Entry 7: A Birth Story (Part 1) ~ Fear

Sunset over Deer Spring pond. January 26, 2022 (Lucy Bryan).

There was a time—back in my 20s, when I was years away from conceiving my first child—that I fancied myself the kind of woman who would be really into birth (and probably pretty good at it). I remember watching Ricky Lake’s documentary The Business of Being Born, a searing critique of the way the American medical system does birth. I dragged an unsuspecting friend to a screening of the documentary Orgasmic Birth, a paean to “natural childbirth” that certainly lives up to its title. On my bookshelf, I proudly displayed a copy of Randi Hutter Epstein’s Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank alongside Toni Weschler’s Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which successfully guided me through years of practicing the Fertility Awareness Method of birth control (and would eventually help me conceive).

I fantasized about giving birth at a place like The Farm Midwifery Center, founded by iconic midwife Ina May Gaskin on a commune in Tennessee. The Center’s website currently bears the banner “birth as it was meant to be.”

Then, at the age of 34, I got pregnant with my son. By that time, my birth fantasies had mellowed a bit. I could no longer see myself squeezing a human being out of my body in an inflatable pool in my living room. Maybe it had something to do with the carpet in the Ohio cabin where we spent our summers: faded to a dingy salmon, it smelled like cat and squirrel pee and bore 30 years’ worth of stains.

My changing perspective on birth also had something to do with an emotion I didn’t expect or invite: fear. Having an OB-GYN for a sister, I’d heard no shortage of horror stories about births gone wrong, and I knew my age put me at increased risk for complications. What if I hemorrhaged? What if the baby went into distress, and I needed an emergency c-section? Or what if he was born with some kind of acute problem that needed immediate medical attention? What if I couldn’t handle the pain? The nearest hospital with a labor and delivery unit was 40 minutes away, and giving birth at home suddenly seemed foolish—or at least like a gamble.

So, I found a middle ground—a hospital in Amish country where I could give birth under the care of a midwife, labor in a tub or on an exercise ball, and still have access to surgeons, anesthetists, and an intensive care unit, should I need them.

Bringing my son into the world was a lesson in giving up control and learning my own limits. My carefully crafted birth plan went out the window when after 11 hours of hard labor—many spent on a birthing ball and in a bathtub. My cervix refused to dilate past three centimeters. I tearfully relinquished my attachment to a “natural” delivery and accepted an epidural, which I was assured would help me relax enough to allow my labor to progress. It did exactly that, but as my anterior (front) facing son descended, his head put pressure on his umbilical cord, and his heartrate dropped. I spent an hour and a half on my hands and knees (which were completely numb)—a position that allowed my son’s heartrate to return to normal and me to practice the meditation techniques I thought I’d be using to breathe through contractions.

In the end, I delivered healthy baby, surrounded by exceptionally kind and attentive medical professionals. It was a good birth, in many ways. But there’s no denying that fear—for myself and for my child—were present.

A few weeks ago, as my daughter’s due date approached, my sister-in-law mentioned how much more afraid she’d felt going into her second birth. “I guess it’s because you know what’s coming,” she said with a chuckle.   

She was right, in part. I dreaded the pain that I knew lay ahead as well as the long physical recovery that awaited me. But I think the things I didn’t know (and couldn’t control) were freaking me out even more. Would I be able to avoid getting COVID-19 in the remaining days before the birth? This baby was predicted to be bigger than my last—how would my body handle that? What if something went wrong, and I had to get a c-section?

I also began to worry about the winter storms that had been dumping snow in our area in the month of January. When I initially learned my due date was Feb. 6, I’d joked that I was going to have a blizzard baby—but as that date neared, that joke began to seem increasingly less like a punchline and more like a possibility. My mother, who was diligently tracking the forecast from Florida, begged me to schedule an induction to avoid having to travel to the hospital in the midst of a winter storm.

I’d like to pause for a moment acknowledge that these fears are privileged fears. When I think about what birth meant to most women throughout history (and in many places around the world today), I break into a cold sweat. A recent walk through an old cemetery reminded me that death was no stranger to birthing mothers or their newborns, and a Google search of statistics on mother mortality rates reveals that in some countries, more than 1 out of every 100 mothers dies of pregnancy related causes. And even in this era, in one of the wealthiest nations on earth, pregnancy and birth are not equal opportunity endeavors. Black women die of pregnancy related causes at 2.5 times the rate of White women in the U.S. In my class last fall, I taught an essay by Tressie McMillan Cottom that explored how racism within the medical system contributed to the tragic and traumatic loss of her pregnancy. Among the things I did not have to worry about as an expectant mother: that because of my skin color, medical professionals might perceive me as incompetent, ignore my pain, or fail to take my concerns seriously.

Still, these realities provided little reassurance in the week before my due date, when the National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for February 2, 3, and 4 and called for days of sleet, freezing rain, and snow. I’ll pick up here in my next post, A Birth Story (Part 2) ~ Laughter.

Predictions for Winter Storm Landon (we live in the pink zone). January 31, 2022 (National Weather Service).