how to give birth, by laura hutton

Warning: Contains graphic language and may conjure up images disturbing to some readers.

Giving birth is a freakshow and you are the main attraction.

As my due date neared, I started getting increasingly apprehensive about “the big day.” For good reason. That baby is coming out one way or another, and at present, there are only two known ways for baby to emerge. While c-sections are increasingly common (around 30% of all births in the U.S.), I really didn’t want to have one…although it meant my va-jay-jay would be the scene straight out of a horror movie Hollywood couldn’t even imagine.

While this thought is scary, I knew it was going to happen. So I just prepared in advance as much as I could. We took a childbirth education class, and I made Frank go with me (much to his chagrin). I read everything imaginable about the stages of labor and delivery, although I could only get Frank to read the section about “how to deliver a baby at home.” Unfortunately this will probably never come in useful for him. I was calling and emailing my doula all the time telling her how freaked out I was getting. Then…as much as I could prepare, I knew I must plan for things to not go as planned. That’s why I said things like, “I would prefer not to have an epidural” as opposed to “I’m not having an epidural.” I didn’t want to say or believe anything definitively. And so, 24 hours into labor, I did get an epidural. (And that’s when I knew there was a God.)

As much as I could prepare in advance, and plan for my plan to go awry, what I wasn’t expecting to be anything but perfect was the actual moment of birth. Not to be all gloomy and sad, but sometimes bad things happen (and sometimes a lot worse things happen than what happened with us). When my doctor broke my water, it didn't come pouring out of me like normal. Instead it was this disgusting brown goo. It was thick meconium mixed with the amniotic fluid. No one explained to us this was a big deal. So when Audrey was born, they didn’t put her on my chest. No one exclaimed, “It’s a girl!” There were no happy cheers or tears of joy. Instead the room was silent. My baby was not breathing. My OB handed her off to a neonatal team who rushed her away. I can recall a nurse telling me, “she’s okay, they just need to clear her airways” – and that’s how I knew I had a girl. I said, “She’s a she? I have a girl?” but I didn’t smile or laugh because across the room I could see them putting a tube (tracheal suctioning?) down the throat of a tiny purple creature that I was horribly detached from for the first time in 40 weeks. Honestly, I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. It was terrifying and I wasn’t prepared for this at all. But after 2 days in the NICU, she was fine and got to go home with us. Phew! The moral of that story is to be prepared for everything to be different than what you imagine.

In fact, no more imagining.

But back to the freakshow. It’s about as freaky as imaginable.

So I was in labor for 30 hours. I labored for the first 12 at home, and the next 12 without an epidural, but with a pretty steady stream of narcotics. Then I got the epidural and slept until the freakshow began. I even slept through “transition” – the stage of labor when women without an epidural start screaming things like, “don’t ever think about touching me again,” and “I hate you.” Like snored through this part. So as I’m starting to come to, and they’re getting the room all set up, I announce, “This is like a fucking freakshow.” And the nurses really didn’t like that at all. One of them said, “no, this is the miracle of childbirth.” Another said, “oh, no, this is when you get to meet your baby.” Whatever crazies. This is when the freakshow begins.

 I’ve labored all day in this really nice, hotel-like room. Next thing I know, there’s medical equipment coming out of hidden compartments in the walls. The bottom half of the bed is removed and gigantic stirrups are hoisted into the air. A bucket with a red medical waste bag is revealed where the rest of the bed used to be. Handlebars pop up from the end of the bed, which now disappears somewhere just past my waist. A gigantic spotlight is rolled in and turned on. The room, however, remains strangely dim, so I know that the spotlight is really concentrated on a certain area of my lower body. Then the nurses put my legs up in the stirrups—since my legs are numb from the epidural, I can’t move them on my own. They wash my nether regions several times with some sort of solution (in my mind it was iodine, but I wasn’t really lucid so who knows), and then they have me do some practice pushing. I was really bad at the practice pushing. Later my nurse told me that everyone is bad at first. I'm not sure this is true, but it made me feel better. During my first set of practice pushes, I pooped. So then I got pretty upset (even though I know that practically everyone shits while pushing out a baby) and I was like, “I just did all that work just to shit? This sucks.” Then they cleaned me off again with the iodine solution and I pushed again. I still didn’t get it. The nurse and I were yelling at each other because I couldn’t reach the handlebars very well, and frankly, I was exhausted and didn’t feel like pushing, especially if all I was going to do was shit. [Side note: during pregnancy, I developed a severe case of de Quervain's Syndrome that was surgically corrected just a few weeks postpartum because I couldn't even pick up my baby, so holding onto handlebars was a feat in and of itself.]

Basically I really didn’t have a choice; the baby had to come out somehow. It was the worst feeling in the world: not wanting to do something but really not having a choice. I like choices. There was no choice here. The nurse watched my contractions on a monitor and told me when to push. Finally I figured out when my contractions were coming (it felt like a really strong urge to poo, and since I had already done that once, I figured there was no harm in trying to do it again). So I just pushed with all my might and low and behold, out popped Audrey’s head at like 50 mph. (A nurse later told me she had never seen anything like it.) My doctor was totally not prepared for that at all. In fact, they thought Audrey’s head was stuck and they were all kinda standing back, talking about doing a vacuum extraction, and the nurses were rushing to prepare for this. When they told me to push one more time, no one really thought I was going to push her out. I’ll tell you what, though: I sure as shit didn’t labor 30 hours, push for 45 minutes and literally shit in front of my boyfriend, doula, 3 nurses, and a student nurse to end up with a vacuum extraction, c-section, or anything other than pushing the baby out on my own.

And that’s how Audrey was born, at 4:24 a.m. on Tuesday, February 19.




Frank left immediately for the NICU. My doula went to find my parents and tell them what happened and bring them back to my room. The doctor and nurses finished up with me—which is another freakshow really, but less dramatic—and then I was left all alone. It was a terrible feeling. I felt incredibly proud and accomplished of having birthed a baby. But I also didn’t know whether or not I should rejoice and revel in my accomplishment. Not knowing if Audrey was okay was the most miserable feeling in the world. Not being able to walk (because of the epidural) made me feel stranded from her—like I had deserted her. So I did the only thing to do and sobbed and wailed for my own mom. It was 3 hours before they took me to see Audrey.

Pushing out a baby after 30 hours of labor was probably the hardest thing I’ll ever do. But motherhood is so rewarding and worth every ounce of pain, exhaustion and fear. I love Audrey so much, like I’ve never loved before. I feel like I was nobody before her. I vow to never forget the freakshow that is childbirth, but it pales in comparison to the love that is being a mother.

And that, friends, is how to give birth. xoxo lh.