The Birth

Saturday the 5th was kind of a sad day for Elizabeth. The night before, she had had false labor; at one point in the day, she was crying. "I thought we were going to have a baby by now," she said when I looked inquiringly at her. So that night, when she came out of the bedroom and said she was in labor, she was a little suspicious of her contractions and their regularity. She didn't want to be let down again, and she didn't want to bother Margaret, our midwife, and have her drive down from Spokane for a false labor.

She did call Margaret, though, and then timed her contractions, which confirmed to her that this time it was real. Margaret began the drive down, and we waited.

A few months ago, when Elizabeth expressed her desire for a home birth, I had some misgivings. What if there were problems? What if the midwife gets here too late? After all, Spokane is kind of far away. Will I have to do more stuff? I'm not that good at doing too much stuff. Sort of like a missionary, Elizabeth resolved my concerns and even showed me a documentary, The Business of Being Born, as well as several YouTube videos of at-home childbirths. Somehow, my anxieties disappeared and by the time Margaret arrived, having a baby at home seemed like the most normal thing to do. Now I'm really glad Elizabeth was persistent in presenting to me the beauties of home birth.

Around 1 A.M., Margaret and her assistant Teri arrived, and Elizabeth and I climbed into the hot tub. I felt a moment of husbandly pride; I had fixed the hot tub a month or so earlier. I'm not all that helpful during birth--I usually just stand near Elizabeth and wait for her to tell me to do something--so having at least the hot tub to contribute eased my existential guilt somewhat. The water was pleasantly warm and I mostly just sat there while she moaned her way through two hours of contractions. She checked on me several times, asking if I was doing okay. I thought it was a funny question: How hard is it to sit in a hot tub for a couple of hours and hold somebody's hand every few minutes?

It was during the hot tub hours that I really felt that this whole home birth thing was pretty great. We were outside, under the clouds and stars, having a baby. The midwife and her assistant checked on us every once in a while, but it was just Elizabeth and I most of the time. At one point, about an hour after we got into the hot tub, a distant coyote yapped several times. Cool, I thought; we are still wild.

When Elizabeth started feeling the urge to push, we went inside the house and she continued laboring in the bedroom. Another of my concerns about having a home birth had concerned the messiness of it all: What happens when her water breaks? What about the blood? What do we do with the placenta? It seems many people have had these same concerns, and a month or two before the birth, the midwife sent Elizabeth a list of things to do to prepare for the messy part of birth. Earlier in the evening, we put new sheets on our bed, then we put a cheap shower curtain over those. Next we put an old fitted sheet over the shower curtain. Everything else was pretty much the way it had been at the hospital for Sonora's birth: the assistant kept putting those blue absorbent pads under Elizabeth to catch any fluids, and it worked.

When we came back into the house, I suddenly felt an urge to look after our guests. They weren't really guests, but that is the category my mind placed them in. In case they wanted to take a nap during lulls in the delivery, I pulled out the futon, put on sheets and blankets, and then I got snacks and drinks ready. Of course, I probably should have been concentrating on Elizabeth, but I suddenly felt the pressures of being a host. This feeling persisted throughout the rest of the night until they left shortly after dawn, and at times this innate obligatory sense became oppressive: I wanted to be with Elizabeth, to share in the experience, but I also felt compelled to look after the well being of the two women who had come to look after Elizabeth's and the baby's well-being. If there were any drawback to having the baby at home, this drive to be accommodating would be it. At the hospital, I knew it was someone else's job to make everyone comfortable, and I didn't worry about it.

Elizabeth finished laboring in the bedroom. At first, she lay on the bed, and then she moved to the foot of the bed, where she knelt on the floor and rested her head on a pillow on the bed. When the contractions came, she screamed or moaned into the pillow, but even muffled by the pillow and bed, she was pretty loud. At one point, Sonora came tottering in from her room. She looked disoriented and half-asleep. Afraid that she would prove to be an annoying distraction to Elizabeth, I rushed Sonora back to bed. The next time Sonora came in, Elizabeth was very close to delivering the baby. I didn't know how close, or I wouldn't have left to put Sonora to bed again.

A minute or two after I put Sonora back in her bed, the midwife's assistant appeared and whispered "Baby, baby," and gestured excitedly for me to follow her. While I was out, Elizabeth had delivered the baby and, with a little assistance from Margaret, had caught our baby with her own hands and carried her into the world. I arrived back in the bedroom at 4:15 A.M. to find Elizabeth kneeling on the floor, her naked body embracing a mewing, vernix-covered newborn baby. Elizabeth seemed to be trying to embrace the baby with every part of her, to enfold the baby with the outsider of her self the way she had done with the inside of herself. "Go ahead, lift her to your chest," the midwife said; "there's plenty of cord." Elizabeth straightened and lifted the baby nearer her heart. Later that morning, I overheard Teri, Margaret's assistant, telling Margaret, "it was a beautiful picture, the way she held that baby; her face just lit up with joy and amazement. It would have made a great photo." And she was right, when I walked in, I saw an expression of rapturous disbelief. From the look on Elizabeth's face, she was experiencing one of those moments of pure, mostly inexplicable emotion.

After Margaret clamped off the cord, I cut it and then held the baby while Elizabeth delivered the placenta. After that, my memories blur somewhat. At some point, Margaret stitched up a small tear Elizabeth had sustained in the delivery. The big stuff was over, everything had gone well, and we were all tired. But there is a moment after that that stands out. The baby was a few degrees too cold, so Margaret said I needed to lay her on a heating pad or initiate skin-to-skin contact. I took off my shirt, unwrapped the baby, and laid her on my chest. I think it is then that I realized I have a new baby too. This isn't only Elizabeth's baby. With her head on my sternum, the baby whimpered occasionally, but didn't cry. She tried out her fingers, flexing and un-flexing them, lightly scratching the skin on my chest with her tiny fingernails. When Margaret came to wrap up the baby and do the initial inspection, I felt sad to part with her.

Margaret measured and weighed her, looked at her skin color, tested reflexes and tone, gave her a vitamin K shot, and wrapped her up again. The hand-scale she used said the baby weighed 7 pounds, 10 ounces (though a few days later, a digital scale put her at 8 lbs. 10 oz. She had gained weight due to Elizabeth's two milk factories, so initially she was probably somewhere in between those two measurements). She was 21.5 inches tall. Elizabeth lifted the baby to her breast and after a couple of failed attempts, the baby latched on well. She has been eating well since.

After everything was done, Teri cleaned up, and we removed the sheet and the shower curtain. A friend of ours took Sonora. Elizabeth, the baby, and I slept in our own bed in our own house. It was a very good experience overall. We hadn't had a bad experience in the hospital when Sonora was born (we had a great midwife then, too), but it was relaxing, comfortable, and somehow fulfilling to have the baby in our own home.

At first, we decided to name our baby Juniper, but after a couple of days, we decided on Rowyn. Her full name is Rowyn Leavy Lee. Leavy was my maternal great-great grandma's name. She was a pretty amazing woman (her name was spelled Levy, but I didn't want people to think of tax levy, so I added an a in to the mix).

A couple of days later, Elizabeth's sister Vanessa and our friend Kathryn came to see us. I took a couple of photos right after the birth (I've included a few of them here), but all of the cute ones below were taken by Vanessa.