Labor
by Jaime Grechika
When I went into labor nothing felt right. I made us steak and fettuccini alfredo for dinner. It was late and we were in bed. With the first set of contractions, I supported my heavy belly with one arm as I got up and walked into the bathroom alone. I felt a jolt of pain so intense I could not speak or call out. I put my hands on the sink and looked into my face in the mirror. Was this it? Labor?
The second set came a minute later.
Active labor? I thought. Contractions one minute apart.
I moved into the bedroom to the side of the bed where Bishop lay. He did not look up.
“Hey,” I said. I was holding the bottom of my belly, doubled over. “Bishop, Bishop, hey.”
“Hey,” he said without looking up, but reaching a blind hand towards me.
“I think I am in labor,” I said. “Active labor.”
“Are you sure?” He said, looking at me, but not pausing the show.
“Bishop,” I said, and felt the belt of muscles across my pelvis tighten so hard that I cried out. “I am seriously sure. Call Melissa.”
We were having a home birth. We lived in southern Colorado a half-hour from the nearest hospital. I went into the living room where we had the birthing tub filled up. I plugged it in so it would begin heating. Our couches were pushed off to the side of the room to make room for the tub. It was dark in the house, and I left the lights off. I could see the tops of the Rocky Mountains far across our little valley. The white patches of snow glowing in the moonlight. I flipped on the propane woodstove. It was cold, late April. I closed the shades of the floor to ceiling windows, with one last glance at the mountains.
Bishop called the midwife, then handed me the phone. After I described my contractions, she sighed. It was almost midnight and she had just gotten home from another delivery. She lived two and a half hours away.
“Try to get some sleep,” she said. “I will too, then I will come your way.”
“There is no way I can get sleep Melissa.” I begged. “Can you please come?”
“Listen. I am going to sleep for a few hours. I will come then.”
Bishop set up our queen-sized camping pad in the living room for me and put a sheet on. He sat down on the pad and looked up at me in the dark room.
“Here, let me hold you.” He said taking my hand and pulling me toward him. He was a large man, tall and his prominent belly rivaled my pregnant one. He was balding, with blue eyes that always held a look of being surprised. When I first met him, his size was a comfort for me, I had always been so small. I felt safe in his arms, in the beginning.
“Come here,” he said, pulling at my wrist. He never knew the right thing to do. Looking up at me, his face was open, hopeful. Something I loved about him at first, an innocence, or as I later came to understand it, a vacancy.
“I don’t want to be held. It hurts so much. I think I am going to be sick.”
I eased myself down and sat with him on the floor then immediately threw up next to him.
Bishop jumped. I rolled off the pad, and he gathered up the sheet. The contractions continued to gallop forward with no breaks longer than a minute. There was no time to rest in between. It was near midnight, and we were alone.
When Melissa arrived, around three a.m., she got me into the birthing tub. I was so afraid of shitting myself in labor, I kept getting out and walking back and forth to the bathroom, sitting, shitting, getting up, walking. There was something happening inside me, during labor, some deep shame that surfaced keeping me bound up tight. I need to stay clean. I kept telling myself. I cannot shit myself. Back and forth I went to the bathroom, unable to let myself relax. Every ten to fifteen minutes while I could still walk, I was on the toilet, staying clean, staying safe.
Through the contractions, I was silent. I put my hands on the golden grains of the oak coffee table and studied the curled web of my fingers. By five a.m. Bishop had gone back to bed. Rachel, the other midwife, had arrived around four-thirty. She and Melissa sat on the couch, leaning against each other. In the dark, they looked like a rock formation, like sandstone eroded by wind. I was in the warm water, my hands at times glazing over the surface, other times bracing my low back. The only noise was the hum of the propane stove behind me and the soft ripples of the water.
After a particularly strong contraction, I looked down and saw the birth sack emerge from between my legs like a clear balloon.
“I see the head!” I called out.
Melissa rushed over, reached an arm down into the water and felt around. “It’s just the amniotic sac. Here,” she said as she punctured it with her fingers. “This may help speed things along.”
In the pre-dawn light, I watched the clear pieces floated up and swayed in the water between my knees like clear kelp.
I knew nothing, but to trust her.
Morning came. The midwives had decided not to check me to see how much I was dilated. Maybe they had forgotten. Later they told me they assumed I was not far along, because I had been so quiet through the night. They assumed that I had been exaggerating on the phone and that that we had a lot of time, and that I was not fully dilated. They had never seen how trauma could silence a woman, even in labor.
Our neighbor Chris, whose wife had a homebirth the year before, knocked at the door at nine. By that time, I could see the midwives were concerned about my stamina. I could no longer walk or stand unsupported. When he came in, I was leaning against the dryer in the mudroom, draped between Melissa and Rachel. They were taking turns walking me around the house. Half-naked, I abandoned the robe I wore for the first few hours and Melissa had found a tank top to pull over my breasts that were already spraying milk, misting like a garden sprinkler.
When Chris pushed open the backdoor, I felt half-wild, almost animal. When our gaze met, it felt as though the darkness of the night flew out of my eyes like two crows.
“Oh,” He took a step back. “I will come back another time. Looks like it’s been an intense night.” He slid out and closed the door behind him. The lace curtain puffed forward and back like an exhalation.
I remember thinking how strange it was that life went on beyond this room. Time seemed suspended like my baby. When the midwives finally asked me to push, my body had already reached its limit. At four in the morning, I told them I wanted to go to the hospital and have a C-section. When I said this aloud in the room, Bishop and Melissa laughed as if I were making a joke.
I pushed for six hours. Three to four hours being the recommended cut-off before most women in a hospital setting would be induced. Just before noon, Rachel had me get on all fours. I faced the white pebbled wall in front of me, my hands and knees pressed into the blue camping mat. Melissa beside me, a hand on my back.
I pushed until I forgot myself. There was no progress. Nothing seemed to be working. Until suddenly, I felt the strange relief of the baby passing through me like a long exhale. I groaned in relief.
Behind me, I heard Rachel’s excited voice coach Bishop, “Catch your baby!”
I could sense them and imagined them touching shoulders like old friends. His big body next to hers. I could feel Bishop’s thigh against my calf and the midwife’s on the other side.
“There you go. A girl!” she said. “Congratulations!”
I could feel the tug of the umbilical cord from deep inside, as Rachel pulled the baby towards her. I tipped my pelvis forward, to give her more cord, but I could feel that it was short, pinning me in place. I tried to look behind me, but I could not turn my head further than my shoulder. I crawled backwards a few inches. The cord taut. I looked up at the wall, down at my hands.
“Oh my god. Oh no! Oh no. Get me the bulb syringe,” Rachel gasped. “Suction. Melissa. She’s full of mucus. Full.”
Her words hit me like buckshot, pierced me with what I already understood.
No cry.
No sound.
No speaking.
Something terribly wrong.
“Someone should think about calling 911,” Rachel barked out. “Bishop, hand me the oxygen.”
“Let’s get this placenta out,” Melissa instructed, her large body close to mine. Her voice gentle and sure. Her hand on my upper arm.
“I need a better suction, get me the suction out of my bag,” Rachel directed.
Then to me she said, “Talk to your baby. Talk to her. Look at her. Make her want to stay here.”
I turned my head to one side, knees pressed to the floor, my hands wide. I could feel myself giving in, giving up. I turned again and looked behind me, but it was as if from a great distance. I could only move from my waist up. I was paralyzed by fear. Everything I had ever heard about the danger of homebirths filled my mind. At the same time, I was watching the wished-for, dream-of-a-life I had evaporate and paint itself into the white of the walls. I would never have the lifestyle I wanted. I would never be happy. I would never escape the tenor of my past.
“Talk to your baby,” Rachel commanded.
When I turned toward her, I could see the bright white body of my newborn girl. I watched her arms and legs pumping in the air, desperate for the oxygen she was not receiving. The midwife held her with one arm in her wide lap, with the other she was roughly rubbing the newborn’s face with the baby blanket Bishop had handed her, trying to wipe the brown-gray mucus down and out of her nose and mouth.
“Hi baby,” I said, feeling like I was speaking under water. “Hi baby. Hi baby. Hi my baby.”
“Oxygen Melissa.” Rachel said.
Melissa, with the phone cradled under her chin was in the process of unpacking the oxygen tank and tubing from the rigid suitcase. She handed the mask over to Rachel and cranked open the dial on the green tank.
“We have a home birth,” Melissa spoke into the phone. “The baby cannot breathe. Mother is thirty-three. Stable… North Cora Street. No, no. She is still white. She’s white. No. Not breathing.”
In that moment, I was still the girl who left home at sixteen but got kicked out at eighteen. I was the girl who tried to kill herself at thirteen, tried to starve to the perfect weight at seventeen. Still the girl who got a full merit scholarship to Middlebury College, then had to be hospitalized second semester or lose the full ride. I was still the girl who spent holidays alone in college because I could not go home. Because it was not safe, and because I was no longer welcome.
When the EMT came in, Melissa covered me with my bathrobe.
With gloved hands he lifted me from the floor and began to walk me out to the ambulance. “The Flight for Life is meeting us,” he said to the room. “At the rodeo grounds.”
“My baby,” I said, looking back, then I felt my voice go quiet. I had known all along that I did not deserve the good life I had fallen into. I did not deserve Bishop’s easy wealth, or an easy existence. I would never escape myself or my past. I knew that now. There would be no good life, and this was simply proof.
It was high noon and from the open doors of the ambulance, I looked out. The gravel road was humped for rain and snow melt, typical small-town Colorado. The day was bright, the sky, cloudless. A few blocks down, cars drove through the four-way intersection by Ace Hardware, housed in a building with a false front like an old western. I was laying prone on the stretcher inside, empty-bellied and silenced by exhaustion, shock, disbelief. There was blood wiped across my stomach and between my legs, and it was mine.
I looked through the doors, past the river, and over the tops of the cottonwoods and trees and beyond. My newborn who was not breathing was still inside the house with my two midwives, my husband. I was flat on my back in my sky-blue robe. The EMT took my blood pressure and said it was “normal.” In her expression, I caught a look of surprise, as if no one could possibly have normal blood pressure with what I had been through, with what was happening inside the house.
Welcome to my life, I thought.
I looked past her and past the yellow mineral-tinged river. I saw the backdrop of the Cimarron mountains and their stone faces that seemed gray and impenetrable. They were a boundary that my mind reached, bounced off of, and came back to here. The EMT put a soft cotton blanket over my legs, and I wondered at this small comfort in this vehicle so full of sharp edges, stainless steel, and glass. It was April twenty-first and although I was not sure of it yet, I was a mother.
As we waited, I let my eyes linger on the massive line of cottonwoods along the Uncomphagre River whose spring-bright leaves were just beginning to coming in. The rodeo grounds, where we would meet the helicopter, just beyond. If I squinted, I could see the place the Flight for Life would land; the barren circle of the arena, dusty and flat, the old horse track, a stand of sun-blind bleachers, the metal sunshade.
Her lungs, I was told later, were stuck, one-side-to-the-other, as if they had been glued shut.
It was April twenty-first, and I was a mother.
The second set came a minute later.
Active labor? I thought. Contractions one minute apart.
I moved into the bedroom to the side of the bed where Bishop lay. He did not look up.
“Hey,” I said. I was holding the bottom of my belly, doubled over. “Bishop, Bishop, hey.”
“Hey,” he said without looking up, but reaching a blind hand towards me.
“I think I am in labor,” I said. “Active labor.”
“Are you sure?” He said, looking at me, but not pausing the show.
“Bishop,” I said, and felt the belt of muscles across my pelvis tighten so hard that I cried out. “I am seriously sure. Call Melissa.”
We were having a home birth. We lived in southern Colorado a half-hour from the nearest hospital. I went into the living room where we had the birthing tub filled up. I plugged it in so it would begin heating. Our couches were pushed off to the side of the room to make room for the tub. It was dark in the house, and I left the lights off. I could see the tops of the Rocky Mountains far across our little valley. The white patches of snow glowing in the moonlight. I flipped on the propane woodstove. It was cold, late April. I closed the shades of the floor to ceiling windows, with one last glance at the mountains.
Bishop called the midwife, then handed me the phone. After I described my contractions, she sighed. It was almost midnight and she had just gotten home from another delivery. She lived two and a half hours away.
“Try to get some sleep,” she said. “I will too, then I will come your way.”
“There is no way I can get sleep Melissa.” I begged. “Can you please come?”
“Listen. I am going to sleep for a few hours. I will come then.”
Bishop set up our queen-sized camping pad in the living room for me and put a sheet on. He sat down on the pad and looked up at me in the dark room.
“Here, let me hold you.” He said taking my hand and pulling me toward him. He was a large man, tall and his prominent belly rivaled my pregnant one. He was balding, with blue eyes that always held a look of being surprised. When I first met him, his size was a comfort for me, I had always been so small. I felt safe in his arms, in the beginning.
“Come here,” he said, pulling at my wrist. He never knew the right thing to do. Looking up at me, his face was open, hopeful. Something I loved about him at first, an innocence, or as I later came to understand it, a vacancy.
“I don’t want to be held. It hurts so much. I think I am going to be sick.”
I eased myself down and sat with him on the floor then immediately threw up next to him.
Bishop jumped. I rolled off the pad, and he gathered up the sheet. The contractions continued to gallop forward with no breaks longer than a minute. There was no time to rest in between. It was near midnight, and we were alone.
When Melissa arrived, around three a.m., she got me into the birthing tub. I was so afraid of shitting myself in labor, I kept getting out and walking back and forth to the bathroom, sitting, shitting, getting up, walking. There was something happening inside me, during labor, some deep shame that surfaced keeping me bound up tight. I need to stay clean. I kept telling myself. I cannot shit myself. Back and forth I went to the bathroom, unable to let myself relax. Every ten to fifteen minutes while I could still walk, I was on the toilet, staying clean, staying safe.
Through the contractions, I was silent. I put my hands on the golden grains of the oak coffee table and studied the curled web of my fingers. By five a.m. Bishop had gone back to bed. Rachel, the other midwife, had arrived around four-thirty. She and Melissa sat on the couch, leaning against each other. In the dark, they looked like a rock formation, like sandstone eroded by wind. I was in the warm water, my hands at times glazing over the surface, other times bracing my low back. The only noise was the hum of the propane stove behind me and the soft ripples of the water.
After a particularly strong contraction, I looked down and saw the birth sack emerge from between my legs like a clear balloon.
“I see the head!” I called out.
Melissa rushed over, reached an arm down into the water and felt around. “It’s just the amniotic sac. Here,” she said as she punctured it with her fingers. “This may help speed things along.”
In the pre-dawn light, I watched the clear pieces floated up and swayed in the water between my knees like clear kelp.
I knew nothing, but to trust her.
Morning came. The midwives had decided not to check me to see how much I was dilated. Maybe they had forgotten. Later they told me they assumed I was not far along, because I had been so quiet through the night. They assumed that I had been exaggerating on the phone and that that we had a lot of time, and that I was not fully dilated. They had never seen how trauma could silence a woman, even in labor.
Our neighbor Chris, whose wife had a homebirth the year before, knocked at the door at nine. By that time, I could see the midwives were concerned about my stamina. I could no longer walk or stand unsupported. When he came in, I was leaning against the dryer in the mudroom, draped between Melissa and Rachel. They were taking turns walking me around the house. Half-naked, I abandoned the robe I wore for the first few hours and Melissa had found a tank top to pull over my breasts that were already spraying milk, misting like a garden sprinkler.
When Chris pushed open the backdoor, I felt half-wild, almost animal. When our gaze met, it felt as though the darkness of the night flew out of my eyes like two crows.
“Oh,” He took a step back. “I will come back another time. Looks like it’s been an intense night.” He slid out and closed the door behind him. The lace curtain puffed forward and back like an exhalation.
I remember thinking how strange it was that life went on beyond this room. Time seemed suspended like my baby. When the midwives finally asked me to push, my body had already reached its limit. At four in the morning, I told them I wanted to go to the hospital and have a C-section. When I said this aloud in the room, Bishop and Melissa laughed as if I were making a joke.
I pushed for six hours. Three to four hours being the recommended cut-off before most women in a hospital setting would be induced. Just before noon, Rachel had me get on all fours. I faced the white pebbled wall in front of me, my hands and knees pressed into the blue camping mat. Melissa beside me, a hand on my back.
I pushed until I forgot myself. There was no progress. Nothing seemed to be working. Until suddenly, I felt the strange relief of the baby passing through me like a long exhale. I groaned in relief.
Behind me, I heard Rachel’s excited voice coach Bishop, “Catch your baby!”
I could sense them and imagined them touching shoulders like old friends. His big body next to hers. I could feel Bishop’s thigh against my calf and the midwife’s on the other side.
“There you go. A girl!” she said. “Congratulations!”
I could feel the tug of the umbilical cord from deep inside, as Rachel pulled the baby towards her. I tipped my pelvis forward, to give her more cord, but I could feel that it was short, pinning me in place. I tried to look behind me, but I could not turn my head further than my shoulder. I crawled backwards a few inches. The cord taut. I looked up at the wall, down at my hands.
“Oh my god. Oh no! Oh no. Get me the bulb syringe,” Rachel gasped. “Suction. Melissa. She’s full of mucus. Full.”
Her words hit me like buckshot, pierced me with what I already understood.
No cry.
No sound.
No speaking.
Something terribly wrong.
“Someone should think about calling 911,” Rachel barked out. “Bishop, hand me the oxygen.”
“Let’s get this placenta out,” Melissa instructed, her large body close to mine. Her voice gentle and sure. Her hand on my upper arm.
“I need a better suction, get me the suction out of my bag,” Rachel directed.
Then to me she said, “Talk to your baby. Talk to her. Look at her. Make her want to stay here.”
I turned my head to one side, knees pressed to the floor, my hands wide. I could feel myself giving in, giving up. I turned again and looked behind me, but it was as if from a great distance. I could only move from my waist up. I was paralyzed by fear. Everything I had ever heard about the danger of homebirths filled my mind. At the same time, I was watching the wished-for, dream-of-a-life I had evaporate and paint itself into the white of the walls. I would never have the lifestyle I wanted. I would never be happy. I would never escape the tenor of my past.
“Talk to your baby,” Rachel commanded.
When I turned toward her, I could see the bright white body of my newborn girl. I watched her arms and legs pumping in the air, desperate for the oxygen she was not receiving. The midwife held her with one arm in her wide lap, with the other she was roughly rubbing the newborn’s face with the baby blanket Bishop had handed her, trying to wipe the brown-gray mucus down and out of her nose and mouth.
“Hi baby,” I said, feeling like I was speaking under water. “Hi baby. Hi baby. Hi my baby.”
“Oxygen Melissa.” Rachel said.
Melissa, with the phone cradled under her chin was in the process of unpacking the oxygen tank and tubing from the rigid suitcase. She handed the mask over to Rachel and cranked open the dial on the green tank.
“We have a home birth,” Melissa spoke into the phone. “The baby cannot breathe. Mother is thirty-three. Stable… North Cora Street. No, no. She is still white. She’s white. No. Not breathing.”
In that moment, I was still the girl who left home at sixteen but got kicked out at eighteen. I was the girl who tried to kill herself at thirteen, tried to starve to the perfect weight at seventeen. Still the girl who got a full merit scholarship to Middlebury College, then had to be hospitalized second semester or lose the full ride. I was still the girl who spent holidays alone in college because I could not go home. Because it was not safe, and because I was no longer welcome.
When the EMT came in, Melissa covered me with my bathrobe.
With gloved hands he lifted me from the floor and began to walk me out to the ambulance. “The Flight for Life is meeting us,” he said to the room. “At the rodeo grounds.”
“My baby,” I said, looking back, then I felt my voice go quiet. I had known all along that I did not deserve the good life I had fallen into. I did not deserve Bishop’s easy wealth, or an easy existence. I would never escape myself or my past. I knew that now. There would be no good life, and this was simply proof.
It was high noon and from the open doors of the ambulance, I looked out. The gravel road was humped for rain and snow melt, typical small-town Colorado. The day was bright, the sky, cloudless. A few blocks down, cars drove through the four-way intersection by Ace Hardware, housed in a building with a false front like an old western. I was laying prone on the stretcher inside, empty-bellied and silenced by exhaustion, shock, disbelief. There was blood wiped across my stomach and between my legs, and it was mine.
I looked through the doors, past the river, and over the tops of the cottonwoods and trees and beyond. My newborn who was not breathing was still inside the house with my two midwives, my husband. I was flat on my back in my sky-blue robe. The EMT took my blood pressure and said it was “normal.” In her expression, I caught a look of surprise, as if no one could possibly have normal blood pressure with what I had been through, with what was happening inside the house.
Welcome to my life, I thought.
I looked past her and past the yellow mineral-tinged river. I saw the backdrop of the Cimarron mountains and their stone faces that seemed gray and impenetrable. They were a boundary that my mind reached, bounced off of, and came back to here. The EMT put a soft cotton blanket over my legs, and I wondered at this small comfort in this vehicle so full of sharp edges, stainless steel, and glass. It was April twenty-first and although I was not sure of it yet, I was a mother.
As we waited, I let my eyes linger on the massive line of cottonwoods along the Uncomphagre River whose spring-bright leaves were just beginning to coming in. The rodeo grounds, where we would meet the helicopter, just beyond. If I squinted, I could see the place the Flight for Life would land; the barren circle of the arena, dusty and flat, the old horse track, a stand of sun-blind bleachers, the metal sunshade.
Her lungs, I was told later, were stuck, one-side-to-the-other, as if they had been glued shut.
It was April twenty-first, and I was a mother.