Ambrose is born

“Fear not, the time is coming

Fear not, your bones are strong

Fear not, help is nearby

Fear not, Gula is near

Fear not, the baby is at the door

Fear not, he will live to bring you honor

Fear not, the hands of the midwife are clever

Fear not, the earth is beneath you

Fear not, we have water and salt

Fear not, little mother

Fear not, mother of us all.”

-birth song, The Red Tent, Anita Diamante

“Why had no one told me that my body would become a battlefield, a sacrifice, a test? Why did I not know that birth is the pinnacle where women discover the courage to become mothers?”

-Dinah’s labor, The Red Tent, Anita Diamante

March 22, 2011     4:23 in the morning       a Tuesday

What a very odd place to start.  There I was, in childbirthing class, minding my own business, when our baby gave a funny low wriggle and I felt a pop, like a cracked knuckle.  I felt concerned for the baby for a moment, and then I shifted in my seat and felt what I anticipated in the two seconds right before - - a gush of fluid, another gush.  My face flushed with heat and I turned to Brian, completely at a loss for several long moments.  “I think I just ruptured my membranes,” I whispered.  I got up to go to the bathroom; he asked if I wanted him to go with me and I shook my head - - and so began our shy, awkward dance we have never danced before.  The music is distantly familiar, but we have only been told a few of the steps and practiced them little.  I think we are doing well, though.  In high-strung giddiness we picked up a few supplies at Kroger and got food to go at Wok Hay, all the time both of us texting those we felt closest to, to let them know.  I spoke with my mother, who was a tower of joyful calm, a lighthouse with a friendly beacon, and my sister, who was beside herself and crying.  I spoke with Kelley and Gramma and Nana.  It was important to hear the voices of strong women I know, to experience each of their personalities shining their lights into this dark mystery.  With that first dribble of clear fluid in the toilet, something not fear but not unlike it gripped me.  Well, here it is, my self said to its reflection.  What the hell do I do now?  The same as with the pregnancy, the very first thought is: I am absolutely not ready for this.

            But we came home and ate (hot and sour soup for me) and Brian raced around checking things off a mental list.  We took a shower and he took a few photos of me, realizing I would no longer be pregnant Wednesday when Meagan is supposed to come over to take pictures.  I lay down, mouth and throat dry, feeling a little sick and wondering if I would sleep, praying I would sleep.  I did, stopwatch in hand, for a little over two hours.  I awoke to pain and decided to run a bath.  It was immensely soothing, but I only stayed there through two or three contractions because I thought I might find more sleep somewhere.  I dozed another 40 minutes or so maybe and woke clammy, too hot, and sick-feeling.  Brian, restless beside me, waking each time I shifted, put his hands on my back in the places that feel best.  He got up to get me a cool washcloth, and he ate a couple of handfuls of cereal and he went back to bed at my request.

            I know there is no more sleep for me, so I am playing the “when do I call” game with myself, counting minutes and “judging” the severity of the contractions based on criteria I absolutely have no knowledge of.

            Right now I am relatively comfortable.  I have no idea what is coming.

*                         *                        *                        *                        *               

March 25, 2011           

Here is another day, and highest praises to the force which is life which moves us that it is so.  I have never seen a more glittering morning, the sunlight cascading over dark, still-bare branches like the laughter of a stream in the mountains or a chain of finest silver passed from the fingers of the lover to the beloved.  It washes across the blanket on the bed, and these pages, and my own profoundly changed body, flooding in, blessing me, for I am the luckiest, chosen, for my first-born son sleeps close to me.  He will not know how I love him, until this day comes for him, if it does.

Ambrose Lexington Ramsey Dunn was born to us yet a stranger at 2:04 in the afternoon on March 22.  Several have already asked me if I would do it again, what I did that day, to have another child, and now, looking at him, I know:  I would do it as many times as you asked of me just to bring him to the world.  It is only grace that makes us only need to do it once.  It was more intense and painful, in a way of not even belonging to this reality, than I ever could have possibly conceived before experiencing, but I would endure it over and over and over to have him, to hold him, to feed him, to watch his slate eyes, blued over like the distant mountains, and touch the perfect softness of his cheeks and hair.  I would do it again.

My labor was my own, as every woman’s must be.  I prepare for things and focus but in the end I must scream in the birthing.  Silence and stillness are not my ways.  I cannot ask for help but when it is offered and I trust more in its rightness than in my own knowledge, I will grasp it with both fists and follow it to the very last drops of strength I have.  I must lose myself in my independent effort, but when it becomes too much, I cast about in helplessness, sometimes close to panic, rarely knowing the right questions to ask but intensely alert to whatever lifeline may be thrown to me.

Brian woke and arose soon after I called Linda Cole (the midwife on call) to explain my contractions and gain reassurance – she had said the night before if I had not progressed to the “4-1-1” contractions by 8 in the morning to go ahead to the birth center because you shouldn’t go more than 12 hours after the water breaks without progressing.  She told me to try to eat breakfast, so Brian and I ventured out into the dark to get eggs.  Kroger was a ghost town, and I was glad, as I could no longer walk through the contractions and had to stop and lean and sway several times.

Back home I managed to very slowly finish some scrambled eggs, and at about 5:30 Brian gently prodded me into going for a walk.  We slowly trod the lightening sidewalks.  I felt a little sick, mostly if not wholly from nerves and adrenaline.  Down Deery Street and back, I leaned or squatted every couple of minutes, breathing and letting Brian support me.  We warily greeted an equally wary pit bull, perhaps confused by his loyalty to his duties as home guardian and his instinctive recognition of my vulnerability.  Up Luttrell to the top of the hill and back, squat and breathe, lean and breathe, talking gently about nothing much, Brian pointing out the house painted the same colors as the tree out front, stopping to smell tiny daffodils, which I do not think I realized until that morning smelled so achingly sweet.  I thought of daffodils several times that day.  I thought of being a daffodil, of the 30% of my genetic code that I share with them, of being a stalk, a blade of grass, a slender branch on a budding tree, and the pain is a gale that comes howling over me, and if I try to resist and refuse to bend with it, I will snap.  I must be supple and pliable and let the pain take me where it will.

It took me somewhere I had never been before.  It took me far, far from any thought of daffodils or tree branches.

Soon we packed our food, laptop, clothes, carseat, cameras and so on and made our way to the birth center.  We parked in back but had to go around to the front (stopping, breathing, on the stairs) because nobody had opened up yet.  I sat and closed my eyes and breathed and waited for Addie, the morning midwife, who took me (with her tallness, her gentle sweet slightly shy efficiency and honest young friendliness, like a camp counselor) to the exam room with the dragonfly mobile over my head to check me.  Yes, I had ruptured part of the membrane sack (or, rather it seemed, the baby had - - the baby, still a stranger, a concept in my brain rather than a person), but it was somewhere farther up and my forewaters were still intact.  This was good, she said, because it gave them the option of breaking it later if things were not progressing.  Five centimeters, she said, and eighty percent effaced.  My heart leaped like a fish.  Halfway there! I thought, not knowing what the other half would mean.  Addie led us downstairs and helped us get comfortable in the room I had wanted since the first time I visited, little courtyard and mahogany bed frame and dresser, an intimate feeling perhaps not of home but of a visit to a relative’s house, or a homestay on a choir tour: somewhere you know you are welcome to be comfortable for as long as you need.

Brian set up the “snack bar” and computer and I staked out a spot in the recliner with my coconut water.  My mom and sister showed up soon after and asked many questions, and I went down the hall to say hello to my Centering Pregnancy class which was meeting that morning.  I weight-shifted from foot to foot, increasingly uncomfortable in my skin, and I answered their questions and responded to their well-wishes.

I met Patti, a nurse who was almost ready to be certified as a midwife and was interning.  At first I was wary of her as we felt each other out and she botched her first IV attempt – they had to give me two rounds of antibiotics because I had tested positive for group B strep.  She and Addie, Adelicia, left well enough alone except to check the baby’s heart rate every half hour, so Brian and I walked outside for a few minutes, me finding this picnic table, that stump to try to reach before the next contraction.  They were still low but getting stronger.  I smelled the strange shredded-looking daffodils in the tiny garden bed and looked mainly at my feet while I walked.  Back inside, I kicked one of the yoga balls gently up and down the hallways, rolling on it or kneeling with my forehead on it through the contractions.  At the end of that phase, I sat in the recliner to have the baby’s heart rate checked again, and Patti knelt by the chair and rubbed my knee and thigh through the next contraction, instructing me to try humming or moaning through them, to relax all my muscles but focus on a downward force to try to make them more productive.  She surprised me at this point, and my perception of her shifted immediately.  She was calm and helpful and willing to be intimate, like a mother, and she damn well knew what she was talking about and exactly where I was in the process.  I felt myself laying my trust at her feet and letting go calmly and naturally, allowing myself to be vulnerable, childlike, in her care.  This was a crucial change.

Brian’s presence held me up.  Once he left to get more snacks at Food City, and once he left to set up the carseat, and both times I felt my heart flutter like a snared bird until he returned.  I needed him.  Patti suggested that I shower, and even that time away from him unsettled me. 

She told me to try stimulating my nipples with the water to move the contractions along.  At his point I had been there maybe three and a half hours on top of my 12 hours of labor before, and still my contractions hung around 60 seconds apart.  I tried to keep myself active and working instead of relaxing, but my inclination was to curl up somewhere and be relaxed and quiet – but I knew that was not going to get me anywhere.  They were getting more intense, though, and the moaning was becoming necessary.  The shower did feel good, but I was so restless.  After I got out I moved to the bed and they traded my green yoga ball for a blue one shaped a bit like a jellybean.  It was supposed to put good pressure on my belly, but by that point I was not much caring:  I felt like I was beginning to know in my body if not in my mind a little of what was coming and that it had to get a lot worse before it got better, and what began to change at that point was this:

There is a mirror that we are all the time holding up before ourselves, talking to our reflections about who and what is around us and how we are in relation to all those things.  We are constantly examining, speculating, and finding patterns, constantly wondering if what we just said sounded stupid or condescending or insensitive, constantly wondering how our hair looks or why our right ankle is acting up or what we will do next and why.  But as the knob was cranked up on the pain, I lost all of that.  The mirror was taken completely away and I was like an animal with nothing in my head but surviving this moment.  I rocked on my knees with my arms over the blue jellybean and moaned like a Cessna droning over Ijam’s on a clear day.

They asked me if I wanted my waters broken open, and after a moment’s hesitation [“It makes it faster but more intense, right?”], I agreed.

She put me on my back and fresh waves of pain greeted my change in position.  She reached her fingers deep inside and said I was at 5 or 6 centimeters, so almost no progress.  I nodded her ahead and she put a long sort of crochet hook inside me against the balloon of my membrane sack.  She pressed, waiting for the next contraction for counter-pressure, and when it came with my humming I felt a pop much louder than the night before and a flood gushed from me, exactly like bursting a warm water balloon.  The pain escalated immediately with force and I felt a new searing pressure and she told me that was the head against my cervix.  I breathed out that wave and rolled on my side to take another, and I knew I was going to be sick then and told Brian and my sister so, so they would get out of my face, and Brian put a pink pan under my face and my diaphragm lurched and my body emptied itself violently.  By then I already could not care; I felt vaguely a yearning not to be putting Brian through this, but everything had turned inward, and the world was only voices and temperature and pain and every so often encouraging eyes in an encouraging face and trembling attempts to follow instructions.

They told me to try kneeling again and as the next contraction caught me my humming rose from my belly to my throat.  They told me the first contraction in a new position would be more intense.  They told me to keep my humming low and try for an “oohhhh” instead of a close-lipped hum.  I began to rock forward and back on the ball, my cadence increasing as I grew more frantic.  After each peak and fall I was aware in the brief lull of relief of a few moments’ chorus of “That was perfect, you are doing so great, that was great, you are amazing.”  I was too hot, I tried to moan, overwhelmingly hot, the heat was making the pain worse.  At some point they helped me out of my skirt.  I was dimly aware of some discussion and then the door to the courtyard was opened and Addie was fanning me and perhaps Brian had a cool cloth.  I had lost track of everyone.

After a time I do not know about they helped me to the end of the bed.  I do not remember exactly how it happened.  But the birthing stool had appeared, a throne draped in white towels, and they directed Brian to sit on the bed and I cradled my back between his thighs and grasped his hands, my armpits over his knees, my legs splayed at their command.  Patti knelt before me, coaching me through contractions to try to make me keep them, keep them low, keep them productive.  I was glad I had thrown up because each time I felt my gorge rise, the urge became instead that downward energy. 

My body did very many things I did not tell it to do, had no idea it could do.

I was aware, while still on my side, before, of my sister wanting to call my dad there because she thought Mom was not faring well.  I remember then Addie saying that pushing could take three hours and thinking without words I do not have three hours in me.

But I caught that my mother was trying to find a way to be useful and I knew that Addie passed the fan to her and from then on my body was bathed in the wind of her huge, determined and ceaseless motions and the new Spring air from the open door.

Before I knew what was happening, Patti was checking me again, my face wrenching against the pressure of her fingers, and she was saying I was fully dilated and if I felt the urge, to push.  What?  What had happened to five or six centimeters?  I was too dazed to ask questions, and I was not sure what an urge to push would be like - - but sure as her words, after a couple more humming moaning contractions I felt a strange pressure, a very new thing, as if all my bones and organs wanted out.  Not a bowel sensation like I expected from what others had said.  With each new contraction, I bore it downward and forward, again my body taking the lead, my mind not even trying to chase it down.  As each contraction and pushing passed, I collapsed against Brian, head lolling, sweat pouring, limp and done, the midwives demanding that I take huge deep breaths as I rested, to get more oxygen, plenty of oxygen for me and the baby, and pointing out how the spans between contractions had broadened some again to give me that time to rest in between.

Addie produced a mirror and Patti told me to growl out my moans, to use my voice to help push and I locked in on the sight of my own sex in the mirror, deeply woman-colored and ripe and with a patch of darkness that was the crown of my baby’s head, a dark patch that grew to a slender crescent as I bore down, my growling moans rising to a loose, low-pitched scream each time, a sound torn from me, a rising song I could not control and did not know even I had the lung capacity for, all my resources rallying, my very blood singing, oxygen leaving me in those long, crescendoing moaning vocalizations, part of it all escaping up and out and the rest bearing down and forward, down and forward, down and forward, sending the baby in its final slow arc toward the universe.  I lost sight of the mirror then - - I might have thrown my head back in my howling - - and I felt the rest of the baby’s head slide free and they were feeling for a cord around the neck and instead felt fingers and I was overcome again and I pushed again, with everything - - somewhere in there, once, the “I can’t” that I kept shoving out of my head made it past my lips, but fruitlessly, because I knew it was not a question of can or cannot, it was only do, now because there was only one way out of this and it was completely up to me and I had to, I had no choice.  I knew Brian’s voice - - “Yes you can, you are so close, you are doing great” - - and his body and his hands in mine, such solid support giving me firm, even foundation.  I knew my sister to my right, hand on my thigh, my mother with her fan, Patti’s determined and kind face and eyes, her smile at each landmark I reached.  And I pushed impossibly and screamed and he was out all at once and I looked down and there he was, seeming huge to me in that first moment, and they rubbed him with towels and he was screaming even before they lifted him, and I saw his curled up arms and tiny sex and hair and cord, still connected to me but with his screaming already closing off his body’s connection to mine - - but in his screaming that took away my screaming, already linking himself to me in a much more important and lasting way.  I knew his voice.

I felt high.  Neither of us were yet part of the real things around us.  They placed him in my arms, against my chest, and his tiny froggy newborn cry went through me like a shaft of light in a deep cave, and he was the sun, and he was my son, and I tasted the strange word in my mind and was lost in the music of his joining the chorus of the consciousness of the universe eternal, diving into that river to swim with me.  I held him close and watched him and I spilled over, but even tears were not enough for it so the urge passed.  I looked up at Brian then and his tears were puddling on his glasses as he looked down at us, and I felt my own tears looking back even if they were still held in my eyes, and I kissed him, and we were one.  And it was good.

From the first moment we looked at each other with smiles shy in our decision to embrace becoming parents and I went to work practically singing with its goodness and rightness, to the moment we looked down at our child together, we were swept away by the strong, constant wind of life sending us forward.  We had done it together.  We had brought a child into the world, a perfect child, a miracle that I felt somehow we had nothing to do with.  We could not do something like that on purpose, or in our own power.  No human alone can achieve something so perfect.  Maybe not even two humans together with a love like ours.  Maybe so.

We talked sporadically of names and finally just decided to decide.  We talked about several, about which town and which family name, and we chose three names to precede his established fourth, and after a couple of hours of his life I spoke softly just to him, with Brian at my shoulder, his name.  And his soul became tethered to a title.  And together we all rejoiced.

--This after they put me on the edge of the bed and numbed me with horrible needles that I had no power left to wrestle with as I trembled like a dry leaf in the wind, and they sewed my torn places top and bottom and helped me lean on pillows and gave me ice and blankets as they passed Ambrose around to his grandparents, his aunt, his father. - -

He was weighed and measured - - 7 pounds, (2.8) 3 ounces, 19.5 inches - - and tested for defects and reflexes and was found to be perfect.  My prince.  My love.