The Day I Became A Mother

It took me quite a while to get started but here I am! Here I am trying to describe something that feels like it's almost impossible to put into words: Samuel's birth.

Part One: Preparations And Being Un-Prepared

Our birth story might not be as exciting as you may expect. Nothing bad happend, nothing unusual happened. Still, for me (obviously) it is very special and I hope you'll think so, too.

Every birth starts with a pregnancy and mine and Samuels particular pregnancy started and ended with a shock. We hadn't planned on having children for many, many years. We didn't even live in the same city at that point and we made sure nothing baby-related would happen to us – so we thought! This little baby of ours however made it pretty clear he wanted to be in our lives – as clear as two purple lines and a little button that had called my belly his home for four weeks already. Quite a shock for two people in their mid-twenties who both just moved to new, seperate cities and had planned to start working on their university degrees! It's safe to say that we both struggled to accept the implications for a while, which made the first three months, as difficult as they already physically were, also emotionally challenging. I don't want anybody to think that we didn't become happy, thankful and very, very excited as the pregnancy progressed but the start was rocky - to say the least.

Apart from some health scares that turned out to be nothing at all, the second trimester was pleasantly uneventful. Towards the third trimester I started to feel more uncomfortable (but really, who doesn't?). Back pains became a constant factor of my every day and I was more than just a bit stressed out when heartburn and yes, incontince joined the list of common pregnancy symptoms that apparently I wasn't going to avoid. As annoyingly slow and dependent on my boyfriend I was, I still LOVED being pregnant. The excitment, the planning, the whole mystery around it - which was magniefied even more when we decided not to learn the sex of the baby -, I adored (almost) every second of it.

By Easter 2014, at 36 weeks, I felt huge and immobile but still insisted on accompanying my mother to see a play at Thalia Theater in Hamburg. The weekend was slow and gorgeous and filled with sun-soaked walks, coffee dates and an extended brunch with my godmother. Still, when I returned home I entered a new phase of exhaustion that I couldn't shake off no matter how many baths and naps I took. At this point I should mention that we always assumed this baby to come at least a week late. How we came to this bogus idea, I'll never know. On Thursday, 4/25/2014, now 37+3 weeks along, we had our last birthing class which left us none the wiser but a whole lot calmer as we started to prepare for the – as we thought – long period of waiting. The next evening I remember being quite annoyed. Annoyed by the never-ending sense of mental and phyical fatigue, the extreme heartburn that I had stupidly decided to ignore when I had pizza that evening to make things even worse and annoyed by the fact that I was annoyed.

Part Two: Taking Baths And Other Fluids - Early Labor

I took a long bath to help with my back pain (it didn't make the slightest difference) and when I got out of the tub I felt a bit of pressure on my pelvis. I didn't give it more than a second of attention, though. Just before we went to bed - at around eleven, I was way to tired for a later bed time - my heartburn got even worse than usual. Due to the level of exhaustion I'd been feeling I went to sleep quite quickly despite the pain. After only an hour and a half I woke up, annoyed by the fact that it still felt like fire ants were going for a stroll in my upper torso. The situation got even more unpleasant when I realized that I was slowly, steadily but surely peeing my pants without having any control over it. Between complete amusement and overall exhaustion I told the father-to-be about what was happening, got up, which in my hippo-esque state must have looked very funny and went to the bathroom to change. Only then did I notice that I was still getting more wet and the stream of pee (which I laughably thought that was) was not coming to an end. I crawled back into bed to inform my boyfriend, hoping he would comfort me by saying that our estimated delivery date was more than two weeks away, which he did. You have to understand that 1.) we didn't expect the birth to start for another 2-4 weeks 2.) we hadn't packed a single thing, not one thread, no mediations were memorized, no music was burned on a forever-to-be-kept CD 3.) we were as mentally prepared for what was to happen as Galileo Galilei would have been if he were invited to watch Formula One. I might exaggerate a bit on the last point but still, our baby's birth seemed as far away as it had been the last couple of months – it just seemed so completely surreal. After a few minutes we both grew more uncertain because, and I'm sorry if you feel this is oversharing it, the fluid smelled differently. As a consequence I called our midwife, feeling immensely guilty for waking her up in the middle of the night for something that was possibly absolutely nothing. She went through a catalogue of questions and in the end determined that indeed I was in labor. However, since I didn't have any contractions up until then she told us to get some rest, sleep through the night and meet her at the birthing center at ten in the morning. You'll soon understand why this is still funny to us. Right then it made complete sense to me as we had learned that it isn't unusual that a first-time birth can take days!

Part Three: More Baths, Even Less Fun - Active Labor

So back to „sleep“ we went. After only five minutes (or was it even less than that?) I felt a cramping in my lower abdomen, which kept getting stronger and more painful with every second. Even though I knew that these probably were contractions, we also remembered that people who run to the hospital (or the birthing center in our case) in panic at the first sign of the birth starting, are often asked to go back home. I was determined not to have this happening to me! Instead I tried to tell myself that what I was experiencing was only the beginning and that things would only get worse. However, I soon realized that there were absolutely no breaks in between contractions, not one tiny second. Instead I started to feel sick and threw up and after only twenty or thirty minutes I wasn't able to stand or sit or lie down, nothing gave me comfort any more. In our birth preparation class we had learned that in order to determine whether the contractions you are feeling are 'only' Braxton-Hicks or actual you-will-have-a-baby-soon-contractions you should take a warm bath. Getting into the bathtub however made thingsa hundred times worse - a clear sign: we were in labor. By this time I had finally accepted that maybe, probably, I was going to meet our baby a tiny bit earlier than I had anticipated. It might be that only women who have already experienced labor know what I'm talking about when I'm telling you: it takes a moment or two to mentally embrace that you are going to push a little human being out of your body. Yes, there is that huge junk of time called pregnancy which should be more than enough - 40 weeks to be exact - to prepare for this moment, but really: I don't think many women realize what labor physically means and what it feels like before they actively go through it. So it may come as more of a surprise to some, less to others, that, while I was sitting on the edge of my bed, realizing that in fact the contractions would only get more painful and that I was going to become a mother a lot sooner than May 12th, I was simultaneously calculating how long I would have to suppress my contractions (ha!) in order to at least have my baby born in May. Hilarious in retrospect but, I guess, a valuable coping mechanism at the moment.

While I threw up two more times, tried to find relief in different positions and did a whole lot of swearing, if I remember correctly, my poor boyfriend ran about the appartment and tried to collect everything from a 'what-you-really-need-in-hospital-bag'-list we had been handed out at the end of our birthing class. 

Part Four: A Taxi Ride and Another Bath

 

At 3am, two hours after the contractions had started without a break in between, I threw in the towel. I was in full-blown labour and I sure wasn't going to risk having this baby at home completely unplanned! So again, we called our midwife Stephanie and when she heard how close together the contractions already were, she agreed that we should meet rather sooner than later. And so, one hellish taxi ride later, we found ourselves in front of the birthing center at a quarter to four in the morning. After our midwife arrived we went to the birthing suite and she checked my curvex and the srength of the contractions.To our surprise I was already four centimeters dilated! At hearing the good news I was able to let go. The pain was overwhelming but, I know this might sound strange, only in the most positive way. I could feel my body work and felt like I could trust the process. My body knew what to do, my baby did excactly what it was supposed to do to finally arrive safely in my arms. All I had to do was focus and breathe and that was all I really did for the next hour. We tried different positions to make me feel more comfortable, some included holding onto my boyfriend, some required the assistance of a birthing stool, all of them had the same result: the pain couldn't be helped, it was all part of the process. In the end both Stephanie and my boyfriend would tell me that throughout the entire birth I made almost no sound of discomfort. I think in the moment it would have disturbed my concentration, so I never felt the urge to scream or moan.

At around a quarter to five I asked to go into the tub so Stephanie filled it with warm water. Once I went in something happened that I wasn't able to explain then and still can't in retrospect. This time being surrounded by water was excactly what I needed! While I could still feel the contractions and they still hurt, the pain became so bearable that for the first time during the last few hours I was able to talk and even laugh. After this point what had been an okay-experience turned into a wonderful, exciting process.

Part Five: A Shock and A Baby

At around 5:15am I left the tub to use the toilet. We had been 'warned' in class that at some point during the later part of a birth the body tries to make as much space as possible to help the baby go through the birth canal. Since I felt an enormous amount of pressure on my lower body I assumed that I had reached that point. If you are rather squeamish you probably don't want to read this part, just skip it and read on after the break. Sitting on the toilet I was suddently scarred to push because I thought if I'd do it to hard I'd end up having a baby in the bathroom! The pressure was so overwhelming though that it took me over 15 minutes to finally admit that I might be close to actually having this kid! I gently checked with my fingers and was shocked to my very core. What I felt was something soft, yet firm and above all fluffy coming out of me.

In complete disbelieve I got up from the toilet, went back to the birthing suite and into the tub, made myself comfortable, took a deep breath and told Stephanie and the boyfriend that I was 'pretty sure' the baby was very close. Sure enough, two or three contractions later, Samuel's head, after slipping out and in a few times, came out. I remember that I got a bit annoyed that it took me so 'long' to get him out, so when another seemingly unsuccesful contraction ended I just kept on pushing until finally, he popped out (I never admitted this to Stephanie). What followed was the weirdest feeling I'll never forget! His body still inside me, Samuel turned his head from the left to the right a few times, always looking down. All we could see was a teeny tiny thing, almost furry that was moving and very much alive! Only 20 seconds and another contraction later our son came into this world and was immediatly placed in my arms.

The first thing I saw was his incredible hair.

The first thing I said was ' we have a son'.

The first thing I did was kiss his sweet face.

There he was after only 5.5 hours of labour at 6:11am on Saturday, 4/26/2014, all 2780 grams and 48 cm of him.

After fifteen minutes my boyfriend cut the cord and took him to the other room in a pile of blankets. I delivered the placenta twenty minutes later and finally left the water after that. Samuel was then weighed, measured, dressed and breastfed for the first time thirty minutes after his arrival on this planet.

We left the birthing center at 9am as a small family of three.

The next day we gave him the name SAMUEL BRUNO. We love him very much.