Lou's Birth Story

G-Rated Version

Louis Marion Smaus was born at 3:29 AM on January 22nd, 2014 at BirthJoy Midwifery in Issaquah, Washington. It was Wednesday. He was a healthy boy weighing 8 lbs, 3 oz.

PG Version

After a couple days of inconsistent labor and three hours of hard pushing, the baby who would be named Louis Marion Smaus was born at 3:29 AM on January 22nd, 2014 at BirthJoy Midwifery in Issaquah, Washington. It was Wednesday. He was a healthy boy weighing 8 lbs, 3 oz.

PG-13 Version

Elana's water broke around 2:30 in the wee hours of Monday morning. She woke up with contractions and realized she'd leaked in the bed. Later that morning, getting into the shower, she leaked a puddle. The contractions were still far apart, so Matt went to work bedding and feeding the cows in the barn.

Elana proceeded to have contractions throughout the day. We were excited, but they did not progress. They came anywhere between 20 minutes and an hour+ apart, and often lasted for 2-3 minutes. They were inconsistent. We assumed things would pick up at night, but they did not.

The following morning Matt did not go to work, expecting things to shift. By mid-morning we began to feel discouraged. Throughout the day, the contractions continued but did not come closer together. They grew a bit stronger, and remained oddly long, but there was no clear pattern. We spoke to our doula, Elaine, and Cindi, who was standing in for our midwife. We had an appointment with the birth team at 2pm. We tracked the contractions, and I ran into town to pick up herbal supplements to kick labor into gear -- blue cocosh, black cocosh, and ginger.

Elana began positioning exercises in earnest, as the birth team's best guess was that the contractions were stalling because of an issue with the baby's position -- maybe it had swung around so it was facing forward rather than backwards. Elana crawled back and fourth on all fours with folded-up towels tied to her knees, complained when I put my backpack down and messed up the turnaround at the end of her crawling track. She layed on her side with her leg propped high. She hung upside down from the ceiling like a bat so the baby would recede from her pelvis, then executed a tidy front flip to quickly propel it back down head first oriented in the right direction. Just kidding.

Our doula recommended an acupuncturist, and we went to see David Lin in Bellevue. He told her she had poor circulation, and was surprised she had gotten pregnant as easily as she had. I was skeptical, but he was a nice guy. He stuck her full of needles and left the room. There she was, my little pin cushion, trying to relax on her side. I meditated in my chair. I snuck some prayers and blessings in with the meditation for good measure. I grew very present with Elana, the birthing process, and the baby. That was the value of the visit for me. And when he came back to withdraw the needles some 40+ minutes later, Elana was much more relaxed. He prescribed us herbs, and we mixed up a batch and El shot it down.

We proceeded on to the midwife appointment, picking up food from the deli at PCC. Cindi, Mallorie, and Karen met with us. They were a bit puzzled by the erratic contractions, especially since the baby, it turned out, was mostly in a good position. The bottom line was that the water had broken, and the risk of infection rises steadily once the water breaks, so the guideline is to recommend induction at the hospital after 48 hours. We were hours away from that deadline. Elana was very nervous. She cried a couple times -- she really didn't want it to go that way. I encouraged her to make peace with the possibility that things wouldn't go as we wanted them to go. I repeated Bryan Conant's words to me the night before that it is all about getting the mom and the baby home safely, all else is virtually insignificant compared to that. It put me at ease, and I felt grateful for medical science, as I was grateful, too, for the alternatives.

It is a fine line to walk between believing in the way we want things to be and being at peace with how they turn out.

Thinking a little bit of fussing couldn't hurt, we took the ribozo to the baby. Elana got down on all fours (without towels, poor knees). A ribozo is basically a big scarf that you draw around the pregnant belly and wiggle back and forth to loosen things and work the baby into the right position. I think that started things.

On the way home from the midwife appointment, I called Dave, my acupuncturist, and spoke to him about the birth. Above all else, he said, trust the midwives. They know what they are doing.

Then labor kicked into gear. Maybe it was the exercises, the herbs, the acupuncture, the ribozo, the encouragement, newfound faith, or maybe it was just time. Either way, that evening she started having more regular contractions, though they still didn't line up consistently with any of the patterns the books indicate. Then, a little after 8pm, she drank the first 2oz shot of castor oil blended into a protein-rich smoothie. Things may have been revving up, but suddenly they screeched out of the parking garage swerving onto the street. I called Elaine, our doula, and she was baffled by the contraction patterns, still, but when she heard Elana moaning in the background, she said, "Let's meet at the birth center, now."

Elana was having contractions right on top of each other, and they were strong enough now that she would moan deeply into them. I had told Elaine that I heard the first moans recognizable as "the moans the laboring women make in the youtube videos." They were serious, sensual, purposeful, necessary.

In fact, it was hard to get her into the car. Luckily, we had packed up when we'd gone to the acupuncturist, in case the baby had come while we were out. But I got Elana most of the way to the car and she ran waddling back into the house to go to the bathroom. The castor oil, of course, had kicked more than just labor into gear. And she was experiencing a ton of pain at this point. Eventually I got her into the back seat and told her to forget about the seatbelt. She was carrying around a big metal mixing bowl in case she vomited and she crouched over it in the back seat. It was sometime between 9 and 10 at night, and all the way to the birth center I tried to focus exclusively on the road. Country roads are dark, and I had the seat pulled far up to make space for Elana behind me, so my legs were cramped under the steering wheel. I have desperate nightmares sometimes where I'm trying to drive like this with no room to move my legs. Elana moaned and groaned in the back. I watched the road like a hawk.

She said the first five minutes seemed to take forever, then the last twenty minutes of the drive flew by. We were at the birth center, where Elaine was waiting for us. She checked for the baby's head and it was low -- her fingers didn't go all the way in. She called Cindi to come in right away.

Over the next hour both Mallorie and Karen arrived and integrated themselves neatly into the process. Elana's laboring was in full gear and, with expert coaching from Elaine, she was riding out the contractions with loud, deep moans. A couple times her voice became shrill and her bared teeth would open and she'd start to look panicked, and Elaine would coach her back down into a lower register. El would channel these deep moans up through her body from the bottom of her spine through her chest and throat. These kept her sensually engaged with the process -- a beast capably taking on beastly challenges. Elana used me to push against. I planted myself beside her and held her right hand against my chest and she would push against me with everything she had while her other arm waved around grabbing at things. She didn't want to hold anything with that arm, just wave it around and grab at things. This was to endure labor; Elaine kept telling her not to push because it wasn't time yet.

Cindi arrived and Elana started to push. She gritted her teeth and curled her body over the baby and pushed down and out. It was the wildest thing I've ever seen a human being do. She would squish her face up and growl and seethe and yell. This went on for three hours.

She moved into many different positions. She laid on her back. She crouched. She laid on her side. She squatted. She hung off my neck and squatted. She did all these things in the tub. She stood halfway between the bathroom and bed and pushed straight down toward the floor.

There was early progress and then it stalled. For a long while, the baby's head would come into view when she pushed, then recede when she let up. It was an inch forward, inch back kind of progress. And then she sat on the toilet, and progress was made. The head dropped permanently into view. She laid back down on the bed, and a birth assistant each grabbed a leg and cocked it back towards her body to spread her hips. She pushed. She was in so much pain but she pushed through it, out and down. The days of "relax and sink" were past, it was do or die. "Remember," I told her, "the enemy's gate is down."

I tell you, when that girl is determined, stay out of her way. A hobbit like her will deliver the ring to Mordor -- the only one that can do it -- dreaming of home all the way. That is the hobbit way when it comes to courage. She pushed and now progress was two inches forward, one step back. Fantastic. The head started to protrude more and more. It was blue. And then, suddenly, Elana gave a huge determined push (like a hundred she'd just given) and the head came out, and out, and out -- it was like the starship flying over in the opening scene of the original Star Wars -- this endless conical head and then the rest of the body flowed out in one endless long jiggly mass of enormous being that had somehow been inside of her. I caught the baby and brought it straight over to me, and held it against me for a moment, plucking any membranes I could see from the mouth and face, before placing it on Elana's chest. "What's the sex, Matt?" somebody prompted. I had forgotten even to look. I looked. "A boy," I exclaimed, and for Elana, "a boy!"

We hadn't finalized the name yet. That would take us another couple days. The little boy was pink, except for his long blue head, and healthy. His eyes were wide and searching, attentive to everything, scanning intently around, dark and flickering.

Elana held him against her. She cried. I cried. I couldn't believe it. This was the most magnificent thing I have experienced in my life.

R-Rated Version

Her water broke but for two days her contractions did not progress. Promise turned to discouragement turned darker, so on the second day we took action. She crawled around on all fours back-and-forth across the living room floor to drop the baby into place, growling at me when I foolishly placed my backpack in the turnaround at the end of her route. She was a rig hauling cargo, and maneuvered like one. Best to stay out of her way.

She laid on her side with her leg propped up on two pillows in the air, making space in her pelvis for the baby to descend. We called the baby's spirit down. I suggested we place her feet-first with legs apart in the gap between the driver and passenger seats in the car, then accelerate to a complete stop. Anything to get that baby moving.

We went to an acupuncturist, who diagnosed her as having poor circulation, and was surprised that we had conceived so rapidly. I wrote him off (after briefly considering slapping him with my nuts) and continued to nod congenially. He stuck Elana full of needles and left us. I meditated. I travelled into the nether realms. I circulated through the room, the universe, my body. I spoke to the resident spirits, the watchful spirits, the spirits that maybe weren't paying as much attention as they should be, and told them if they fucked this one up they'd have one human lifetime of hell delivered to them by my own astral, ass-kicking self. Mostly I centered myself, aligning the dropline in the center of my body with the pull of gravity and weighting myself down with a bellyful of heavy chi so that no matter what forces buffeted us I would come back to standing without effort, like a bop bag. Did you know that's what those are called? I just looked it up on google. It's such an innocuous way to describe a toy that young boys wail on to practice beating the shit out of things, which is way more fun than "bopping."

The acupuncturist came back into the room. My roots extended to the center of the earth. My feet were tigers and my thoughts with the dragons. I lived among the stoney islands of the sea and spray and amidst the mists of the sky. He took the needles out of her. She was so relaxed she was glowing. He stood in the center of his room in a perfect universe with tidy spirits holding sway over their small clean corner of the world. People have cold feet because a wise body knows exactly how much energy to assign to the extremities, and doesn't indulge them beyond that. Fools try to keep them warm. Nonetheless, the healer with his tiny needles designed for tiny foes prevailed. She arose refreshed.

We swished some foul-tasting herbs in a glass of warm water and Elana threw the concoction back. We were off through forest and field with flatbread and stew to warm us. We met the midwives among the great trees in the valley and they stood around their hissing brew assigning names to the shapes that arose in the steam and vanished. One spat into it and the saliva evoked a wicked schism from which a dark ember leapt and was gone. We drew blackness out, and drew spirits in. We placed upon Elana the warm cloth of the ribozo and drew it back and forth across her belly as if she were a lantern from which we might conjure a genie. I had only one wish, and I breathed it forward into the universe steady as a command.

We left the midwives, encouraged by their honesty. We had mere hours left before our window for natural birth passed, at which point Elana would surely find herself chained to a hospital gurney with tubes running into her veins, men in labcoats looming over her with rusted scalpels, the dead, dying, and interred insane wailing all around. To avoid that fate, we prayed, and I called upon the healer of Queen Anne.

The healer appeared before me in a dream. A slim, wavering figure with a clear voice. He said, simply, "Trust the midwives." I had looked to him for alternatives, but he gave me confirmation. I let go.

Soon she began to groan with the pleasure-pain of labor. It's so odd, she told me, <em>it hurts so much but I am so happy to feel it</em>. She imbibed the oil of the castor plant to encourage contractions, and the pain began to come on in steady waves. She would pace, sit, lean when it came on. She groaned, and then at one point the pain rose in pitch and a deep, resonant moan issued from her throat as an entreaty to the universe to <em>bring it on.</em> It was the sound that protects by giving, that conquers by absorbing, that gains ground by letting go.

And we were off again, back down to the great grove in the valley, where the midwives gathered to bring the soul of a child into the world. The soul moved inside her with a rising urgency as we traveled the dark roads from farm to town. Her body sprung, tensed, and released in response, every time. I was fixed on the journey, a courier charged with grave responsibility, watching for flickers at the edge of the headlights.

We pulled in among the trees and I walked with her hobbling into the home. The women came around. A great force entered the room, began to move beneath what we could see. Elana coursed with it. The midwives channeled it. I felt it, and stood by it. A rhythm set in, a mounting rhythm that can only be compared to sex. It builds towards a climax. But unlike sex, it has no need to be pleasant, because it does not ask you to respond to the urge, but brings the urge upon you whether you would have it or not. And at each onslaught, there is a choice to resist it and suffer or accept it and move. Movement is better because it sustains the possibility of release. And that's the whole progression -- one victory over suffering followed by another, each pain followed by a greater pain, like the testing of Job, until pain is magically transformed into something entirely different.

The pain built in Elana, and each time it began to turn to suffering she ingested it, transforming it alchemically to move beyond it. Labor progressed. The midwives held her and counted with her to push. When she pushed she would wrap herself entirely around the being at her center to squeeze it and compel it to go, to drop down, to exit -- a fantastic exit that is also, of course, an entry.

When the exit happened, it tore her nearly to the anus. She pushed the newly incarnated soul out into the world through the limits of her own flesh. That blows my mind, reminding me of samurai with the strength to commit sepuku, to take his own life with his own blade, for honor. But this is for life. It is a courage that most men know little about. Warriors know it, perhaps. It is what tests the mettle of women as battle tests the mettle of men.

When they sewed her up an hour or so later, I held the baby boy in my arms beside her. When the pain of the suturing got bad, she said, simply, "Ooh, poke, pokey, pokey-poke..." And with that she rode over the pain and on into the glorious future of motherhood, scarcely a look back. It was only later, when I told her how amazing she was, that she cried and said, "It was so hard. It's so amazing. It was so hard."

And that's life, I think, in a nutshell. So hard. Amazing. So hard. You don't get one without the other. And then we pass it on, because we decide it's worth it.