Tex arrived – 10:45 am on Thursday, January 30th. A whopper, he weighed in at 9lbs, 6 oz, 23 inches long. Here is the story of his birth, in several (non-gross) parts:
Tex’s Birth Story, Part One
I wrote this in the wee hours of an icy Wednesday morning. Tex was uncomfortably lodged in my ribs, but still very active (for this I was thankful, remain thankful – as painful as those moves and jabs became, I was always sure of him, my hearty boy). He stretched and fidgeted and shook, and I patted my undulating stomach and watched the sun come up from the couch, later watched the sun go down from the couch. I made it my job to not go into active labor. There was a lot of tv, weather news mostly – Atlanta and Birmingham spun out of control, commuters fallen victim to a too-late shut-down decision that shunted millions of them all out into the streets at the same time. I snoozed, read, ate, drank water, watched endless amounts of television. All the while, anxiously I monitored my ebbing and flowing contractions, hoping I wouldn’t have to attempt to reach a hospital over roads of solid ice.
When they woke up at the start of the day and joined me, our two boys marveled over the light dusting of snow in our backyard as if it was some sort of ice palace. They and their father pulled on what shoddy winter weather gear we possess (very little – a toddler pair of mittens and another mismatched pair of gloves, stocking caps, lots of layers), and hurled themselves out into it. Because, over the course of the past 24 hours, rain had turned to freezing rain which turned to snow, it was mostly a layer of ice out there. They skated on it, fell on their butts, staggered up again howling wildly with delight. Later they came in with ruddy faces, eating icicles that had fallen from the roofline and exclaiming over their adventures. I had to stay inside – a fall on ice at this stage would have been a bad thing, so I enjoyed the boys’ giddy experience of our rare snowfall from the kitchen window. I took a picture of snow on the palm tree. Our poor palms – they may give up the ghost after the winter they’ve had so far.
That Wednesday night everyone went to bed, leaving me asleep on the couch. Heartburn has made the couch my bed for the past month or so – I’ve had to sleep sitting up if I wanted to sleep at all, such was the pressure from Tex on my poor stomach. Despite the heartburn, I managed to fall soundly asleep, until a very severe contraction woke me at one or so. It was probably a 7 on the pain scale – very intense, out of nowhere, and I hee-hee-hee breathed through it, then fell back asleep. Fifteen minutes later, another, just as intense.
And so the night went. It wasn’t unlike so many nights I’ve had during this grueling January – contractions, strong enough to wake me up, but only 3-4 in an hour, and not getting any closer together. The difference here was the intensity – these contractions were a challenge to breathe through. They drifted to an 8-10 minute interval, but never any closer. They didn’t go away, didn’t get any less intense.
Given the icy conditions, I waited for the sun to come up, then between 6am and 7am woke the Professor. No longer confident in my ability to diagnose my own self in labor, nevertheless I told him we needed to slip and slide our icy way to the hospital. I was pretty sure the contractions would end, pretty sure we’d be sent home . . . except that they were so intense, with great downward pressure, I decided it was worth the drive in to check. This would be our third drive to the hospital now, and this one through fairly dangerous conditions, so the decision weighed heavy on my mind. Would it be more dangerous to drive, or more dangerous to presume that I was not in active labor and risk an unassisted home delivery (which, all my natural crunchy granola inclinations aside, I would never in a million years want to go through)? Having read at least a half dozen stories of women giving birth on sleds, in driveways, and by the side of the road in this terrible weather, I thought we’d better just go on. That would give us plenty of time to make a leisurely and safe-ish drive to the hospital, rather than wait until the drive was more urgent and perhaps put ourselves in danger on the bad roads by having to go too quickly. At least conditions were better on Thursday than they’d been Tuesday and Wednesday – everything melted midday Wednesday and then re-froze in the evening, but there had been no additional freezing rain, so certain areas (including the steep hill on which we live) were mostly free of ice. If he’d come 24 hours earlier, we might have had to go to a different, closer hospital, delivered with whatever OB was on call, or even called emergency services.
I have no scientific basis for this whatsoever, but I do believe that the timing of labor has something to do with the mother’s stress. This is to say, I think perhaps my prodromal labor over the course of the month, and my many stops and starts, was partly due to the fact that I was so stressed, mostly about work. I received a large number of sudden, unexpected assignments in the latter half of January, and it was important to me to be able to situate those assignments before Tex came, so that I could do as little work on them as possible after he was born. I’d take each one, get it organized, get feeling good about the situation, and then be given another one, spinning me into a panicked frenzy of trying to get that one situated . . . it was really quite ridiculous, I felt like sending out a bulletin saying HELLOOOOOO, PREGNANT, COULD POP ANY DAY, STOP GIVING ME THINGS WITH DEADLINES IN TWO WEEKS.
Anyway, I think he was ready to come out a little earlier than he did, but my stress was keeping him locked up in there. To ease a baby out of a body, the body’s got to relax and let it go . . . mine was constantly clenched, both from work stress and also from pain. So the signal would come to start labor, and I’d choke it off. This is a simplistic explanation of a complex process, and I’m sure there are more factors in play, but I also don’t doubt that stress caused some of the issues. All this to say . . . on Thursday morning, as intense contractions took over my body in long and irregular intervals, I turned all of my attention to relaxing every muscle, every ligament, every mitochondria in every cell of every tissue of every bit of me. There would be no stalled labor today, I was going to relax that baby out of me if it took every ounce of focus and deliberation that my poor weary body had left. . .
Oh hooray! Very glad the waiting is over and little (big!) Tex is here.