord these objects produce. I know this is “shallow” and I also know it arises from a primordial inborn place—shrug!) My ignorance in the baby gear realms was absolute, and I felt a little resentful of spending multiple hours reading articles about the least environmentally evil brand of disposable diaper (conclusion: meh). My friend Meredith (one of the aforementioned BAMF nurse-midwives and also recently-ish herself a mama) rescued me, emailing her extremely right-on (and entertaining) google doc of no-bullshit baby gear. Her guide—slightly augmented with but mostly reinforced by the somewhat bourgier-minded resource at the end of the Nurture book—saved my brain. Rama, who is a diligent and skilled investigator of all things gear and as well as an extremely savvy craigslist/fb marketplace/goodwill auction/offerup shopper when it’s appropriate, took our list and crushed it.
Getting Things Into Place, both result as well as process (however much I vexed against it), contributed greatly to my sense of somewhat-readiness. I was tangentially reminded of an insight I’d reached in the scrawled spiral-notebook morass of our DIY wedding planning. In that project also I felt deeply suspicious of force$ I knew to be pushing us to believe we needed things we didn’t, and in an effort to trim the fat we’d taken all the arrangements upon ourselves. This I will disclaim was totally contingent upon having hunted out an elusive a la carte venue, which we did after much rankling (to me) searching. Holly’s Ocean Meadow was just that, a Pacific-overlooking cliffside meadow, feat. a small private beach (and an on-site house to stay in). This meant we had the blessing and curse of controlling all aspects of our fete. We could be decisive about what we wanted to drop the bigliest coin on—excellent photographers—and could do the rest on our own terms: Spotify playlists, SF Flower Market self-assembled florals, a compostable-plate-and-cutlery taquiza picnic with a choose-your-own-seating-adventure mix of vintage quilts, stacked-pallet tables with hay bales, standing barrels, and proper tables and chairs—as opposed to the more traditional coursed-and-catered assigned banquet-table fancy-place-setting style. For dessert instead of a mega-cake we did pies from Sweet Adeline in Oakland as well as a Mendocino home-kitchen mother/daughter pie biz, plus cookies from a Fort Bragg bakery. Of course even our as-lowkey-as-we-could-make-it-while-still-comfortably-hosting-a-large-range-of-ages-event entailed the maddenment of innumerable logistical considerations, decisions, and arrangements—like of the porta-potty-rental research and engagement variety. What degree of commode sophistication would be respectful of our guests’ sensibilities? Not topics upon which I enjoyed conferring contemplation.
But what I realized: the whole bridezilla conniption-over-napkin-rings stereotype, maybe rather than simple pettiness run amok (as I said I can be extremely aesthetically precise and am furthermore impentitently petty, no judgement regardless) it was more of a transference of the intensity of Big Life/’til-Death-do-us one-precious-life timeline-forking stuff into small tangible choices, micro-manageable passed-app-sized bites of supposed control. “The frailest stay[s] against our fears.” Maybe the baby nest-prep was similar, a cleaving to the commandable when facing down the “uncontrollable mystery” of the advent of a new and unfathomably huge “hostage to fortune” era.
Whatever all it was, the calm afforded by practical food/stuff preparedness ran deep for me. As for the info end of prep, in addition to my own reading-up our birth center offered/required three classes (conducted over Zoom at the time of my pregnancy, because Covid): one on labor, one on newborn care, and one on breastfeeding. They were extremely educational, but each one left me feeling shook by the gnarl (some of the slideshow photos were bit too violently gross for my quease-queen thresholds). The realness was realening.
Late in the game, at thirty-eight weeks, another mosca engooped itself. I tested positive for Group B Strep. This would have been more of an insect toot except the very thorough midwife who received my lab result realized that the kind of antibiotic they could administer to me at the Birth Center—ampicillin—was a cousin of penicillin, and penicillin was additionally a cousin of the antibiotic cefaclor I have had listed as an allergy on medical forms since I got hives in second grade—that may or may not have been caused by that medication I was taking at the time for an ear infection. It was wildly frustrating, because I was next to definite I’d been prescribed penicillin types over the years since and had been fine, but I wasn’t absolutely one-hundred-percent, and my ability to use the Birth Center versus the hospital (where they had other antibiotic options) hinged on this non-penicillin-allergy status being a certainty. Such a small, stupid, probably-not-a-thing thing that could upend the much more consequential question of “birth venue” (though keeping things in perspective: our bottom-line desire was obviously for a healthy baby/healthy me, the labor process itself being ultimately the wood-knocked evil-eyed means to that end, and far from the whole enchilada). I tried to request that my entire CVS prescription history be snail-mailed to me (apparently the strange way they do things), but it would take several weeks at which time we’d be well past our due date and the point would be moot. My mom is an absolutely magical doctor hunter many times over and she made a miracle happen: she found an allergist who could see me the day after my rapidly approaching due date and who would be willing to test me for the allergy despite my advancedly pregnant state.
A huge coup—if we could make it ’til then. The proverbial ointment though got stickier in week thirty-nine. I’d been going into the Birth Center for nonstress tests (which non-invasively monitor fetal heartbeat and movement and possible uterine contracts) and ultrasounds to check amniotic fluid levels since week thirty-six—I think because of my thirty-five-year-old “geriatric” status (lmao). It had all been looking good, but getting the four-quadrant amniotic fluid pocket measurements was proving consistently tricky because the baby had settled comfortably into an extremely lopsided position, essentially using my whole right side as a sort of hammock for his back and butt. One younger midwife had told me the fluid screening—particularly the four-quadrant aspect of it—was inherently a little flawed as well as often inaccurate, but it was what we had to work with. At 39w1d my fluid levels were cusping toward Too Low and we were sent to the hospital to re-screen with their fancier machine and to perform some additional assessment of the baby. The fluid measured the same but the baby looked great, so they sent us home for the night to return to the Birth Center the following day to check fluid levels again. If they couldn’t get a better number induction would enter the conversation. I drank loads of water that evening, and then in the wee hours that night I felt some internal reconfiguring. Next morning’s ultrasound the baby had budged enough toward center that they could finally find some fluid on the right side—and the possible necessity of induction receded.
The no-baby days trickled by, and then passed the hurdle of our due date. With great gratitude we drove the following morning into SF for my allergy testing, which officially confirmed I was good to go with penicillin—and by extension ampicillin. Hoorah! We picked up celebratory cannoli from Stella Pastry in North Beach and headed triumphantly home: the Birth Center—barring of course the unforeseen—was a go!
A few more no-baby days—which was fine with me—I had a deferential-to-larger-forces hope to wrap up a piece of writing I’d been chipping away at for…way too long. The afternoon of Thursday March 31st I barged at last through its unruly conclusion, and that very night (of the New Moon in Aries as it happened) labor commenced. Going to get a little graphic now (no less than one might expect from a “birth story,” but I’m myself easily squeamed and want to preface the shoal-out).
Ram and I were about to sit down to our unpunctual quarter-past-nine dinner of savory oatmeal when I peed and saw left behind in the toilet something that immediately conjured the oft-encountered-in-labor-literature term “mucus plug.” Some very gross “safe search off” googling backed up the ID…but also informed me that its loss could occur immediately before labor—or days or weeks in advance. Plus where was my bloody show? Ten minutes later another pee and it made its clarion red entrance.
When I’d read in some book or other about “early labor” they talked about going to see a film, or alternatively making oneself a “birthday cake.” Yeah, no. L. M. A. O. That was not my experience. Within minutes of my “show” I was utterly—and I mean utterly—incapacitated. I tried to lie down, moved to Rama’s and my full bath, then went full-blown cave mode and sequestered myself in the front half-bath, where I passed the entire night slumped over on the toilet, my torso leaned over onto the little sink vanity, a sleeping bag draped intermittently over my shoulders. I do not know how people keep track of their own contractions. Such an action was so beyond my scope it really does sound like a joke. Thank god Rama, The Birth Partner open on his lap and the Contraction Timer & Counter app on his phone, was able to log them by sound from the couch. Regarding sound: out of all my extensive pain-management-strategy reading (in the aforementioned Nurture book, as well as the canon recs Spiritual Midwifery and Birthing from Within, plus whatever online stuff) the solitary concept that stuck with me when the shit ultimately hit was from this section of Nurture:
How Your Jaw Affects Your Labor
Have you ever felt hip pain from an injury in your hamstrings? Or noticed that your neck began to hurt from low-back strain? Muscles relate to and affect each other throughout your body, and the muscles associated with birth are no different. When you have a contraction, the abdominals pull up on the pelvic floor and pull down on the chest, which pulls on the neck, which pulls on the jaw. With every contraction, remember that the tension from a contraction isn't just in your belly; paying some attention to releasing your jaw muscles can significantly help alleviate the tension of contractions, which in part can help your cervix relax and open. Try the following exercises during and in between contractions and notice how they can affect tension.
*Mouth the letters A, E, I, O, U as wide as you can, using the full range of motion in your jaw.
*Relaxing your lips, blow air through them, making a sound like a motorboat. This is a great de-stressor during strong contractions.
* Slightly parting your lips, whisper the word "la" over and over; notice how your jaw relaxes.
*Sounding, or vocal toning, is a practice used by singers to warm up the singing apparatus: diaphragm, vocal cords, throat, and facial muscles. When used in childbirth, it helps relax the abdomen and the perineum as well. Think low, vibratory sounds, like "mmmmmm" or "ohhhhhhhh" (both of which are impossible to make with a tight jaw!).
I think I’d read in one of the other books also about the jaw/vocal cords/vagus nerve/parasympathetic nervous system…regardless, for whatever reason, the A-E-I-O-U vowel-growling was the technique my brain retained. I actually started out at a higher pitch, but the on-call midwife (who that night happened to be the extremely awesome founder of the Birth Center)—heard me in the background of Rama’s check-in phone call to her and gave the excellent advice to slow it down and lower my register. Much better. (At some point through it all I apparently switched to the Spanish alphabet vowel sounds “ah eh ee oh oo,” which always chuckles me.)
At some later wee hours juncture Ram gave the midwife another call. My contraction timing was starting to range on the head-on-in instruction we’d been given (and since we lived about thirty-five minutes away it didn’t seem wise to play it overly mellow with the timing). She listened in on me again, then told Rama that it sounded like I was laboring really well and she’d rather we didn’t risk disrupting the progression if we could help it. She advised we sit tight if we could ’til the dawn. At 7:00 she called him and told him to come on down; she’d summoned in the full on-call staff, and, since it was a Friday (the SRBC was open for appointments M-Th) and there were no other patients in labor, we’d likely have the place entirely to ourselves.
I didn’t know how I was going to make it to the car. By some superhuman summoning of will I got myself to the backseat, across which I somehow sprawled myself. I am THE BIGGEST stickler when it comes to seatbelts, but I’m pretty certain I didn’t fuck with buckling. Our bumpy country backroad was Not Fun.
We arrived, and they immediately got me onto an exam table, put a covid test up my nose (covid positive peeps were sent on to the hospital for delivery, so Rama and I had quarantined ourselves as much as possible in the three preceding weeks) and checked my cervix.
I was so completely out of it—and so completely in it—but when the midwife reported I was seven centimeters dilated and transitioning, and that “this was happening,” my relief was EXTREME. I’d more or less assumed that upon our Birth Center arrival I would still have many many hours of laboring ahead of me. The possibility that completion was near enough to be perceived somewhat reset me.
I can’t offer a super clear or linear recounting of what followed because I was in an altered state of consciousness. What I have mostly are impressions and what was told to me after by Rama and Maddy (the latter of whom had arrived as planned at the Birth Center maybe an hour after Ram and I). I know I got the Strep B antibiotics on board in the correct window of time. I did not use any of the many accoutrements of relaxation I’d packed—I laugh to think of the yoga mat, fake candles, twinkle lights, bluetooth speaker, and the labor-time essential oils mix I’d painstakingly blended to be used in our diffuser and/or for massage.
I decidedly did not wish to be massaged (a first in life). I probably didn’t prefer to be touched much at all. I was apparently unfailingly polite with my many “no thank yous” to the various offers of holistic analgesic aid—and just in general; the nursing staff repeatedly remarked upon my flawless manners to Rama and Maddy. (Though I’ll bet I also flexed the expletive “fuck” into its every possible potty-mouthed position.)
About Rama and Maddy: I truly did not care that they were there supporting me. The only person I cared about was the midwife, and what I desired from her was direction. I wanted her to guide me into whatever position, instruct me to perform whatever movement. At one later point I upon her recommendation climbed into the warm labor tub I’d been somewhat ambivalent about—but that Rama had urged me to request be made available—and it was indeed very nice. When the midwife thought I was getting perhaps “too” comfortable in there (hah), I got out again as bidden. I had been told I would have an uncontrollable urge to push when the time came; I never did. At pushing time I relied upon the midwife completely to tell me when, where, for how long, etc.
When Jamie came out I was on my back or my side; my physical relief at his emergence was ecstatic. I believe Rama and one of the nurse assistants were holding my legs, and Maddy was I think positioned to get the full visuals. She said he looked terrifyingly still and blue for the first second after he appeared—as they apparently do—but he yelled and ruddied up instantly. Really his presentation was immediately pristine. So many newborns look (very understandably) kind of wrecked when they first come out, oddly squished and strangely hued, but I guess my forty-five minutes of actively pushing—fast for a first labor the midwife said—weren’t too squeezy. Jamie Alejandro Geroux, born 4/1/22 at 12:15 p.m. on the button, was placed in my arms round and rosy.
Regarding birth time: I was fanatical that we get an accurate one even amidst the hullabaloo, in our (requested by the Birth Center) birth plan I tasked BOTH Maddy and Rama with noting and recording it. For those who GAF: J’s an Aries sun, Aries moon (and Mercury too, making it a stellium situation; swear to god I’ve got some wild Aries karma), and a Cancer rising. And wow is he (with the forever caveat that astrology should only ever serve in aid of exploration and expansion and should never pigeon-hole nor diminish). I had been getting such a strong beat on in-yute Jamie—the decisive, powerful, impatient and constraint-averse nature of his movement—and this dynamite-y vibe-read has indeed been borne out since, as one aspect of his intensely wonderful being.
Name notes: I’d long, for a boy, fancied the name “Finnegan,” nickname “Finn,” but Rom was a hard no. Since Rama is generally amenable, when he does throw down I know he means it. I persisted in revisiting the name, but he just really wasn’t feeling it. He also didn’t have any good or sincere suggestions of his own to offer; some of the nombres he floated/spitballed/workshopped /whatever-the-eff he was doing really made me feel like he was trolling me. Manfred. Buddy. Philo. Bruce. Ragnar. Infuriating. At last we co-reached a name neither of us hated: Jamie. In fact we both really, really liked it. I have a cousin Jamie, but he is a fantastic human and so we had only positive associations. As for the middle name: “Alexander” is Rama’s and his Dad’s middle name, and “Alexander/Alejandro” is a family name on his mom’s side. When we first met Rama had told me his name was “Rama Alejandro,” I guess because it’s more romántico? I laughed my ass off when I later saw the “Alexander” on his driver’s license, and it’s laft us since. Anyway, we went the “family name” route but opted for “Alejandro” over “Alexander,” and closed the great name debate with complete satisfaction on both sides.
The after-birth was another blur, but the really nice blissed-out kind. Jamie was big, much bigger than the seven-and-change pounds they’d predicted: a chonky 8 lbs. 11 oz., 21.5 inches long, with a sizable spherical 99th-percentile head. I’d torn to what Maddy affirmed was a quite gnarly second-degree, but I hardly felt the midwife stitching me up. Passing the placenta was a laugh. My arms were so noodly I do remember it feeling like a struggle to support Jamie’s weight when first holding him on my chest, and my mind couldn’t properly absorb the breastfeeding instruction I was being given. We did though have swift-ish latch success, and then the following Monday the previously mentioned badass birth-center-founder CNM breezed through our follow-up exam room and in mere moments completely dialed-in my breastfeeding positioning and technique.
The Birth Center’s policy was that we remain there six hours for monitoring and recuperation, then were free to head home with our very “fresh” baby, a completely surreal notion. The hazy hours passed for me easily. Rama and Maddy figured out the car seat, and before I knew it we were ever-so-delicately buckling the new dude in. He looked like an angel (and I choose the word, as a cliché-averse extremely not “angel-y” person, for its absolute accuracy).
Back at home Rama laid Jamie down in his Snoo, we swallowed a couple bites of the lasagna (I’m pretty sure I was too tired to eat), and Rama and I crashed out for a couple hours alongside our snoozling babe while Madz kept watch over us all. I know the majority of that first nervous night would prove significantly less restful than those primary peaceful hours, but they seem like a very lovely place to conclude this Birth Story.
I’m writing this “The End” somewhat suspecting I may go into labor with baby número dos this very night* (we’ll see), and it’s nearing evening and time for me to get my ass in the shower. In short I was and continue to be very deeply thankful for the ease of my pregnancy with Jamie and for the nature and outcome of his labor and delivery. As ever, all the evil eyes, all the wood-knocks, with nothing but humbleness plus unutterable gratitude. Here’s to many, many, o-so-many more of These Happy Days of the Good Flesh Continuing. Sending out the hopeful humble energies and down-bowing orisons toward the next birth—be it tonight or after—but surely soon. The End.
*I did.
