With our first child, the labor and delivery that we experienced wasn’t anything like any of the birth stories we had read. It was hard to believe, but there was no denying the fact. Throughout the nine months that we were waiting for our turn to have a story to tell, we read about everything from the most blissful euphoria to the most agonizing misery. With that many different precedents, it was astounding that ours was different.
After some consideration, I would have to assume that to anybody but the two of us, our labor and delivery was probably quite similar to many others’. Thing is, there’s no way for us to look at the whole experience from an objective viewpoint . . . can’t be done, and we wouldn’t want to, if we could. It’s an amazing thing, to have that kind of memory group. For me, it isn’t one flowing memory, from start to finish–it’s a whole mountain of little bits of memory, with gaping holes, I must admit. The chronology in my mind is entirely void of timestamps, from the time we got to the place where the baby was to be born to the moment we met that little person, face to face. For everything before and after, I can remember pretty clearly the timing; it’s just that stretch that seems kind of fuzzy, as far as the clock is concerned. Other people, though, can give a time-specific play-by-play, from start to finish.
My point is, birth stories are probably going to seem different to every laboring and delivering couple, during their evolution and after the fact. As much as you read up on what to do to make such-and-such happen, only a certain amount of control really exists. That’s not a bad thing–the woman’s body is designed to do this, after all! Even if you’re not into new-age thinking or any other kind of spirituality, there is a certain common-sense truth to the advice of “listen to your body.” For those of us who never had kids before, there’s even more wisdom in that recommendation. I’m no physician, and with only one child, I’m no expert, either. Fact of the matter is, though, when our baby was coming, there were things we did that neither the midwife nor the books nor the websites told us to do, and everything, all together, got our baby out in one healthy piece.
We had read all about what to expect during labor, but very little of it matched exactly with what was happening to us. With back labor starting from the first contraction and the bag of waters not breaking until jacuzzi time (so we didn’t even realize, for sure, that it had happened until the baby was being born, and the bag was already broken), we were kind of afloat, with no full-blown precedents to watch for what to expect next. Thankfully, my spouse is calmer than I, so we didn’t have mass hysteria, and once I was calmed down, it became a matter of going with the flow and waiting to see what came next. One thing you’ll probably read that definitely held true for us was the advice to relax–that was probably the only thing that obviously helped. Everything else, we weren’t sure it wasn’t just psychosomatic, and even though it worked one time, it might not work the next time.
But, this was just us–everybody’s different, or so it seems.
