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Pearl's Birth: Part I
assembled @ 3:39 p.m. on 2002-06-24

Pearl's Birth: Part I

Today is my baby's first birthday, and in honor of that, I will share the story of her birth. It's quite a long story, so today will be the first part. :)

Pearl was born on June 24th, 2001, and the day is still crystal clear in my mind. I can still see moments of it when I close my eyes. They are bright like the sunlight that was pouring into the room that morning. The clearest for me is the moment when a screaming, angry child was placed on my stomach. Eyes squeezed tight, limbs stretched in rage, and all I could say was "Oh, it's you." and cry. Pearl was due on June 17th, 2001. Father's Day. She would have been a nice Father's Day present, but she decided that she liked where she was staying, and was not going to come out until she was good and ready. She has always been a girl who knows what she wants. My husband, Hero, and I, had taken classes in the Bradely Method, and were totally committed to a natural, drug-free, intervention-free birth. Inducing was out of the question for us. Besides, we had learned that the average pregnancy was 41 and 1/7 weeks, not 40, as is commonly taught, so little Pearl wasn't truly overdue. My last day at work was June 15th, and I spent a long, slow week at home, waiting for labor to begin. In retrospect, I should have taken lots of naps.

On Saturday morning, June 23rd, I woke up with light contractions. I lay there for a bit, noticing that they were fairly regular, and when Hero woke up, I grinned and said "Would you like to have a baby today?" Of course he said that he would! We lay there in bed for a while, timing the contractions, and though they were fairly regular, the lengths varied, so we decided to get up and walk around. We went to the mall and as we walked, the contractions got further apart. I would still have an occassional twinge that would cause me to squeeze Hero's hand, but I figured that maybe today wasn't the day after all.

We got home, putzed around doing I-don't-remember what, and I was on the computer at about 6:00 pm when the contractions started up again, harder this time. We timed them for a bit and took our time declaring they were regular, even though they clearly were. They got harder, though looking back on it now, they weren't that bad at the time. I walked and walked, back in forth through our little apartment, from the bookcase in the living room to the bed in the bedroom, lying down when a contraction came. Again, in hindsight, I would have gotten as much sleep as I could, and not worried about walking just yet, but I had my logic for it. One, I didn't want to be two weeks past my due date and be transferred out of the birth center and into the hospital. And two, though this was silly, I thought, "The more I walk, the sooner the baby will get here." That may be true, technically, but it was too early in labor to worry much about that. A word of advice to any women reading this? SLEEP! You never know how long, or through which part of the day, your labor will occur. Because I was worried about walking, I didn't get any sleep from 10 am Saturday morning until 11 pm Sunday night. True, after Pearl's birth I was so thrilled I couldn't sleep, even though I tried!

Around midnight, I asked Hero to call the answering service for our birth center. Nell, my favorite midwife (though I love all three of them) was on call for the weekend, and she called us back promptly. She spoke to me for a few minutes and determined it was too early to go to the birth center. I was disappointed because in my illogical, first-time-mom reasoning, the sooner we went to the birth center, the sooner the baby would be born. Pshaw. Nell told me to take a shower and see what happened. The 20-minute shower felt wonderful, and around the end of it, I definitely felt some sort of shift. The contractions got harder, and as I got out of the shower, one hit that seemed to peak and peak, going on forever, and in tears, I asked Hero to call Nell back. I didn't want to talk anymore, and Nell said be there at 2 am, I'll meet you there.

Hero packed up the car, then helped me down the stairs and into the car. I was so excited! We stopped at the 24-hour Walgreen's on the way, to get film for our camera. I remember cringing over ever bump, squeezing my fingers into the pillow on my lap.

We arrived at the birth center before Nell, just as a huge rainstorm broke. Though we went to the back door as we had been told to do, there was no one there to let us in, so we stood under the awning there about 10 minutes, with me squatting every time a contraction hit. A doctor drove in to the parking lot and, though she said that she didn't think we were supposed to go in that way, she opened the door so we wouldn't have to stand outside. Nell pulled up a few minutes later.

To be continued.....

then || now