Giving Birth in the Andromeda Galaxy
Reflecting on the life-changing events of eight years ago.
Content note: I tell my birth story in this one without sparing the blood-soaked details (spoiler: it has a happy ending). If that’s not for you, skip it! ❤️
I didn’t send a Substack last week because it was my kid’s birthday, and I was busy with presents and preparations and celebrations, which included, but weren’t limited to, painstakingly recreating a Dairy Queen ice cream cake for him. He declared it to be “okay.”
Whenever someone’s kid has a birthday, I like to say “happy birthday” to the kid, and also “happy birth day” to the parent who gave birth. Birthing parents deserve a damn party and a cake. I have had five slices of ice cream cake since Friday and it’s more than okay!
In early April, 2016, while Colin and I were watching the third or fourth instalment in the Lone Wolf and Cub film series, I got up to use the bathroom, and suddenly felt like I’d spilled a jug of warm water down my pants and onto the floor. There was a mysterious puddle beneath my feet.
“I think my water broke?” I said. I was already a week past my due date and we were just hanging out at home, watching TV at all hours, waiting for something to happen. Everyone warned me that it wouldn’t be like the movies. Your water doesn’t break dramatically like a big ol’ water balloon, they said. It’ll probably feel like a slow trickle, they said. Like peeing your pants a little bit.
That was not my experience. Mine was a sploosh.
I don’t remember who cleaned up the amniotic fluid, but it must have been Colin, because I could hardly bend over. I called my midwife, and she asked me a few questions and then told me to get some sleep, because the following day might be a long one.
I tried to sleep, but the contractions started just after midnight, and they kept waking me up. The midwife told me to wait for them to be consistently a minute long, and less than five minutes apart, but they were wildly, annoyingly erratic. Sometimes long, but far apart. Sometimes short, but frequent. It took nearly 24 hours for the situation to progress, and during that time, I barely slept, couldn’t eat (it was the only day of my entire pregnancy during which I felt truly nauseous), and didn’t want to talk to anybody. I was in the zone, or at least, a zone. That zone was a solitary place.
Around 10 or 11pm on the day after my water broke, we called an Uber to drive us to the Toronto Birth Centre, a facility led by Indigenous community members and midwives, where I hoped1 to give birth. I told Colin not to tell the driver that I was in labour, because I didn’t want him to freak out. Missy Elliott’s Work It was playing on the car radio, and it seemed like a really apt soundtrack for what I was going through.
At the birth centre, things slowed down. I walked around, took a bath, sat on a big bouncy ball, and gritted my teeth through contractions that were reaching unbearable-ish levels of intensity, but at a glacial pace. I was in a facility without doctors, so no significant pain management solutions were available to me. I knew this would be the case. I, a person who takes extra strength Advil for minor menstrual cramps, chose this. I would have questioned this choice, or maybe my sanity, but I was too busy being in the zone. The zone was like a long tunnel, dark on both ends. I could see only a few inches in front or behind. I started counting during the contractions, and determined that the most blinding pain lasted for a count of seven. I only needed to survive from one to seven. Easy!
Tiny aside: “counting through the bad parts” is a technique I’ve used many times in life, to get through painful situations. Once, years earlier, I used it to survive the Leviathan roller coaster at Canada’s Wonderland. I hate roller coasters, but a friend who loved them insisted that I try her favourite one, and I’m nothing if not a people-pleasing little bitch, so I spent my entire time in the lineup counting the number of seconds it took the coaster to climb up to and then descend down the steepest part of its track. Five seconds. I figured I could survive to a count of five, so I got on with her. It was a nightmare, but I did it.
So, I was in the zone (the alone-zone), and nothing outside the zone mattered. I was alone, and everyone else in the room was very far away, like I was seeing them through a telescope. I knew that they were actually right there, touching my legs or rubbing my back or holding my hands during the contractions. But, in another sense, I was in the Andromeda Galaxy, 2.5 million light years away. I knew that they were there to facilitate something I was doing, but I also knew that no matter the level of intervention required to get it done, I would be doing that thing alone. I’ve never felt more confident or more certain in the power of solitude than I did that day.
At some point around two or three in the morning, I started to feel that mythical “urge to push” that I’d heard so much about. The only thing I can compare it to is the urge to throw up, minus the nausea? An involuntary, whole-body heaving that feels both bad, and like a huge relief.
I pushed for 45 minutes, or maybe three hours, and then a ten-pound child came out of my body and Colin “caught it” (the midwives encouraged this anxiety-inducing contribution from the birth partner).
After that, everything went bonkers. There was a baby on my chest, and I was getting two injections of whatever it is that they give women to stop them from bleeding to death, at which point my bleeding slowed, and they realized I had an internal tear that my midwife described as a “starburst.” An assistant midwife asked me if I wanted “a tour” of my placenta, to distract me from the pain. A tour! It took hours (did it just feel like hours, or did it actually take hours? I think it actually took hours) of stitching to repair the damage, during which time I was given local anesthetics, as well as my fill of nitrous oxide. If you’ve ever had nitrous oxide in the dentist’s office (or used it to get high during your misspent youth) you’ll know that it doesn’t really take the pain away. It just makes you stop caring. While I was high and disassociating, I remember thinking several times “if it was a few decades ago, this is how I would have died.”
I didn’t die. I went home with a baby, and instructions to take a hot bath every day for the first few weeks. To this day, I’m convinced the midwife told me that more for my mental health than for my physical healing. That 20 minute daily break was pretty important, even if I spent it hysterically sobbing over a song Alan Zweig off-handedly told me about on Facebook2.
And now, that baby is a creative, stubborn, uniquely hilarious and brilliant non-conformist who just turned eight. Happy birth day to us both.
“Hoped” rather than “planned,” because you truly never know what’ll happen, and there’s no better way to guarantee disappointment than to carefully plan something you have absolutely no control over.
The song still makes me cry. Listen at your own peril, if you are a parent! Thanks a lot, Alan! (Seriously though, thank you. The song is beautiful and I think of it often. ❤️)
I hope it’s not weird of me to say, but what a great birth story! It’s so true we are so in that moment. Happy Birthing Day to you.
I was on the edge of my seat through this whole post as if I didn't know how it was going to end. Thank you for the story, and for a close-up view of the experience that I haven't heard very often. I have not been reading the right books, perhaps, but also how much your personality determined the details of it made it easier to put myself a little bit in your place.