Rural Dreams

New Baby Days

William's delivery was hard. Steve and I laugh at that water tub picture. It is so deceiving. It looks like we just got into a hot tub and were handed a baby. The truth is that I pushed for almost two hours. I am amazed when I hear Steve tell people how peaceful it was. Did he not hear the howling woman?

Of course that moment when you are handed the baby is just incredible. I guess that compared to the hospital, it WAS peaceful. Nobody was yelling at me to push, and between contractions I was able to relax and even chat. And then when it's over, you just get to hold the baby.

We stayed in the tub for just a few minutes after he was born. The midwives braced to help me out of the tub and the moment that I stood up out of the water I started shaking violently. My sister-in-law was just telling me about this happening to her after one of her kids was born via c-section. She said that she was told that it was a normal reaction to hormonal changes after giving birth, but I hadn't experienced it with Aidan and thought that the c-section must have contributed to it. I suffered for my arrogance. One of the midwives gave me a homeopathic remedy that chased the shakes away instantly, though they revisited for short intervals throughout the night.

I had a tear that needed sutures and it was like a two hour Three Stooges routine. The midwives rarely need to suture, so they don't get a lot of practice. In my case, I tore along my scar from Aidan's birth, which probably was exacerbated by the OB having his hand inside of me during the delivery. While the Vagina Dialogues were going on with the stitches, I tried to block out what was going on by reading and Steve got to hold Will for two hours and talk to him and sing to him. It was great bonding time and Will is now very responsive to Steve's voice. Because of the stitches, I've had orders to not go down the stairs. Hopefully, today will be my last day of confinement, the midwife is coming this evening to check on us.

The first night, I bled, Aidan peed and Wes threw up. We were all expelling.

I was expecting the after-baby adrenaline rush that I had after Aidan was born and it never came. Maybe the adrenaline was a result of the excitement (not the good kind) of the hospital transfer and what I'm feeling now is a more natural reaction. It's hard to not analyze it.

The first couple of days, Aidan's energy was really frenetic and aggressive. He was trying to be affectionate with the baby, but every action that he took was alarming. Every sound he made was LOUD. Every touch was HARD. The first night the midwife came to visit, I could tell that his behavior was making her nervous and she ordered that I shouldn't be left alone with Aidan and Will. He had been away with friends the day of the birth and most of the next day, so he spent the following day with Steve and by the end of the day, Steve had the, "we love you no matter what" talk with him. I thought that Steve was projecting a bit with that - that the issue was more subtle, but then Aidan started to get better. He's back to his old self again now, but it was a strange couple of days. A side note to this is that our dog was like this when Aidan was born, it was like he had a hormonal reaction to my body's changes. People who came to visit Aidan commented on how big Wes looked - like he was puffed up with testosterone. We got none of this from Wes this time, maybe because he has since lost his testosterone making parts.

Steve has been working his butt off keeping house and taking care of us all. It's been immensely satisfying for me to hear him say things like, "I just vacuumed this!" or, "I want an industrial sized washer and dryer". Not because he's ever been unappreciative of my own housekeeping efforts, which are mediocre at best, but more because I can commiserate. As Lisa B-K says, it's the "constant negation of your efforts" that makes housework so hard.

The first day, I tried to cut Will's fingernails. He was, of course, scratching himself. I had said something to Aidan about cutting Will's nails and Aidan said, "will it hurt him?" This annoyed me because cutting Aidan's fingernails is a huge ordeal so I replied, "no, and it doesn't hurt you." Well I am braying like an ass now because Will started crying with the first cut on his pinky and I could see that what I thought was nail was actually skin. His pinky is mangled now and I am having irrational new baby worries that it will have to be amputated and I will never forgive myself because all he will want in the world will be to play the violin and he'll never be good enough without his pinky. Aidan doesn't know that this happened. Not that it matters, I'm never cutting anyone's nails but my own again.

I'm trying to comfort myself with the knowledge that he won't be circumcised, and that would be far more traumatic than a nail cutting accident. That is, unless amputation becomes necessary.

A more serious concern has been that on the first night's visit, my midwife thought that Will looked too jaundiced and suspected ABO incompatibility. She sent Steve right out to buy some full spectrum light bulbs and we've been on a hydroponic baby protocol ever since. We heated up the room and kept him naked under the lights as much as possible. Newborns don't like to be naked, and they certainly don't like to be left alone under bright lights naked, so I spent much of the next two days trying to comfort him and hold him under the light with very few sleep breaks. We even slept with the light on. Steve and I were constantly evaluating his color. Is he getting yellower? Does he look orange just because he is crying and turning red? All of the adjusting and moving around and catching or cleaning up naked baby fluids was hard on my underside and I started to feel worse down there instead of better.

Our efforts were rewarded in that he got no worse, and now we still are using the lights, but we have light clothing on him too and we are sleeping in the dark again. I think my milk kicked in yesterday too because now he will sleep for long stretches and is generally much more content. In the scope of medical dramas that you could have with a newborn, it ranks as almost unmentionably minor. It's been a strange atmosphere though, he and I confined to this hot bedroom with the primer white walls made whiter by the full spectrum lighting. A couple of times someone has knocked at the back door and I've had to ignore it. If I get the OK to descend the stairs tonight, we'll slowly start to emerge into the world.

William John Collins 2/24/04

I really thought it was a girl, just like I really thought Aidan was a girl. And he has red hair. It was like deja vu, only wetter and faster. But not all that fast. It started at 1:30 in the morning. I slept in a rocking chair between contractions until about noon. As soon as I got out of the chair they were three minutes apart and we called the midwives. He was born at 7:12 pm. Aidan spent the day with our friends and came home around 9pm.

Our girl's name was Signe, which we both liked a lot. It was Steve's great-grandmother's name. We never could agree on a boy's name. Steve has an Uncle Will who we are both very fond of. He's been helping Steve with the renovations at his mom's house. He has webbed toes. His birthday was yesterday and he's been saying all along that if it's a boy and it's born on the 24th, and he has webbed toes, you'll have to name him Will. Well, our boy isn't webbed, but the coincidence of the rest is too much, so Will it is. John was Steve's father's name. I'm having a little trouble accepting that my child could have such a common name, but Steve has been giddily calling him "Willie boy" so what can I do? We haven't applied for the birth certificate yet, but I'm pretty sure it's decided.

I'm typing lying on my side with one hand. I'll write more when I can sit properly.

Leaving Long Island

My Mother-In-Law came up for the weekend with the NY Times in tow and I came across this article about how young people can't afford to live on Long Island.

Young Adults Call L.I. a Fine Place to Grow Up, and Leave

I have a brother-in-law on LI who makes $60,000/year and just moved out of his in-laws house into an illegal basement apartment. He is responsible with money. He has a degree in electrical engineering. He and his wife are expecting a baby, and they live in someone's basement.

I hardly know of anyone that I went to high school with who has the kind of "adult" life that you would think that a 30 year old would have. Maybe I hung out with arty types that eschewed traditional employment, but it seems like even safer kinds of jobs are not so numerous and safe as one might think and even so, the cost of living prevents people from having the kind of lifestyle that our parents had.

We left long Island and even the whole New York area because we didn't think that we could EVER survive financially there. And we're not the only ones.

You'd have to pay to read this article, but the gist of it is right there in the headline:
For More People in 20's and 30's, Home Is Where the Parents Are

Swallowing My Pride

Sort of - I like the pic right here, but you'll have to click for the more descriptive belly pics.

A few weeks ago.

Today.

Broke and Waiting for Baby

No baby yet - though the Braxton-Hicks are getting less charming and more painful so that every once in a while I wonder if it's a REAL contraction.

Steve got home last week, but was sick all week and is just starting to get better. Sometime last week I balanced our checkbook and realized that if all of our checks got cashed we'd be $45 overdrawn. We were expecting a check in the mail for the job that Steve just finished, but it STILL hasn't come. It didn't feel like a good environment to bring a baby into the world last week. The bank account felt like a time bomb. Over the weekend, Steve did some work for a friend, who gave him $40 and he scoured the house for loose bills and change and came up with $10, so this morning he is going to go and deposit exactly $45 in cash into the bank. It is such relief. I bought water and dog food with the other quarters last night.

I have to keep telling Aidan that we don't have any money because he wants to go places and do things. It's amazing how everything requires money - I only have a quarter tank of gas so I don't even want to go anywhere that doesn't cost money. I've been thinking about life in a more primitive/moneyless economy and how almost everything that we do costs money.

The other night Aidan asked me what we would do if we ran out of food. (We have plenty). I told him we'd eat Wes. Then, we played a game naming all of the silly things we would eat - the walls, our clothes, eyes (then we couldn't see!), ears (then we couldn't hear!), the roof (then the snow would come in!). Then Aidan said we could go to the store and steal the food. I tried to keep dissuading him from that line of thinking, but I think it was inconceivable to him that there could be hungry people and a store full of food and that the hungry people couldn't have some. And he's right - it's pretty mindblowing when you think about it. We'll have to discuss dumpster diving the next time it comes up.

Does it all sound pretty grim? It's not. It's really just a cashflow problem. We have money coming in, we just have to get through this time. Hopefully Aidan will look back on this and say, "is that all there is to being broke?" We own our house (and we got money in the bank on time to not bounce our first mortgage payment!) and there's oil in the oil tank. When Aidan was born we were similarly broke but it was much worse because we had debt. My mom was staying with us and was buying all of our groceries and supplies. I didn't have a car for most of Aidan's first year. He LOVED putting on his shoes because he knew that we were actually going somewhere. I never answered the phone for the debt colletors. Yes, things are absolutely rosy right now in comparison. This will pass - and soon.

Moved In - No Baby Yet

It's been so weird for me not having internet access - it's good to take a break from it for a while, but I really missed it. It's like not having a good knife in the kitchen. (Or a cutting board - which is something that we haven't yet retreived from storage - I have a few of them, and of course they're all in the same box together and it WASN'T the one marked "kitchen essentials".)

I have DSL now, which was a much cheaper and easier proposition than I had anticipated. The modem was free and I picked the slowest option, which is less than the cable was. I notice the speed difference when I am downloading something, but for the bulk of what I do, it's no big deal.

It's really funny for me to read my last entry now because Steve has been working on Long Island for the past two weeks. So there I was saying that we were comng up here to be with him and it turned out that we STILL haven't been able to be with him. He just didn't have work up here yet and an empty bank account and a two week job opportunity on Long Island pretty much set up this situation.

He's been coming back on weekends to help set up house and birthing space and then going back on Sunday nights to work for the week. It's been really hard in a way, but we've also been grateful that he at least has work down there. It would have been much worse if he was here but we couldn't make our first mortgage payment.

I had one difficult day this past week where my hips started to really ache in the night. I typically get up now every one to two hours to pee. I hobble around for a minute and then my hips work it out and I'm fine, but this past Tuesday morning, they weren't working it out and I was feeling really crippled. It was very upsetting because I still had a long list of things to do to get ready for the birth and it felt like I might be incapacitated. I called my midwife that morning to talk to her about it and in the middle of the conversation my phone went dead. I didn't realize what a fine thread was holding me together until that happened. I just snapped and couldn't stop crying. I scared poor Aidan. I just suddenly felt so vulnerable.

All turned out fine in the end - I still don't know why the phone wasn't working - but it served to really put me in high gear to get ready for this birth. I got home from picking up another phone from a friend's house and the first phone was working. So now I have two just in case. I hobbled to Wal-Mart hell in the snow to get the items on the list of supplies that I was supposed to have for the homebirth. I had a conversation with Steve about how we would feel if he missed the birth. We both agreed that we could handle it and that he should stay and continue to work, but it was a comfort to have the conversation. It was a very intense day.

And the next day I was back to normal. The pain in my hips was gone. The phone was still working and hasn't been a problem since. Some friends came over and helped me set up the birthing tub. I felt strong and happy again. I don't think I have ever in my life had so many people around me who are willing to help with whatever I need and I feel so blessed. I just really need to have a phone so I can call them when I need them.

It's still hard for me to imagine birthing here. It takes a long time to make any place feel like home. Most every day a little something gets done to make it more comfortable. Yesterday I met the neighbors for the first time and that felt like a huge accomplishment. They were very nice and I got their phone number, so I feel like I could even call on them in an emergency.

We have a room set up downstairs as a birthing room - it has a twin bed in it with plastic between the sheet and the mattress, the birthing tub, all of our supplies, an office chair on wheels, covered windows, a space heater and Aidan's puppet theater hanging in the doorway as a curtain. It's a pretty sparse space, but just having the windows covered has made a huge difference.

Steve will be back, hopefully for good, tomorrow night or Tuesday. He's been working through the weekend and was only home for the day on Friday this week.

Aidan was sick last night and that's why I was able to write his birth story. He was all better by the morning. His sicknesses are like that a lot. He just burns through them with a quick fever.

I just finished reading Hope Dies Last by Studs Terkel. It's the second of his books that I've read in the past year. I read Race this summer. I think that I want to BE Studs Terkel. I want to use media for activism the way that he does. It's intelligent and sensitive and broadminded.

But for now, I'm having a baby.

Aidan's Birth Story

Here it is after four and a half years. It's a very different story than the one that I originally wrote a long time ago which was filled with an agonizing amount of detail. Time spans may be inaccurate. It's true that memories of birthing are dulled over time. It's been my goal to get it written before the new baby comes.

Prelude
I got pregnant in September of 1998 and then miscarried in October, on Columbus Day. Before I miscarried, I had an appointment with a local CNM who did homebirths. She spent a lot of time explaining how inflexible she was as far as payment. I left her office in tears and knew that I couldn't use her. When I miscarried a few weeks later I didn't have any health care provider and because it was a holiday, I couldn't find a doctor who would see me. When I first started bleeding and it wasn't that heavy yet, I went to the emergency room where they couldn't even bother to check for a heartbeat. They just confirmed that I was bleeding and told me to see an obstetrician as soon as possible. Then, of course, they sent me several very large bills. Besides the obvious emotional trauma of miscarrying, I knew that I needed a Rhogam injection and I couldn't find a doctor to see me. My stepmother called her former OB-GYN in New York City, who I had seen once, as a teenager, and he agreed to give me an appointment.

I became pregnant with Aidan soon after all of this. I had never even had a period. Aidan was born September 1, 1999 and I feel like he gestated for a full year. I immediately looked into getting health insurance when I found out I was pregnant the second time and it turned out to not be such an impossible prospect. There didn't seem to be any restrictions about pre-existing conditions, though I was never completely sure and I was often nervous about my bills getting paid.

After much searching, I found a CNM in Brooklyn who was willing to do my birth at home. I was in the suburbs, and she didn't have a car, so she planned on taking a car service to my house for the birth. It wasn't an ideal situation, but I couldn't find anyone else. It turned out that her son was best friends with someone that was part of my very small acting program in college. I took this as a good sign.

New York State has strict laws governing homebirth midwives. They must be Certified Nurse Midwives and they must have a relationship with a doctor that is willing to be their hospital backup. It is very hard for CNMs to find doctors to be their designated backups. We couldn't find a doctor on Long Island to be my backup doctor, so we used a doctor at St.Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan who was accustomed to working with my midwife. I just read in Mothering Magazine that the same doctor's resignation from St.Vincent's Hospital led to the eventual closing of the Elizabeth Seton Childbearing Center in New York City because they went a full month without being able to do their birth center births with no backup doctor at St.Vincent's.

There is another kind of midwife called a direct entry midwife. It is illegal for direct entry midwives to practice in New York State, though all of the states surrounding us don't see them as such a menace. Just within a short drive of us now are Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, all of which allow direct entry midwives. When I was pregnant with Aidan, it never occurred to me to seek out a direct entry midwife, and I'm not sure that there were even any in the area, or how I would have found one since they don't exactly advertise, being outlaws and all.

Days of Labor
The CNM has to abide by certain guidelines that the backup doctor requires. In my case, they seemed pretty minimal but turned out to be significant. I had an early sonogram for dating purposes since I had never had a period. I don't remember exactly now, but I think my due date was determined to be August 16th. Once I was two weeks past the due date, I was supposed to go in for testing. I am not entirely sure what this testing would have consisted of, since I never did it, but if the doctor overseeing the testing decided that there was a problem, I would be immediately sent to a hospital and set up with a pitocin drip. The thought of putting my birth into the hands of a doctor that I had never met and whose sensibilities were unknown to me was scary. I was set up to go in for testing on a Monday. Early Sunday evening, I spoke to my midwife on the phone and she gave me a recipe for a big castor oil cocktail. As with most of the decisions that had to be made around my pregnancy, she didn't really advise me to do it or to not do it, she just gave me the facts and let me make the decision.

I drank it down and it really wasn't that bad. I started getting contractions that felt like menstrual cramps in my back within an hour and I lost my mucous plug soon after that. I was so happy and excited - pretty fearless really. You are considered term at 37 weeks, so by 42 weeks I had spent five weeks thinking that the baby could come any day. Even though I had started my labor, the baby still didn't come that day. Or the next. Or even the next.

I was pretty uncomfortable through the night and didn't really sleep at all. I did a lot of pacing. I thought that the contractions were pretty strong and fast, but apparently they weren't doing much of anything. My midwife came the next day and checked me and I had hardly dilated at all. The contractions were considerably milder the next day and the midwife sent Steve and I out of the house to keep me moving around and to distract me. We stayed out for a really long time without even calling the apartment, sort of leaving my mom and the midwife and an apprentice/doula hanging. I felt really bad about that when we got home. We went to Steve's twin brother's house, my friend's health food store, a Waffle restaurant, and Steve's mom's house.

That night, the contractions were stronger again. I was tired, but couldn't sleep. I think that the midwife spent the night that night. I know she went home for a little while at some point, but I can't remember when - but I am pretty sure that she was there that night because I remember feeling like she should be doing something to help me manage the labor. Maybe she was staying out of it because my mom was there. Steve couldn't stay awake and my mom spent most of the night with me. There was a rocking chair involved - the one that my step-mom sent as a baby gift - I think I rocked through the night, or maybe my mom did. I can't remember.

In retrospect, I feel like the midwife was just there to catch the baby. I absolutely loved the pre-natal care that I had with her: I would go to her house in Brooklyn and spend an hour on her sofa, talking about how I was feeling and eating, doing blood pressure, getting my belly measured and listening to the heartbeat. At some point she suggested that I have a doula, which was a total shock to me. I thought that a doula was someone you need in a hospital, not at a homebirth. I couldn't afford one, so someone that she knew had come along as a sort of apprentice. She was very nice, but I never really felt like I had a relationship with her. Although she had attended births, she hadn't had a baby herself, and so I had trouble trusting her as someone who could understand what I was going through. So, in retrospect, maybe my midwife kind of knew that managing labor was not her thing.

Anyway, that night was very difficult, and the next morning I was terribly discouraged to find that I still had barely dilated. I did all sorts of things that next day. I vocalized. My midwife sent me out for a walk around the block. I couldn't do it. The Jamaican grandmother across the street who had had all seven of her children at home saw me hobbling down the street and gave me some herbs. We went back in the house and I drank a tea from them. We put hot packs on my back. My midwife checked me and my water broke. I took a bath, which I hated, and got the impression that there was meconium in my water. I told Steve that I was never going to do this again. I rocked, naked, in the rocking chair. We started to talk about going to the hospital. I was dilating finally, but it was very, very slow going. I had missed two nights of sleep and spent the entire day and much of the night before in terrible pain. I labored on the bed curled up in a ball for some time, starting to feel like I was in an altered state, but it wasn't that altered state that is the end of labor, it was simply exhaustion. We finally tried an enema. I was already pretty empty from the castor oil and two days of labor, so it wasn't that bad. I tried the altered state on the toilet for a little while - maybe an hour - I had no sense of time at this point.

My midwife checked me and I was at eight centimeters. I said that I wanted to go to the hospital, and that's what we did.

Since it really wasn't an emergency, we drove 45 minutes to St.Vincent's in New York City where the backup doctor was. When we got there, I was still at 8 centimeters and the doctor detected meconium. I was set up in a hospital bed with a monitor around my belly and IV. I asked for an epidural before being given pitocin. I had read enough birth stories to be very scared of pitocin, especially in my exhausted state. The anesthesiologist wasn't the least bit interested in my worshipful praise. I guess he gets that all the time. I couldn't accurately relate how long things took at that point. It seemed very quick, but I know that I slept for a while.

I remember hearing another woman give birth before me. I remember the weary faces around the small room - my midwife, my mom and Steve. The doctor came in and checked me and said that I was at ten centimeters and they started coaching me to push. My midwife had told me that I could tell him that I wanted her to deliver the baby, but I didn't have the nerve. Afterwards, my midwife told me she thought that the epidural had worn off by the time I was pushing, but I can't be sure. I did get up and walk right afterwards, but the pain of actually birthing Aidan seemed so insignificant compared to my labor. Maybe it just was. I needed some coaching to know when to push because I wasn't really feeling like pushing. I could see the contractions happening in my belly more than I could feel them. And how to push? What was I pushing? I had to be told that it was like pushing out a bowel movement. I could feel him coming out in the end, and I think that the doctor had his hand inside of me at some point because I could feel that and I asked him WHAT he was doing. I think that I only pushed for about 20 minutes.

Aidan came out face up and ten pounds, so I was laboring with a really big, posterior baby.

I tore, I don't know how much, and the doctor stitched me up pretty quickly. My midwife later commented on what a good job he did with the stitches, but felt like she could have delivered the baby more gracefully, with less of a tear.

My mom, who has red hair, was delighted that he had red hair. Steve and I were shocked that he was a boy. Everyone commented on the huge size of his hands. He never, outside of the womb, had those miraculously small baby hands.

They whisked Aidan away really quickly and suctioned him and gave him some oxygen. Steve was with him and feels like they did this really dramatic resuscitative thing, but I am not so sure. They smeared his poor eyeballs. A nurse did that awful kneading on my belly, which I also didn't think was necessary. Then they wanted to give him sugar water instead of breast milk because he was so big and might be diabetic. Then they didn't want me to breastfeed because I hadn't had an HIV test while I was pregnant. I did breastfeed fairly quickly and he nursed like a pro immediately. My short experience in the hospital just confirmed for me that homebirth was the right thing for me, it just hadn't completely worked out.

I wasn't nearly as disappointed as I would have expected. I was totally high on adrenaline, I think. I was wide-awake and terribly happy and in love. Aidan was born at 3:26am. He was just gorgeous, with very little of that bruising or misshapen head that newborns sometimes have. He had these blisters on his wrists and it took us a couple of days to deduce that he had been sucking on them in the womb. He was probably hungry from me hardly eating for two days. Steve went out and got some food, came back and shared some with me. We had a stunning view of the sunrise and the West Village out the hospital window. Steve went home to get some sleep. I hardly slept for the next 24 hours or so.

Epilogue
I had a dream while I was pregnant - that I had a ten pound baby in the hospital and I was so very happy. I told a few people about this dream because it puzzled me so much. I thought it was a sort of anxiety dream, but how could I have been happy having my baby in the hospital? It was a huge lesson for me, to remain flexible and open to unexpected possibilities. I didn't recognize the dream as at all prophetic until it was all over. My midwife never thought that it was a particularly big baby. If I hadn't told a few people about it, I would have doubted my memory. I wasn't 100% right on though. In my dream it was a baby girl.

If I was going to do it all over again, under those same circumstances, I would still have tried a homebirth, but I would have gone in for the testing at 42 weeks instead of inducing with castor oil. I would have just waited for my body to do it's thing on it's own and trusted that the doctor wouldn't find anything wrong where there was nothing wrong (though my latest sonogram experience doesn't support this). The only other regret that I have is staying in the hospital after Aidan was born. I would have been much more comfortable going home right away. Both were decisions made out of fear.