My four week old son, Wyatt, sleeps in his peanut shell sling, nestled against my body, as I type. Today is a milestone, the first time I have gotten him to accept being worn in the sling. I sit at my desk in the living room, watching the snow fall gently off the trees in the backyard. The whole house is peaceful, and I feel good to be on my computer and to have Wyatt nestled against me at the same time. I feel as if everything is going to work out now.

It took a while to get to this point. The first couple of days home with Wyatt were the most desperate, overwhelmed and exhausted days I have ever experienced in my life. I knew about the “baby blues”, but they had conjured up a vague image of a new mother sitting next to a tiny, sleeping baby in a frilly white bassinet, eating chocolate, crying about being fat. I hadn’t known that “baby blues” really translated into feeling as if I would never be able to go to the bathroom, eat, sleep or shower again. I hadn’t realized that just when I began to feel a little bit better, I would leave the house without breakfast to fill out forms for his first pediatrician visit while only having had 1-3 hours of sleep in any 24 hour period in the previous five days, sitting in the lobby bleary-eyed, puzzling over sections that asked if my four day old infant was married and who his employer was. I hadn’t known that my husband and I would wait an hour and a half to see the doctor, only to be told immediately, “This boy is yellow – you need to go down to the lab to have his blood drawn immediately.” And that was his first check-up.

Several hours later, I found myself a virtual prisoner in a hospital room with him for three days, breastfeeding him every three hours and then putting him back under the phototherapy lights, putting his little mask back on to protect his eyes, watching to make sure he didn’t squirm out of it, popping the pacifier back into his mouth when he spit it out and became upset that it was missing. While I was in that room, I last track of what day it was or what the weather was like outside. I had no sense of where I was located in the building. It was a surreal feeling to walk out with him, past the nurses as they sat at a sort of counter, realizing that they were so close all that time that I pushed the call button and somebody would come into my room.

My husband would bring me food and water every day. I never had enough water despite begging nurses for ice water at every opportunity. Every morning he would bring me five or six bottles of water to last me the day, in between ice water. He would also bring me snacks like pop tarts, and if the cafeteria lunch was terrible that day, he would go out and get me some fast food. He would sit there all day with me, playing World of Warcraft on his laptop, using the hospital wireless connection. Occasionally he would tell me what was going on with the primaries, letting me know that McCain was winning or that Obama and Clinton were neck and neck.

My life had become completely different as soon as I went into real labor the night before Superbowl Sunday. I had been having false labor for a week by that time. Not just Braxton Hicks contractions, but consistent contractions that were three minutes apart and lasting for over an hour. I had already been to the hospital triage room and been sent back home once before. This time I knew it was real, because I was experiencing “bloody show”. It was about 1:30 AM in the morning. I was so excited I stayed up to time the contractions for a while. Then I got bored and went to bed until about 8:00 AM. I felt excited that I was getting close to having the baby. The contractions did not yet hurt much. I could easily cope with them. I felt hopeful that my months of drinking red raspberry leaf tea might mean that I would have a fast and easy labor. I brewed some more red raspberry leaf tea. This time I resolved to wait before going to the hospital. I would wait until the contractions were not just three minutes apart for an hour, but were also starting to hurt and were getting stronger and closer together.

That afternoon, my husband I made our second trip to the hospital triage room. I knew the drill this time. Take off my clothes and put them in the plastic bag. Pee in the cup. Put on the gown, climb onto the table, get strapped to the contraction monitor and the fetal monitor, and wait for the resident doctor to check my cervix. The same doctor who had checked me a week ago was on call this time. He remembered me. I could tell he looked skeptical that I was really in labor this time. When he checked me, he found I was only about two and half centimeters dilated. He said I could either go home or walk the halls and get checked again in a couple of hours. I chose to walk the halls for about two hours. When I got checked again, I was still only three centimeters dilated. Reluctantly, I went back home, unsure of the criteria to use to return again, since I was already meeting the normal criteria of contractions lasting at least one minute, three minutes apart, for an hour or more.

At home, I walked around the house and leaned forward with every contraction. I waited until they were so painful that I could almost not cope with them anymore, before asking my husband to drive me back to the hospital. It was now evening on Superbowl Sunday. Sitting in the car on the way to the hospital was excruciating. I could cope with the pain so much better in a standing position. Even more excruciating was being told back in the triage room that I was only four centimeters dilated. The resident doctor seemed to be trying to decide whether to send me home again. I was almost in despair, when the nurse discovered that my water had broke. That meant they had to admit me. What a relief. I wanted to get into that hydrotherapy tub ASAP. I had been planning a waterbirth for months. I had read that an “aquadural” is almost as good as an epidural. I had transfered my care to a hospital CNM so that I would be allowed to labor and push in the water.

Sinking into the tub was like heaven. I thought everything would be okay now. I relaxed into the water, feeling the pain immediately lessen. Soon I noticed that my huge belly stuck up out of the water almost entirely, and that it was growing cold quickly. The labor nurse who was on duty was an angel who offered to spray my belly with the shower head attachment to keep it warm. After fiddling with the attachment for a few minutes, she announced she would have to transfer me to another room, because it wasn’t working. “No!” I immediately said. I had no desire to move to another environment again. The most stressful part of my whole day had been going from one environment to another. It made it hard to get into a groove and stay in in it. I felt I was coping well at this point and I didn’t want my groove disrupted. So I stayed. I took off the gown and lay in the tub wearing only a sports bra. Then I got on all fours in the tub and submerged by belly in the warm water. The nurse put a hot towel on top of my back to keep it warm. That position felt better than anything else had yet. If I could have maintained it, I might have been okay, but it was tiring. The tub was so shallow, and I had nothing to rest on. My sweaty face was on the side of the tub, on top of my hands, and my arms and shoulders were getting tired. I tried getting on my side in the water. I abandoned the side position after one contraction. It wasn’t much better than being on my back.

The nurse announced I would need to get out of the tub so she could refill it, and I decided to get checked for progress. To my disappointment, I had not progressed at all, and my contractions had slowed down. I realized I would have to stay out of the water for a while and cope with the pain on dry land again. I don’t know how long I labored out of the tub before getting checked again, only to find that I was only five centimeters dilated at this point. I was starting to feel a lot of pain, and I realized that before it was over, I was likely to feel twice as much pain, and it was likely to last a long time, at my pace. I began to consider getting the epidural but wanted to try the water again first. This time, getting into the tub did nothing for my pain. It relaxed me in between contractions, but each contraction hurt like the dickens no matter what position I took in the tub. In my birth plan, I had instructed that I did not want to be offered anything for my pain. The nurse kept asking me to rate my pain and asking me if there was anything she could do for me. At that point, I was rating my pain a 9 on a scale of 1 (I was repeatedly asked to rate my pain), and I decided to get the damn epidural.

I was likely having back labor, since the midwife and her nurse practitioner had thought that Wyatt felt like he was presenting posterior at my last four prenatal check-ups. That would explain why my labor lasted three times longer than the average first labor. Mine was thirty-six hours. The average first labor is twelve. With back labor, the baby’s spine slams against the mother’s spine with each contraction, making contractions more painful. Not only that, but the baby’s head does not press down on the cervix as much as the head of a baby presenting anterior. This makes cervical dilation slower. I’ll always wonder if I could have held out without the epidural if I had a more average length labor, but I guess I’ll never know. I’m stopping with Wyatt. I have no plans to have more kids.

The three contractions I sat through while the needle went into my spine were the most painful of all, and I had to sit on the edge of the bed with my back rounded, perfectly still, through each one. I hugged a pillow and cried out without moving at all, each time. In the middle of this, I heard the phone ring, and I heard my husband pick it up. “Well you are,” he said, and he hung up the phone. Later he said that my mother had called right at that moment and said, “I hate to bother you, but…” That night, I actually slept through the hardest part of my labor, in no pain. I would occasionally awaken to look at the monitors, and they would show no fetal heartbeat and no contractions. I would waken my poor husband, who was snoozing uncomfortably hunched in a chair in the corner next to a drafty window, to have him hit the call button. Each time, the night-shift labor nurse, who was an angel, promptly came and fixed the monitoring belts, reassuring us that everything was fine. At 6:00 AM, the nurse told me I was 10 centimeters dilated and that I should be able to meet my baby soon. I felt wonderful, refreshed and excited. I asked when the midwife would show up.

At 8:00 AM, the midwife came in and said brightly, “Hi, girlie!” I gave her a cool reception and looked her in the eyes without smiling, hoping my eyes said, “Where were you all this time?” I couldn’t tell if she picked up on it. I had been told that she would do what was called “labor sitting”. I had not been told that she would not show up until I was ready to push. But it got worse than that. Not only didn’t she help me, but she made things worse. It was she who encouraged me to increase my epidural dose, ultimately leading to a complete numbing of my whole pelvic region, to the point that I felt no pressure and no urge to push. It was she who told me to remain flat on my back while pushing, pulling my legs back with my hands. I asked whether there was any way I could use a squatting bar and have the edge of the bed dropped, so that gravity would help me. She and the day shift nurse just looked at me like I was crazy. She kept telling me to push like I was trying to poop, but I could not feel my butt or anything else down there. They held up a mirror for me so I could see that the top of the head was showing with each push. I would see a little bit of blonde hair, and then it would disappear again, in between pushes. I just could not get that little blonde head under my pubic bone. After three hours of this, the midwife abruptly informed me that I would need either a C-section or a vacuum extraction. I tried so hard to push to avoid either one, but I just could not do it. It was one of the most traumatic experiences I have ever been through, feeling totally disconnected from my body at a time when I needed most for my body to function.
The midwife called the doctor that she works with in her practice. The hospital newsletter I had read while I was in my first trimester of pregnancey had credited this doctor with reforming the hospital’s labor and delivery unit, bringing in midwives and hydrotherapy tubs, and making the postpartum recovery rooms more homelike. I had thought all this time what a wonderful man he must be.

“Will you let me help you?” asked the doctor. “Yes,” I replied. He was there for all of five minutes. In that five minutes, I pushed three times with the vacuum being held on the baby’s head to keep it from going back inside of me in between pushes. Suddenly, the baby was placed on my chest, and he gazed into my eyes alertly and intensely, without crying. I teared up. Meanwhile, my husband missed this moment, because he was concentrating on what they were doing to me down there. He later told me that the doctor whipped out a pair of scissors, said “It has to be done,” and snipped me all in less than three seconds. Immediately after that, the midwife said something about my sphincter and started freaking out and trying to stitch me. The doctor said, “No, no, let me show you,” and got the stitches started, then walked out. Two days later we passed the doctor on the way out of the hospital and said hello, but he walked right by without acknowledging us.

On my second night in the hospital, while Wyatt slept for six hours straight, I cried for the first three hours of it and then slept for three hours before he woke up hungry. During my three hours of crying, I came to terms with my labor, and soon it seemed like it was something that had happened years ago. All my energies were focused on caring for Wyatt. I’ll always wonder if his newborn jaundice would have been so bad if he had not been a vacuum extracted baby. I read online that vacuum extraction can cause bleeding under the scalp, and that when the blood clots are broken down in the baby’s body, it increases the bilirubin levels in the blood, predisposing vacuum extraction babies to more trouble with jaundice. Not only did Wyatt have to be in the hospital under the lights for three days, but then he had to be on a billy blanket at home for six more. We dealt with his jaundice the first three weeks of his life. It took an unusually long time to clear. His pediatrician does not think his jaundice has anything to do with his vacuum extraction, since he has no visible hemotoma on his skull.

But we’ve got a bright and healthy son who has grown almost three inches in his first month of life. He gets excited when he’s put down to play on his play mat/baby gym. After fifteen or twenty minutes of this, when I pick him up, he looks into my eyes so happy and excited about the world. I tell him that the world is an exciting place and that he’s going to have so much fun. As he gazes into my eyes and listens to me, and his face lights up even more. I hope I’m not lying to him. I’ll try to make my words come true.

Occasionally, he gets a very intense look in his eyes as he looks into my eyes. He had that very look the first time he was placed on my chest, immediately after emerging from my womb. My mother says I got that look in my eyes when I was about a year old, but not as young as him. “Really?” I said. “You mean all babies don’t get that look?” I wonder if he will be even more intense than I am. He already loves being read to, looking at my face with excitement the whole time I read, and actually looking at the pictures in the book when I hold them right in front of his face.

What fun to get past the logistics of feeding, pooping, sleeping … rinse and repeat … and finally get to the play time and the reading. And what an enjoyable and relieving experience to wear him on me without the constant fear that I am just about to hear him cry as I try to snatch a bite to eat or check an email. Baby-wearing slings should be counted among the greatest inventions of all time, and I’m quite sure that a woman invented them, too. Now I know how to be a mother and still find time to write and to play on my computer. Wyatt is perfectly happy next to my body in the sling while I sit here, occasionally stirring and cooing. I’m getting to know all the little sleep noises he makes when he’s in a light sleep, and they’re more adorable than I ever noticed before. Maybe I’ll enjoy some of these first three months of Wyatt’s life after all. Previously, I had been making it through my days with the knowledge that he would not be as fussy, helpless and high-maintenance once he reached the age of three months old. I had been thinking to myself, one month down, two to go. Now if we could just get to the point where we could eat dinner without him crying in the evening…