Yup, you guessed it, this is the Labour Post. Avert your eyes if the word "meconium" makes you queasy. I know every new baby in this Blogger world has the obligatory "how I was born" post – not collectible in a baby book yet – and I hummed and hawed as whether to spend my precious precious "she's asleep" time composing this entry. But in the end, no offense oh few and lovely readers, this post is for me. I can already feel the magical warm bubble that is my memory of labour start to dissolve and lose focus. I kinda want to capture for myself how weirdly amazing it all was. And, as AH pointed out, look where this silly blog has taken me: it began with me, all sad and single and crazy fun times after a break-up in 2001 (and the breaker-up-er actually just called me this afternoon to talk about the baby so that worked out well anyway, he is still a dear friend) and has gone through job changes, moving, meeting AH, getting engaged at the best bowling alley in the world that I have just read will be torn down in April which makes me so sad, getting married, moving again and again and graduating college and moving AGAIN and starting grad school and now, becoming a Mom. Craaa-zy. Anytime I am tempted to think I am doing nothing, spinning my wheels, wasting time, my little blog corner of the world reminds me it is not so. Nevertheless, I swear soon I will migrate over to Blogger for reals, just to be able to post pictures.

So if you're interested, future self, here is How I Became a Mother. At exactly 41 weeks, I was sitting at our kitchen table at 1:10 am playing a rousing game of Mexican Train dominos with AH when I felt the proverbial, Hollywood-esque "water breaking". What Hollywood doesn't tell you is sometimes your water just keeps on breaking, leaking for hours. A preview for all the leaking to come I guess. I wasn't too panicy but our midwife directives did say to call if the water broke so we did, but I told AH to let them know we would come in the morning. I wasn't having contractions yet, and I didn't want to bundle down to the unit and be sent home. With a promise we would come in the morning, we went to bed, sleeping surprisingly well for people on the cusp of labour. Certain we would be sent home anyway, we meandered our way down to the hospital the next morning. And lo and behold - who was on duty this day? Why it was Mean Midwife, the ONE midwife I did not want to land for labour. Oh I was sad. She is not the warm and fuzzy type. But friends, if this story teaches you anything, it's that you can be DEAD WRONG sometimes. That is foreshadowing, right there.
She swabbed, confirmed the water breakage, we were admitted and thus, Labour was on. It was all kind of a joke at first. Walking the hallways for hours, not really in pain, wondering what lay ahead. hearing scary scary moans behind closed doors. We moved to a Delivery room eventually which was rather plush and dimly lit. Time just kind of flowed there, hours passing in a few minutes, pains getting stronger. I went from doing the crossword to deciding the bathroom was the only acceptable or appropriate place to ride out contractions. Throwing up in front of someone, half-naked contractions on a toilet - so began the end of my rather substantial modesty. Lord, that was just the beginning of course. To my midwife's surprise, when she checked I was 5 cm. And an hour later, in rather insane fuzzy mind-bending pain, to her further surprise, I was suddenly 8 cm. Whoo! I had to make decisions about pain relief and oh yes, I took the epidural. I feel sort of good that I made it to 8 cm unassisted but I bow down in reverential amazement to anyone who does the whole thing naturally. I THOUGHT these contractions were the most amount of pain a person could be in and still barely survive. I would rue these thoughts a few hours later. Epidural was awesome, could care less weird cords were coming from my spine, just happy to be a human again. And because the babe kept having low heart rates, we did a bunch of fancy maneuvers involving reinsertion of amniotic fluid to float the baby off the cord for several hours - my sister, a labour and delivery nurse, said such low heartrates would have gotten me an instant C-section in her hospital but that is why Midwives rule - midwives in a hospital where you have access to an epidural Double Rule. It really was the best of both worlds. She knew I didn't want doctor or surgical intervention and did all sorts of crazy things to make it happen. Plus, they were so damn patient with us. At this point, pre-pushing, it was coming on 1 am, 24 hours of labor. But nobody tried to hurry it along. In fact, we took a 2 hour nap before pushing, thanks to the epidural of course, which felt delicious.
Now, pushing. I admit, it hadn't sounded fun. But most women do it for an hour or two, really hard work and hurrah - baby. So I was stoked. I worked hard. For the first hour, really hard. Just as hard the second hour. But as we entered the third hour of pushing - which is hell my friends, honestly, not to scare you but pushing is too benign a word for waves of Needing to Push something gigantic from within you - clinging to the squat bar, twisting AH's shirt into ribbons as he calmly counted to 10, listening for the encouraging "good jobs" and enduring the weirdness of having other grown women clean up my vomit, poop, blood and maneuver my substantial heaving mass all around a delivery table as I cried that I really couldn't finish this thing, I just didn't think I could...I am proud to say I did crack jokes the whole way through and according to AH, inquired after the well-being of all parties in the room regularly and always said Please and Thank You when asking for ice or water or anything - which made my midwife finally say "Um, stop being polite. This is about you. This is your moment. We are here for you." Which still makes me cry, because that was something I need to take to heart in rel life too. Lose the polite sometimes! Nevertheless, I do like good manners, and am secretly pleased I never once said a mean thing to AH, as I've heard so often women do. Instead, I thanked him. Maybe my heart isn't so black and twisted.
But at 3.5 hours of pushing (my sister gasped at this figure - "definite C-section" said she of the ELEVEN MINUTE push - ooh, how I hate her) my midwife approached and said that maybe it was time for doctor intervention like forceps or vacuum. I understood, and I wanted it to be over, oh how I wanted it to be over, so the doctor came in to consult. And just as she was scrubbing up to check me out, a massive wave of pushing came over me and lo, 10 minutes later we had a head out and free and then, thank god thank god thank god, a few minutes later the whole damn baby slid out. I think I asked 20 times if it was really over. Yes, yes yes and it's a girl, they said and I spontaneously cheered. I cried a little but no copious sobs or wave of life altering tidal wave of Mom-ness, that I had been curious about. Relief, mostly. They took a pretty long time to aspirate her lungs and get her moving but when they put her in my arms, her eyes - huge eyes - were open and blinking and staring and taking it all in, quiet and steady. I'll be honest - I was expecting to see her and feel irrevocably different or a gush of "motherlove" and while I did the appropriate cooing and was SO happy it was over - it wasn't a single life-changing moment. It's been a series of them, building up day by day.
My midwife - who by now I knew was not mean at all, but amazing and just totally focussed on helping you through labour, not the early nicities, came and kissed me on the forehead, something I felt oddly moved by. Like a Mom. And she said that it had been really special, watching AH and I do this together, that we had something special. Which made me feel AMAZING. I felt like the three of us and the nurse were some kind of Power Unit or something, some bonded family. How funny to have that as your Daily Job, people eternally grateful to you, feeling close to you, wishing you could be part of their damn family - it would be crazy. They have likely not thought of me since then, while I will always always remember them. And that's their JOB, their paycheck cashing job.
Also, and ladies, this is the important bit. My midwife ensured, by using the maximum quota of mineral oil, that I came out of the whole thing with Not - One - Tear. Intact. No stitches. God bless her, I could have kissed her. I think I did. Midwives - they are the best. As a result, recovery has been substantially less crazy than I thought it would be, lucky lucky lucky me.
The midwife came in the next day, just to check on us in our recovery room and it was like seeing your Mom walking through the door, I swear. She said she had been thinking of us all day, just thinking about how I had kept my sense of humor and AH had been so steady and how much she had enjoyed our labour. Can you believe I ever called her the Mean Midwife? I can be so wrong.
There will surely be more than you ever wanted to know about baby Simone in coming times - oh, the name - it was so strange. It had made it to our list, but kind of barely, we had all these spunky old fashioned names that I was sure would be better but after we were with her for an hour, AH proposed Simone and yup, it seemed Just Right. She is petite and kind of quiet and sorta elegant. Plus, I'm a Francophile. And I don't know anyone with the name. The celebrity echoes include Nina Simone, Simone Weil and Simone de Beauvoir which is a pretty cool list. They always said the right name would present itself and it surely did. Did I mention she is amazing? Okay, enough. But all that stuff about "the day you were born was the best day of my life?" All true.