Baby Story By Beth Soltzberg
{Posted with the author's permission}


The examination room was different than any I’d been in.  Two of the walls were plastered with photos: babies, some just moments old, some older and conventionally garbed in holiday velvet; and women, in every stage of giving birth.  Laced amid the round baby faces were uncovered breasts and bottoms and yes, naked vaginas, right in plain view, there in sharp focus.  Upon first entering the room, I walked straight to the rocking chair in its center, and settled myself on its worn, crocheted cushion.  The pull of gravity on my heavy body molded me to the wooden curves of the chair, and I tingled with the warmth of knowing someone believed that pregnant women deserved a rocker in their exam room.  However, it wasn’t long before I hauled myself out of the chair, magnetically drawn to the picture walls.  Women shouting in raw pain, women with eyes rolled back to their God or to a reserve inside themselves, women wrinkling their faces in unselfconscious determination, stretching fingers down to touch the head of blue-violet babies just emerging from their vagina - the birthing pictures shocked and intrigued me.  I did not know that babies would come out so blue.  And I had never before seen these female body parts in any photos that were not pornographic.

I had decided to switch from an obstetrician to a midwife when I was six months pregnant with my first child.  The idea had come from a line in a parenting book suggesting that giving birth was not just a vehicle for producing a baby, but also a major life experience.  The notion that birthing could be something more than safe, sterile and efficiently happy connected with a longing I was until that moment unaware of.  Pregnancy had been a trip into the unknown, testing me with day-long nausea for eight weeks, waking me up with crazy, emotionally-loaded dreams, and blessing me with the psychedelic feeling of two-ness.  The OB’s blank examination room admonished me to tuck that swirl of holy wonder under the covers.  The midwives’ room coaxed it forth.  

I learned a great deal from those pictures.  I pointed to one and asked Deb, one of the midwives, what the milky balloon was coming out of that woman’s vagina.  It was the amniotic sac; sometimes it didn’t rupture until later in labor.  What does it feel like, I asked, gesturing with my elbow to a snapshot I could never avoid, a woman with eyes fiery and mouth open in a huge “o”.  It’s hard work, Ellen answered.  We will be with you to help you remind your body that it is doing just what it needs to, that nothing is wrong.  That you can do this.

There was no ambiguity when labor began.  By the time my husband and I arrived at the hospital, it was difficult to walk.  In the birthing room, I passed twenty minutes by myself while my husband filled out paperwork at the admissions desk.  I pressed my fingers into the windowsill, watching as below construction workers broke up the ground for a new parking lot, gyrating my hips and rubbing the skin of my belly when contractions swept over me.  All at once my coaches joined me – Ellen, the midwife that day, Laura, our doula, and my husband Damon. 

I labored for twelve hours, one second at a time.  For most of it I wanted to stand and pace, and as I tired out, Damon and Laura supported me on either side.  In my mind, I labored to tell myself that I was capable of birthing this baby.  I labored to convert my screams into deep, resonant moans so that the sounds reaching my ears and vibrating through my body would fuel my resolve rather than my fear.  I labored to focus on each moment and not concern myself with how long this passage would endure.   

The pushing was almost totally involuntary, like someone was bowling a strike through the alley that was my body.  Ellen helped me kneel on the bed, bracing myself on the headboard for support.  The nurse wheeled in a mirror so that I could watch my child emerge.  I decided not to look, thinking that the sight of my body exploding would frighten me and cause me to tense up.  And by then, I was not really thinking about whether there would be a baby at the end of all this – I just wanted to get through the tunnel that was labor.  Miraculously, I stayed in one piece, and here came a baby - my son Rafi, fists waving, alert blue eyes wide open and looking for me. 

Along with my helpers, I take partial credit for giving birth without medical intervention.  The midwives had taught me that without conscious effort from the laboring mother and her team, the cycle of pain, leading to fear, leading to physical tension could slow a birth and contribute to the need for pain medication or surgery.  A health care think tank I worked for in my pre-child days had conducted a year-long study on reducing c-sections, and found that the single most effective practice was the presence of a doula, whose job is to physically and emotionally help the mother keep pain from turning into fear and tension.  However, I also grant medical technology the credit it deserves.  Part of my mental calmness stemmed from knowing I was in a good hospital, in 21^st century America, and that – unlike laboring women throughout much of history and still in many parts of the world - it was exceedingly unlikely that I would die.  And the final contributor to my low-tech birth was plain luck.  If the baby had been breech and wouldn’t turn, if there’d been complications, I would have accepted medical interventions – with sadness, and with tremendous gratitude.

Just after Rafi’s birth there was a moment when I laughed and began to think of the rewards I wanted that night – an ice cream sundae, a rental movie of my choosing, and a full night’s sleep – and then realized that I had stepped through another door, into the Herculean challenge of becoming a mother.  Over the next difficult year, I looked back at labor as the last thing I did just for myself before the undertow of love and responsibility for this new tiny being pulled me out to sea.  Although I didn’t know it, I needed a circle of women around me, to honor my journey through this rite of passage and to help me heal.  Instead I found myself at home, alone, with a newborn whose needs trumped my own.  Having found a new part of myself through birth, I went under again.  Once again I would emerge dripping, after learning to swim and scrambling ashore on the unchartered island of motherhood.

When three years later I gave birth to my daughter, my team was there with me again: Damon, Laura, and Mary Ann, a midwife from the same practice.  Over the previous two weeks of off-and-on contractions, I had been psyching up for labor like a marathon, feeling both humbled and exhilarated in the face of the challenge.  Labor lasted just two and a half hours, but despite its brevity was so intense that I found it just as hard as the first time.  The pain seemed to sink in deeper, perhaps because this time I had a three year old at home and knew I’d soon have a hungry newborn besides, and I wanted to finish up quickly and get my rest.  My lovely daughter was tiny and very strong, and lay in my arms calmly, gazing at me with gravity.

Having gained wisdom from my first three years of motherhood, after Rachel’s birth I soaked up assistance from family and friends, including a stalwart and crucial circle of mothers I’d met through a new mother’s group.  It was hard work healing from labor, and learning how to become mother to two children.  But this time I did not go under.

Women are losing the rite of passage that is labor.  As feminists, we have emphasized how we are similar to men, not how our unique bodies and challenges give forth a distinct power.  I no longer believe in calling a couple “pregnant,” as I used to in an effort to coax and acknowledge the expectant father’s greater participation.  I now look for ways to specifically honor the physical and mental heroics of friends who are pregnant or have just given birth, but without a cultural context I feel awkward and am not sure my efforts meet their mark.  C-section rates are rocketing upward, as providers advise risk aversion and women learn to put greater faith in medicine and less in their bodies.  The debate about c-sections, focused properly on outcomes for mothers and babies, tragically excludes consideration of women’s experience of labor and how this experience resonates in their lives and their journey into motherhood. 

Labor helped me on my journey.  When I need to remember how strong it taught me that I am, I have pictures.  At each of my labors, the nurse took pictures with our camera.  The photos show me getting the job done, inhabiting my body without thought of an external viewer, unselfconscious as I had only been as a small child, in a time before I can remember.  My pictures are on the wall, now, too, for the women who come next.