Birth (Un)Medicalized: A Case Study
My birth begins at 3 a.m. when I wake with a rock-hard uterus that softens and then hardens again. I have been waking with such Braxton-Hicks contractions for days, at exactly this time, so at first I do not think anything about them. I drink a glass of milk, get back into bed, and then, when they continue, decide to take a bath, which has stopped stubborn Braxton-Hicks contractions in the past. I fill the tub with warm water and keep the light off. My daughter sleeps across the house. My husband snores from the other room. I ease myself in, my belly so large that it pokes out of the water like an island. The contractions tighten, and I breathe in and out, cringing sometimes from their strength. I cannot get comfortable in the tub. All is silent, and my silent discomfort encloses me. I listen to the static of the house, the house and the water a strange cocoon, neither comforting nor unsettling.
When the contractions do not abate, I get out. I dry myself and walk into the kitchen, the contractions still coming, not constant but stronger. Sometimes I grab the counter, arching my back and leaning in. I keep eyeing the clock, timing them. Five minutes apart. Then ten. Then two, then five, then nine again. Unnerving. Frustrating. I walk around the house. The contractions begin to burn, a deep ember filling my back and belly. I can’t think of anything during them, but I reach for a wall. “Is this it?” I wonder. I want to be sure, but I am not sure. It is only when they overtake me that I realize something is coming that I cannot stop.
At 5:30 I wake my husband. “I think I’m in labor,” I say, a hand on my aching, burning belly, my lower back aflame. They’ve suddenly found their pattern—five minutes apart, maybe shorter. I’ve stopped looking at the clock and have just begun to breathe.
The next thirty or so minutes are a strange film. My husband gets out of bed. “Okay. I’ll take a quick shower.”
“You don’t have time for a shower,” I say, knowing, somehow, that this is urgent. My husband calls the doula. He calls the friend who’s said she’ll watch our daughter. He scrambles around the house in his underwear, packing the last of the items in our hospital bag. The contractions come quicker. He calls the doula again.
“How long apart are they?” she asks.
“They were five,” I say. “Now it’s three. Maybe two,” and it is true. I am on my hands and knees in the bedroom, arching my back. I crawl toward the bed and kneel. I bite into the edge of the mattress. I clench the mattress and the blankets during the contractions. I tell myself to relax, like Gaskin wrote, though during the peak of the contractions I bite and press into the bed with a force that surprises me. I moan. I hardly made a noise during the birth of my daughter, but this time I cannot help it. I moan into the bed, into the night. My doula hears my moans on the phone, and tells me later that from the sound she knew I had already passed through the early and midstages of labor.
“We need to get to the hospital,” I say, almost pleading, though in between contractions I am thinking of my daughter. My friend is still a half hour away and I don’t want my daughter in the car with us, in the hospital with us, aware of my pain. I imagine her in the fluorescent lights of the waiting room, confused and scared. In short sentences, I tell my husband to call another friend who lives closer. He begins to panic, still in his underwear, still scrambling around. “I need help,” I say, as another contraction comes on, and I realize, I know, moaning again into the bed, that I am alone in this. Despite my carefully laid plans, despite my husband’s presence, no one is here for me. But the sensations are familiar, and I recognize that, too. I feel a pressure in my perineum that I recall from the birth of my daughter. “He’s coming,” I say. “Now.”
The contractions wrap around my belly, and I moan into the bed as a force pushes down. I feel the force of it meet resistance from bone, from pelvis, and my water breaks, drenching my legs and the floor. “He’s coming,” I say again, and I can sense the panic in my husband, my doula by now on speaker phone, talking to him, to us, though I am no longer paying attention. Two, maybe three more contractions, a push that I cannot stop. I feel the pressure, the something emerging, receding back in. I slip one leg out of my pants, and then the something emerging is fully emerging, and my husband kneels behind me, guiding the baby, more slippery than he expects, from my body to the floor.
I turn, and there my son is: still connected to me by umbilical cord, a whitish being, scrunched, wrinkled, with white goop and red streaks, miraculously alive in the world.
I scoop him up. I crawl into the bathroom, where I squat as the afterbirth slips from me. We debate what to do next—whether to try and drive to the hospital ourselves or call an ambulance—but despite the alarm I register on my husband’s face, I do not feel rushed or panicked. On the contrary, I feel completely fine.
This is an excerpt from the chapter “Birth (Un)Medicalized: A Case Study” taken from We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood by Jennifer Case, published by Trinity University Press; reprinted with permission.
Featured post photo by Aimee Vogelsang on Unsplash
About the Author
Jennifer Case teaches creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas. She also serves as an assistant nonfiction editor at Terrain.org and is the supervising editor of Arkana. She is the author of Sawbill, and her work has appeared in Orion, the Sycamore Review, and Fourth River. She lives in central Arkansas.
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