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The Birth of Isaiah Justice…two years later. #sixthkid

For any new readers, there are some things you should know. This is my third birth. My second is blogged here. If you’re looking for a beautiful, heart wrenching, redemptive birth story, you should head there. My first birth was a traumatic cesarean that I never blogged about at the time. It’s on my list to do that as a way to further process it and take ownership back…but that’s for another time. This post is for IJ, Isaiah Justice, whose birth–and I say this with complete sincerity–was an absolute shit show from start to finish. Literally.

The next thing you need to know is that I am a 4 on the enneagram. Aesthetic is my jam and pretty things make my heart sing, and as a photographer pretty light is always the goal. After conquering my VBAC in a hospital with Aurora’s birth, I knew I did not want to ever again birth in a hospital unless is was medically necessary. I also knew I could not give birth in my dumpster fire, cluttered af house with kids coming and asking me for snacks in between contractions. So when we got completely surprised by IJ’s pregnancy, I started looking for alternatives and found a local birth center. It took literally three minutes of browsing the website to know I wanted to birth there. It was stunning and peaceful and I could see myself having my baby in one of the gorgeous beds or having a water birth in one of the beautiful tubs with light streaming in through the giant windows in every room. In reality, I roared IJ into existence in the middle of the night on a blue plastic stool on the bathroom floor three feet from the toilet, and it straight up looked like a scene from Dexter. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

https://vimeo.com/412597416/a19409490e

I knew from before I ever even got pregnant the first time that two things were very likely to be true of my births: I would go late, and I would have big babies. That is just how it goes for women in my family. Our first child confirmed all of that, making her very stubborn entrance at exactly 42 weeks after 48 hours of labor and tipping the scale at 9 lb 12 oz. That precedent is also the reason our second birth almost happened in our Prius at 39 weeks because labor was just eight hours and we actually couldn’t believe it was happening. So I had absolutely no idea what this time would bring. Any provider or seasoned momma will tell you: third births are wild cards. My own midwife told me time and time again. I thought it’d be wild in a “even earlier than last time” kind of way. No, no, friends. That was never IJ’s plan.

He was in it for the long haul. Pretty sure he planned to graduate high school from my uterus. And to her credit, my uterus tried real hard to serve him his eviction notice. I had three full weeks of prodromal labor. We are talking 8-10 hour stretches of contractions day after day. So many times I went to bed at night thinking I was getting in an early labor nap, only to wake up the next morning with it having completely stalled out. His due date came and went. I had eight acupuncture appointments and three sweeps to try and get things going–on top of literally every trick and old wives tale you’ve ever heard–all to no avail. Baby watch started trending on IG which was both hilarious and absurd, but also a good distraction from my mounting anxiety. If he didn’t come by 42 weeks, my midwife was required to transfer me to the hospital. I was freaking desperate.

And so at 41 weeks my midwife sent me for a postdates ultrasound to check my fluid levels with the plan to break my water on Thursday–three days before the 42 week mark. I called the women’s imaging center to make my appointment, an appointment I had with my first late baby as well, and the receptionist put me on hold to go check and see if they offered that service–as if I’m the first woman to ever go postdates. She returned only to affirm what I already knew, yes they do postdate ultrasounds. “Sorry I had to check, we’ve just never had someone that pregnant come in before.” Face. Palm. I should have canceled then, but it only got better. At the actual ultrasound, the technician tried to correct my due date, telling me based on baby’s size today and at my 20 week check, I was 42 weeks, not 41, and I should be transferred to the hospital and induced immediately. Now I have not had any ultrasound technician training, but I have carried three babies full term and done a plethora of researching in order to advocate for myself and my baby. And so I know, without a shadow of a doubt that due dates are NOT estimated based on baby’s size beyond the first 8-10 weeks because after that babies’ sizes can greatly differ as strangely enough babies come in all different sizes! I did not have the patience or grace to offer any of that information in a kind way so I just kept my mouth shut. I very much wanted to inform her that the magic number she wanted to move my due date to would mean I had an immaculate conception while on a very celibate 10 day (non)vacation solo-parenting with my five kids and very much without my husband, aka the father of my child. (FYI: that kind of terribly stressful spring break idea will absolutely delay your cycle and could very likely result in a very surprising pregnancy. Trust me.)

Just a little PSA here, if you encounter an incredibly pregnant woman who is clearly willing her labor to start and you’re about to offer her anything other than sympathy, encouragement, a coffee, or a foot rub, stop and rethink your approach. She doesn’t need to be reminded that she could have been induced by now. She doesn’t need to hear about your sister’s ex-boyfriend’s second wife’s super scary birth. Just smile, wish her luck, and move along. I nodded and smiled and got the hell out of that office, sure that one way or another, by Thursday I’d be in labor. Wednesday night I booked a babysitter and Liam and I went to a boujee theater and watched a movie in recliners while being served a three course meal and an awesome glass of wine. (Coincidentally, that was our only solo date of 2020.) Thursday morning I woke up to a text from my midwife pushing our appointment from 8 to noon because obviously one more woman got to have her baby before me. So we took the morning slow, and grabbed brunch. When we got to the birth center, we realized the awesome ultrasound office had never sent over my report. My midwife called them to try to have it read to her but they insisted on faxing it like this was 1993. We waited forever, called over and over again, never got the fax, but finally they read her the report and told her my fluid level was “low”. She couldn’t get the actual number out of them, and so she wasn’t comfortable breaking my water.

Defeated was an understatement. We opted to go for the very last resort that I never wanted to try: castor oil, followed by black and blue cohosh. For those who don’t know, and putting this in as pretty terms as possible, castor oil is a diuretic. When drunk it causes the rapid and rather violent elimination of everything in your stomach. The cramps that accompany that are also known to stimulate uterine contractions and often can get labor going. But it also gets a lot of other shit going. Also if you’ve grown and birthed a couple of ginormous babies maybe you can appreciate my hesitancy of this option bc the hemmi-situation was already at DEFCON-1 and the thought of aggravating it any further was terrifying. But I needed this baby to get moving.

So as it was already dinnertime by this point, rather than try to figure out midnight child care, we decided to get one more night of rest and start the homeopathic induction cocktails in the morning. (Coincidentally, that was also my last full night of sleep in 2020.) I got my three hourly doses down by 11 AM the next morning before the shit storm started. Contractions immediately came with it, and I started the cohosh as well. Around 2 PM my midwife called to inform me that she had finally gotten the fax and that the radiologist was off his rocker because my fluid levels were great. “Come on in, and let’s break your water!” White hot rage filled me and my already burning bowels, and I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so murdery in my life. I told her as soon as I was no longer glued to the toilet we’d be right over, but the birth center was 30-60 minutes away and “shitting myself in the car” was not part of the birth story I wanted, Depends or not. I could at least maintain that shred of dignity. The contractions ramped up around 3:00. Liam dropped the little kids with the neighbors and left to take the big boys to a friend’s house. I bounced on the ball begging my digestive system to cease.

He got back; contractions were 3-5 minutes apart, and I didn’t want to risk traffic getting any worse on a Friday at rush hour, so I put the Depends on just in case, and we started the drive. It was bumper to bumper and took the whole 60 minutes, but very very prayerfully we made it without incident–baby or otherwise. We got there around 7:00 PM, and contractions were about every 1-2 minutes by that point. So we got settled in, and my midwife checked me. I was still just at 3 cm, where I had been for weeks. She broke my water and it was absolutely the most anticlimactic thing ever. The tiniest trickle. But I felt good. We had done it. The kids were settled where they needed to be (which is a constant source of anxiety when you’re at the end of your pregnancy and you don’t have any immediate family within 1000 miles); we had made it to the birth center; we had active labor going before our 42 week deadline. All that I had to think about and do was what I had been wishing for for weeks: to labor this baby down and out and find out who had been hibernating in there for almost 10 months!

I think I made it maybe thirty minutes at the center before having another episode–the castor oil was not done with me yet. But I was still on a total labor high, blaming my midwife and her crunchy methods for my shitty misfortune, joking with my doula, and dancing it out to Lizzo with Liam. Another awesome point of that birth-center-style: FOOD! I knew I was still in the earlier stages of active labor and I needed to feed and fuel my entirely emptied body now before I got too much farther and the thought of food was repulsive. So naturally I did what any basic birthing mother would do between contractions: I put in a Door Dash order for Moe’s. We don’t live near one, and nothing sounded better in that moment than queso. So we ate and we bounced and we danced and we moved. I oiled up often, and crunched on at least half a bag of that good ice from CFA that we had stored in the freezer the day before. I moved at my own will, changing positions when it felt right, taking suggestions and support from my doula and my midwife, Liam always by my side to hold me up or apply pressure or just make me laugh as he does best. It was exactly what I wanted my labor to be: a beautiful natural event. Was it hard and painful? Hell yes. But the atmosphere was calm and peaceful and supportive. I felt completely in control of my body and my birth. That was something I had never experienced with my previous two births. No one was delivering me my baby. I was bringing him into the world with some awesome and empowering help. The only thing that could have made it better was if the castor oil would have finally run its course a little quicker. But we can’t have it all right?

Now all that peace and calm had a very precise and definitive end, and that moment was called transition. But rule number one of Birth Club: you can never tell a birthing woman in transition that she is in transition, no matter how many times she has experienced transition before. For me and my births, as well as every birth I’ve had the honor to witness or document, it looks the exact same: a mother who was previously in control hits an invisible brick wall. It is all too much all at once and she utters the famous four words “I can’t do it!” Any nurse, doula, midwife, OB, or seasoned momma will tell you when they see and hear that sequence of events to get the blankets warm because baby is about to be here. Up to that point I had been “saving the tub for later.” In my head I really wanted to try and have a water birth–something I hadn’t had the option of with my previous births–and I didn’t want to be getting in and out. I wanted to get in at the end and finish my birth there. But by that point we were four hours in, I had just been checked and was at a 6 and I needed a change. So to the tub I went. Turns out my timing was a tad bit off because as soon as I got in the water transition hit. I gave it maybe 15 minutes but having completely lost the ability to recognize transition in that moment I was convinced the demonic device at play ruining my birth was definitely the beautiful birth tub and they needed to get me out of that thing ASAP.

They helped me out and I decided the safest place at that point was the toilet so I sat down and breathed through another few contractions there. But my midwife and doula suspected babe’s head was getting caught on my pubic bone which was preventing him from dropping down as much as we had expected by then. They wanted to do some stretch with me that I have completely forgotten the name of but which I can only describe as a beached whale trying to be a graceful mermaid. It involved laying down on my side on the bed with the peanut ball between my legs–feeling very much the beached whale–and then they swept my legs back and up behind me–this would be the mermaid part but in reality felt very much like some yoga that I was unequipped for. Whatever the hell it was, it was causing me to make sounds that I’m fairly sure a beached whale would make if contorted that way, and then I felt an immediate pressure. But again, in my not entirely coherent state of mind, it could not possibly be birth because I was only at a 6, so it of course had to be another attack of the castor oil from hell. I told them I needed to be back on the toilet right that second because “I am not shitting on this beautiful bed.”

No sooner had I sat down on the toilet then I felt the tell tale sign and yelled, “It’s not poop! It’s the ring of fire! I need to push! I don’t want to have a baby on the toilet!” My midwife reached down to check saying, “But you were just at a six–YUP! That’s the head. We’re crowning! Get me the birthing stool!” And so the bright blue birthing stool got rushed over on the beautiful white penny tile without time for even a chucks pad, and after a few minutes, a few pushes and the loudest F-bomb of my life, I pushed his head out at which point my midwife said very calmly but very forcefully, “Stop pushing.” I’m sorry what?? I didn’t have the leverage to see over the mountain of belly and immediately started to panic but a few flicks of her wrist and she said “Ok, go!” and in one more push he–with all the very copious amounts of fluid–was out and on my chest at 11:35 PM. Turns out his cord had been wrapped around his neck three times. She loosened two loops when she told me to stop, and then got the third off when he came out. From “Get me off the toilet” to baby in my arms, it was four minutes. It hadn’t even been an hour since she had measured me at 6 cm. Third births are WILD.

I, of course, was in my usual 8-chin overwhelming, uncontrollable sobs. He was screaming his head off–he gets it from his momma–which was my only reassurance that he was perfectly fine against his absolute purpleness thanks to the speed with which he was evicted. I think my midwife saw some of the lingering panic in my eyes and she got right up face to face with me and said, “You did it. He is perfect. He is healthy. He is here.” And it was exactly the reassurance I needed. I calmed down. We sat and snuggled while waiting for the afterbirth. I joked that in that whole freaking beautiful room, of course I would give birth on the bathroom floor. The placenta came, everything looked great. Liam clamped his cord and then I handed him over while my sweet nurse and doula helped me get cleaned up since in that time of sweet cuddly bliss my son had decided to take a nice meconium shit all over me. I tried to tell you: shit storm from beginning to end this birth was. Then to the bed I went. We talked over his name while my midwife stitched me up–his head was 15 inches around: yes, I’ll take your sympathy. We had been toying around with the name Isaiah Justice for a few weeks, and liked it even more when we were reminded my great-grandfather’s name was IJ. My only hesitancy was that I had always wanted to use my maiden name, Justice, as a first name. But Liam never got on board, and so we agreed it’d take middle name.

I put him back on my chest and he found a b-line to the boob and latched right on. We snuggled more and nursed a bit. Then came the fun part: all his measurements. I was so excited to see the numbers on this giant baby of mine. We stretched him first: 23.5 inches–average length of a three month old, no big deal. We’ve already covered his big ol’ noggin. So then they put him in the sling to get weighed, and she says 9 pounds 14 ounces! Now some mothers would simply say “Holy cow! I did that!” But no, not me. My first thought was, “Well that was definitely 2 ounces of meconium he shit on me, so I’m claiming a ten pound baby!” My extraness knows no bounds, y’all. He got passed around between the midwife, our doula, and our kick-ass photographer. The nurse moved like a ninja cleaning up the whole Dexter scene and the rest of the room, and then everyone but her said farewell. We rested for a few hours while she checked in a few times, and then just a few hours after having a baby, we were on our way home with him. Such a wild feeling.

As I finish writing this, it’s now been two years since that miraculous night. I can’t believe how fresh most of the details still are. Birth is such an intensely powerful experience, and it stays with us forever. I feel in awe of the experiences I’ve had, all so different and individual to themselves. And now we’re preparing for another: a home birth this time–Lord can only hope I won’t need until the third birthday to blog it. Cross your fingers y’all. Until next time!

Kickass photography and video by Sarah Elizabeth Photography

Incredible Doula: Rachel Carbonneau, Family Ways Birth & Postpartum Support

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