“Finally!” I think, “I’m about to meet my baby.”
It was the middle of the night when my waters started leaking. “Had I peed a little?” I thought. “Or is this it? The beginning of my birth story?”
I felt peaceful, calm and ready. I texted my midwife to let her know. She said she would come by in the morning to test the substance to conclude if it was, in fact, my waters.
That day was full of love: long walks, cooking, laughter between my mom and mother-in-law despite their language barrier.
Julia, my doula, and my midwife were encouraging me to just enjoy the day, because labor probably wouldn’t start right away.
I used the day to continue to set up my alters in my bedroom and in the nursery where my husband, Mateo, lovingly set up the birth pool.
I texted friends around the world to let them know things were happening, and to hold me in their thoughts and light a candle.
Though everyone in the environment was calm and loving, there were also the doubts and fears bubbling beneath the surface, like the geysers of Yellowstone - waiting to erupt.
I had fear going into this birth, because nearly everyone in my life at one point or a few had said something like, “A home birth!? Are you crazy??” Or “Wow! That’s brave.” Or some other covert fear-based judgment.
The closest of those people who made said comments, of course, was my mom. She had been against having a home birth from the very beginning. She was afraid things would go the same way her birth went and I would need a C-section. Her fear also emanated from hearing tales of her great grandmothers dying in childbirth with her grandmothers.
Talk about ancestral trauma! So of course there was fear in the air. Yes, our bodies are meant to do this and yes, it is deeply scary.
I could sense my moms growing concerns as the day moved on and still no signs of labor.
When you’re an empath AND add being pregnant and in labor - you become very sensitive to peoples’ energies.
To own my part of the fear, I too was afraid. Afraid of the unknown, and even more afraid that having a home birth would prove to be the wrong decision.
My hope was that I could break the family cycle of fearing birth and change the narrative. And of course, that I could safely birth my baby with minimal interventions.
My body felt pretty good that day and I had no trouble staying grounded in my body with movement, activities and some meditation.
While I waited, I finished stitching Ellalee’s baby quilt.
By the time I went to sleep I was feeling some cramping. Nothing unmanageable though. I looked around at my room - affirmations around me - “My body knows just what to do”. And then I closed my eyes to try and get some sleep. Tomorrow would be an even longer day.
The next morning I woke up at 5am with more significant contractions. I text my Doula and Midwife. They both said to give it a few more hours, that this was early still.
Julia recommended that I start diffusing the Clary Sage. This acts as a uterine stimulant so it is meant to help bring on your contractions. I can remember it working almost instantly. At some point I had to stop it because it felt like it was working TOO well. And the smell was off-putting to me.
Fortunately, Julia came to me around 9am since I was pretty insistent. She was a calm and stable presence throughout my birth. She offered me hip squeezes through the thick of my labor - all 26 hours of it! I don’t know what I would’ve done without her.
She also helped get me setup with a TENS unit which administers tiny electrical shocks that give your pain receptors something to focus on helping to override the pain of contractions. I had this thing cranked on almost high for all of labor. Because my baby was O.P. (sunny side up) I had the most excruciating back labor for almost the entirety of my labor.
I got a couple of hours of relaxation in my birth pool, but couldn’t stay in there long since my waters had started to leak 24 hours prior which poses a higher risk of infection.
I paced, stretched, squatted. The most relaxation I found was in the shower letting the hot water hit my back as I leaned against the wall for support. Alone. I felt at peace because no one was around when I was in the shower. My focus turned more inward and I no longer had concern for my mom or husband pacing anxiously or my midwives falling alseep on my floor because they had already overseen SIX births in that one week. Which seems like too many IMO!
Another sensory comfort was from the music I selected. I had made a playlist of very loving and soothing music. It kept me going when I lost all connection to my affirmations.
I can remember my water breaking when I was doing a side-lying pretzel thingy that was supposed to help turn El to face my back and make the labor a little easier. It was a huge gush! And my bed was soaked. For a moment, I remember sighing in relief. But then that little bit of cushion the amniotic fluid provided was gone and the back of El’s skull laying on my sacrum hurt even worse than before.
Once the labor and contractions really picked up, I found it harder and harder to stay in my body. I had so much back labor that my shoulders would creep up to my ears and I remember Julia having to constantly remind to release my energy down into my body. To soften back down.
It was hard not to flee and disassociate though. What else did I have? Shocking and humming myself through it - after 24 hours of that I was practically in a trance.
“It is said that women in labor leave their bodies… They travel to the stars to collect the souls of their babies, and return to this world together.”
This quote makes that feeling of disassociating a bit more empowering.
The growing anxiety from my family was palpable. I had read plenty of stories to know that birth can take a long time. But they were not as mentally prepared for this. Nor were they probably prepared to hear the sounds that were coming out of me at this point.
I was feeling increasingly unsupported by my midwife and her student midwife who continued to be distant, asleep, and very slow to respond to Julia’s requests for medicine to treat my rising temperature or saline injections to help relieve my back labor. I came to find out after my birth that this was because they were experiencing supply shortages - because of existing supply chain issues and probably because they already had so many births that week.
Mateo, who was calm and supportive at first, began to be vocal about his doubts and concerns. He began to push for us to go to the hospital. At first I told him to take his negativity elsewhere (in so many words). Also, there was an ice storm outside so I didn’t really want to get in the car and drive anywhere afraid of the road conditions.
But after a while, I came over to his side and started saying, “I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m too tired. Do you think I should go to the hospital?” Julia and my midwife implored me to keep going. I was getting closer to meeting my baby.
This would have been an opportune moment for my midwife to have said, “You know what, I think you might be right. You could be better supported at a hospital because my judgement feels impaired from lack of sleep this week and I am all out of saline shots, I only have topical lidocaine in case you tear, and I am out of penicillin for your fever that is continuing to go up.” There was a lack of informed consent. She never informed me of the dangers of my 101-102 fever, or that she was out of supplies.
I grieve for this opportunity that was missed by the person in whom I had put my trust. I grieve knowing that I had no control over it and it is not mine to fix.
“Let’s try the saline injects”, Julia asked numerous times for them. And finally they were delivered. At last, my back labor subsided. Just long enough for me to rest and recover a little strength. I slept. I awoke to the back pain returning. Julia later told me that she didn’t ask for more injections because by this time she had learned of their supply shortages.
Julia begged her for a cervical exam to see how dilated I was. Midwives often don’t like to do these because they don’t want to interfere with the natural progress of birthing, which I understand. But I am glad she agreed to because we realized I was stalled due to an anterior cervical lip. This is the last part of the cervix to be pulled over the baby’s head. I had already been pushing for a while and maybe because of her being OP, the head just didn’t have the angle to move it.
This is where I am grateful to have been in the care of a midwife. Because in a hospital, this would have meant they would probably rush me off for an emergency C-section. While there is nothing wrong with that, an old midwives trick is to administer a cervical lip massage with some primrose oil and help the cervix out of the way so that the head can keep getting into place to push through the pelvis. My midwife did a beautiful job at administering this technique and I am so grateful she did.
But the word massage might fool anyone into expecting something less than torture. This cervical massage is the least pleasant thing you could imagine.
But it did work! The head began to come through shortly after this. Against her better judgement, my midwife let her student offer me a birth stool.
Even though I was warned that this often increases the risk of tearing - I said “I don’t f***ing care! Give me the stool!”
My legs were like noodles. After all of the walking, squatting, pushing. I don’t know what was keeping me going at this point. For some, it seems that birthing naturally has become some sort of an athletic or heroic quest. For good reason. It is HARD AF! But I want to warn those of you reading this and possibly wanting a natural birth, not to get overly attached to a birth plan.
But I am proud of my strength and faith. At the point where I pushed El out, I don’t even know where that strength and energy came from. It was like some kind of original ancestral strength coming from the heavens and the earth - a wild primordial energy. I was simply being supported by the love and the prayers of many angels on earth and beyond.
Ellalee was doing her fair share of work too! She turned at the very last minute and made it possible for me to give a final giant push (I can still remember the sensation of tearing as I made that final big push) and out she came with a roar!
The whole house sighed with relief when they heard her cry and my mother-in-law and mom came running in to see. It was a joyous moment.
All of the struggles melted and softened as I held my new baby in my arms. Her eyes the color of ice like that on the branches right outside my window. My first thought was, “Thank God!”
I had her umbilical chord still attached and i didn’t want to put her down so I ask my husband just cut my shirt off so she could feed.
It is as amazing as everyone says - watching your baby know exactly how to find your breast even with eyes closed. I can still remember her warmth on my chest. And just how I wanted so badly to just stay there, resting, and not think about the next part of having to birth the placenta.
Aside from the comment that the midwife assistant, made, “She’s cross-eyed”, I was in heaven. I felt so satisfied! “We did it!” I remember saying to her.
Physically, I can remember feeling like a raw puddle of human. Aware of the umbilical chord hanging out of me and the fact that I also had some blood pooling under me.
I also felt very tentative holding her - everyone was giving me advice about how to hold and feed and I suddenly felt terrified - like holy shit, I know nothing. I suddenly felt worried that I was doing everything wrong. And also worried something had happened to her on the way out that made her cross-eyed.
The warm, fuzzy, stillness of those first hours flew by. This next part was all the more jarring because of the stark contrast. Suddenly everyone was panicked. Almost two hours had elapsed and I still had not birthed the placenta (In Maryland - emergency transfer is supposed to take place for a retained placenta after one hour).
I stood up to birth it and it definitely did not feel as easy as people say it is. My placenta was also massive. My doula told me she got over twice the number of capsules she normally makes from one placenta.
My Midwife gave me fundal massage to be sure that my uterus clamped back down. I was given pitocin to help stop my hemorrhaging. Then the worst part happened. This is where I need to give you a trigger warning for obstetric violence. My Uterus was not clamping back down.
My Midwife said she thought part of the placenta was still in there and she has to go in and remove it. I said I didn’t want that and she said she had to do it to stop the bleeding. Before I knew it, her whole arm is up inside my uterus and I am screaming in pain and mostly just screaming, “No! Stop! Get the fuck out of me!” Kicking her and pushing her physically away!
It was an unsuccessful uterine sweep. And there was also a complete lack of informed consent, which is half of the whole reason I chose a home-birth.
The other half was so that I could be undisturbed in my home after birthing and not bothered by nurses every second. I had to be transferred to a hospital for retained placenta and blood loss - well over 2000 cc’s (i.e. about half of my blood)
I guess these last parts were just not what I would have expected from a home birth and it caught me by surprise and really colored my whole experience and outlook on birth and the way that it is marketed to us. I think Lucy Jones says it best in her book Matrescence: On Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood :
““I thought early motherhood would be gentle, beatific, pacific, tranquil: bathed in a soft light. But actually it was hardcore, edgy, gnarly. It wasn’t pale pink; it was brown of shit and red of blood. And it was the most political experience of my life, rife with conflict, domination, drama, struggle and power.”
I don’t think one could ever prepare for every possible outcome in birth - unless you’re already an OB or Nurse Midwife. Despite my studying and reading ahead of time, I felt grossly unprepared for the intensity of birth. And I now sort of despise the the rhetoric from the hypnobirthing class I did online - contractions are more than sensations - childbirth fucking hurts. But we are fucking POWERFUL beings.
I sometimes think that women try to downplay the difficulties we face in life to make other people more comfortable hearing about them. Women are fierce, strong, amazing animals. We don’t need to pretend that things don’t hurt in order for this to be true. We don’t need to only share the positive birth stories to protect Maidens who have not yet been through it.
My best advice and take-aways:
1. take a REAL childbirth ed class - like the ones Odile and Kristie at The Womb Room Offer.
2. Stay open to the possibility of things changing and not going according to plan.
3. Go for the empowered birth rather than a “natural” birth (They are all natural because we are animals part of nature).
I remember leaving the hospital after two days of getting blood transfusions with my baby in the car seat. I felt so weak still, but the sky seemed bluer than ever before. I felt as new as my little infant riding in the backseat. And I felt immense gratitude that I had survived all of this, to the person who’s blood gave me new life, and to God.
On the flip side of that gratitude I remember feeling fierceness within unlike what I had ever felt before. I also felt clearer than ever. It felt like a Kali energy - goddess of creation, power, destruction, death. A part of me that had been there all along but never had the permission to be felt. It was the power of a mother. And the pain - all at once.
It took a few more days to feel like I had the physical strength to walk again. It took a couple of weeks to feel like my organs were back in their rightful place and to stop worrying about my uterus.
Postpartum was a freaking mess… hell I still feel like that’s true nearly two years later.
But you can’t rushing healing. And nothing cracks you open wider than becoming a mother.
Amanda Agricola is a Mom, Artist, Yoga Instructor and Creative Coordinator of The Womb Room, living in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, with her family and magical cats.
She has a passion for the outdoors, herbal medicine, volunteering at organic farms, and for the craft of natural dying fabrics. She is also an entrepreneur in organic textiles, and is currently enrolled in a family herbal medicine training program.
Amanda can be reached at Connect@WombRoom.mom or on IG @flowy.ish.
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