Day’s Sunrise

At the end of November 2007, the son I was pregnant with stopped moving at thirty-one weeks. It had been a healthy, normal pregnancy, and we had planned a homebirth out of state, in Maine, because of the hostile environment against homebirth in our home state of Illinois, but suddenly he was gone. We decided to go to Maine anyway and wait for me to go into labor naturally and proceed with our plan to birth him at home. The following is from the story of his actual birth, which happened two and a half weeks later, on December 17:

Our daughter Willa, my husband Rob and I head for the public library, just to get a change of scenery after spending the previous day indoors during the snowstorm. We get there around 3 PM, and I have a pretty hard contraction right before we leave the house. “Are you sure you want to go?” Rob asks worriedly, as I drop to the sofa and clench my knees as it hits. But I am sure. I want to keep going as long as I can, to distract myself and keep busy in case this isn’t the real thing. After Willa’s five-day labor extravaganza, I don’t want to admit this is labor until I am pushing the baby out. Also, I want the contractions to continue, to intensify, and I know that moving around will help. So we go to the library.

In the children’s room, I check my email. I am feeling a bit sick to my stomach and at one point run to the bathroom and have loose stools and quite a bit of pink streaked stuff. “This could be it,” I think. With Willa’s birth, my body voided everything right before labor got really active, and I’ve always believed this is what my body does, and that this might be the sign of actual labor again. Also, it’s about to get dark, and my body seems so attuned to sundown.

As I do my email, I have a contraction so strong that I can’t do anything during it but focus and make some low noises. Something tells me to check the time this time: it’s 3:38 PM. The clock on my computer says it’s ten minutes later when another one, quite hard to bear, hits me, and this time I have the desire to be in a more enclosed space. I slam my computer shut and go sit on a big pillow in the corner of the room. I am aware I’m making labor noises, real labor noises, in the library, and that these contractions are different, more urgent, than any I’ve had earlier. But I’m still partially afraid that this isn’t it, and I want to keep going about my business for as long as possible, as my midwife Donna suggested earlier: “Pay these warm-up contractions as little attention as possible,” she said. “Don’t spend any extra energy on them.” So even though I suspect I’m beginning active labor, and Rob is shooting me looks like “Are you crazy?,” I try to squeeze in one or two last emails.

Eight minutes later, another powerful contraction slams me, makes me stop typing mid-word, and then a milder one follows right after it. They are definitely getting longer, stronger, and closer together: the classic pattern, which I never had with Willa. It’s literally hard for me to believe, and I am choosing not to believe it. I’m still typing, but finally Rob convinces me we should get home. In the elevator ride down to the lobby, I have another contraction, and another one just as I’m about to get out of the car once we’re back home.

Once home, I call Donna. “I’m pretty sure I’m in labor,” I tell her, and report on what happened at the library. “Are you home now?” she asks. “Do you want me to come?” “Yes,” I say. Things are going to pick up from here, I can tell. I am finally letting myself believe it. It’s happening. And I call our doula Ava, whose own child was stillborn, and tell her the same. “I can be there in an hour, maybe forty minutes,” she says. Good. I wish it was sooner.

I hobble around the house looking for a place I want to labor, while ordering everyone else around: I’m going to pack a bag for Willa, and I want Rob to pack dinner for Willa and have my mother-in-law take her up to the bed & breakfast where she is staying, and I want Rob to drive them. I’m very, very clear, that sharp clarity one gets in labor. I want Rob to drive, because the roads are really bad and my mother-in-law has no car seat. I want Willa to go up for a couple hours and come back. I want her to sleep in our house tonight. I want to keep moving, keep the contractions hard, keep the labor going forward. And in between contractions I feel fine, though during them I can’t do anything other than manage them with low noise, stillness, and concentration, as I and all women know to do instinctually, and as I had much practice with during Willa’s labor. It’s coming back to me.

While my family is gone, I call my friend Rachel in New York City and tell her I’m in labor. I want her to know what’s happening and I also want the company while Rob is gone and I am alone and in labor. She was my doula with Willa, and until everyone gets to the house, she is my long-distance doula now. In the brief time we’re on the phone, I have two strong contractions, and make my deep moaning noises. After the second, I ask her how far apart they are. “I think five minutes,” she says. “These are hard, huh? They sound good!” Rob gets back and I yell down to him to go start filling up the birthing tub, and hang up with Rachel just as another contraction comes on.

Donna arrives during another one. She unloads all her supplies and gets her equipment ready and calls Anna, the backup midwife from Mount Desert Island, who is an hour away. “I already called her on my way over,” Donna says, “but now I’ll tell her to come for sure.” I hear her tell Anna my contractions are five minutes apart and this is the beginning of active labor. She also says, “I think your baby’s birthday might be December 17th”—today. Wow. Ava arrives, too, and I have a couple more contractions where I sit on the couch in the dark, cozy little den room and grasp her knee. She returns the knee-squeeze and is simply with me, responsive and open. No one tells me to do anything other than what I am doing. Everyone follows my lead.

What I want is to get into the water, which I know from Willa’s birth offers immense physical relief. While it gets filled, I go to the bathroom, which brings on a terribly painful contraction and although I’ve closed the door and the water is gushing into the tub in the living room, I feebly call out for help. I’m feeling a lot of pressure in both my back and front, and it sort of feels like I need to have a bowel movement, but when I try I feel like I might push the baby out that way. Again I don’t believe it: I can’t be that close. When Donna finally hears me and comes in, I tell her about this sensation and expect her to say, Oh yeah, that’s what it feels like to be in labor, lots of pressure!, but instead she takes me seriously. She seems to think I could push the baby out already if I want to. “No, I’m not ready for that,” I tell her. “I want to get in the tub.” She tells me, “These contractions are going to be pretty unremitting. But you’re going to have some control over this. When you’re ready, I think you’re going to be able to push your baby out gently.”

I get into the tub. The contractions are so much easier in the tub—smoother, subtler—but I am also feeling something extra with them now: I can feel myself opening, feel how close the baby could be to coming out. I need to pee again and want to get out of the tub to do this. Even though I know it will be painful—because I know it will be painful–I feel like getting out of the tub will get me that much closer to having the baby. So I go, stepping slowly, dripping wet and with a towel thrown over me, through the kitchen and the den to the small bathroom, with Donna right beside me. It’s incredibly difficult: being out of the tub brings all the discomfort back, plus makes my body feel that much heavier after feeling so light in the water. I am stooped over and pretty miserable. I have a contraction on the way to the bathroom and another on the way back and they are brutal, slamming. I think, I don’t know if I can go through hours more of this. On the way back to the tub I am leaning on Donna with all my weight and pleading, “Please, please, please, just let me get back in the tub before I have another contraction.” When I get another one right before I can step into the tub I grab her by the elbows and wail, pushing my head hard into her chest. I am very close, closer than I can believe, still. It’s probably about 5:45 PM, and I’ve only been in labor for a couple of hours, and it’s only been really hard for one.

I do finally make it back into the tub. Donna tells me I can reach down and feel for the baby if I want to, if that’s not too much information. I resist, and don’t at first, but then I do, and feel something smooth and round that does not feel like a head. But whatever it is, it’s right there, and I feel how soft and open I am. The contractions are coming with some burning now, tons of pressure, that splitting-apart feeling, and my sounds are getting higher during them. There is little break between the contractions, but it feels good to push gently, to release, in the moments between the pain. With one hard push I feel something burst and the tub fills with blood—my water bag has broken. Immediately, I am sacked with lots of pressure, and I take a moment between contractions to cry out, partly from the pain and mostly from anguish of what is about to come. Donna sees that the baby is crowning and offers to go around behind me and hold him in back of me so I can take a moment after he is born to prepare myself and then tell her when I’m ready to see him so she can pass him forward to me. “Ok,” I say. I’m ready. I call to my baby, call him honeybunch and sweetheart and other things I can’t remember, and tell him and myself it’s ok, it’s ok, he can come now. And he does. It is 6:08 PM, December 17, 2007, and our son Day has come.
*
After a few moments, Donna brings him around to me, and there he is: a still and strange but recognizably human boy baby. I cry softly as I cradle him in one arm, and all of a sudden Rob begins to weep. He cries harder and harder, shaking, leaning over the side of the tub. Once or twice he reaches out with tentative fingers to try and touch Day and almost can’t, he is so overcome.

In the forgiving dim light of the wintery dusk, it’s hard to get a good luck at our son, which is a good thing, in a way. He is deep red, and a large piece skin on his torso is beginning to peel away. His head is malformed from the fact that his skull bones were so soft as he passed through the birth canal, so he has a weird, wavy, extended cranium, like a little alien. He has a lot of vernix, and he looks blurred under the waxy whiteness of it. But otherwise he looks pretty good, and very sweet. He is small but not tiny, about the size of the preemie babies one sees. His little tongue is sticking out slightly, his nose is defined and upturned, his hands and feet are perfect, and he has a calmness to him, with his knees bent gently in fetal position and his arms hanging limply at his sides. In the water, at least, he looks peaceful.
*
Afterwards, the atmosphere is serene and not as grief-stricken as I’d expected. I’d envisioned myself prone on the floor, weeping hysterically over the still little body. But I don’t do this at all. Instead, I smile at him and lie back myself on a sofa, tired and proud of what I’ve done to birth him. I am pleased for the gentle attention he receives. This is my baby, he is here, I birthed him as well as I could have hoped for, and he is dead. It feels true, and inevitable.
*
I decide I want Willa to come back home and see the baby. Rob goes to fetch her, and she comes back already dressed in her pajamas and ready for bed. She is totally wonderful with the baby: curious but understanding, open-hearted and happy to see him, but also gentle and quiet, reverent. She wants to hold him a bit, and we take some photos of the two of them together. But she can see he’s not moving; she can sense a bit better, I think and hope, what dead means. She says goodbye to her brother and goes up to bed.
*
While Rob puts Willa to sleep upstairs, Donna, Anna, Ava and I examine the placenta in the white plastic mixing bowl, and then Day himself. Overall, there is nothing we can see about him that tells us why he stopped living. Like Willa, Day has a thin little rosebud mouth and button nose and it seems that they would have looked alike.
*
After awhile, touching Day is doing visible damage to his little body, which seems to be starting to decompose as we sit there with him. I want to remember him looking as good as possible, so Rob and I talk and decide we are ready to call Katie at the funeral home.
After our baby is gone from the house, Ava, Donna, Anna, Rob and I sit around the living room for a long time, talking about things both deeply serious and sad and things light and hopeful. Considering what has just happened, what is happening, the mood is surprisingly bright and sweet. We are able to laugh and joke around, and Rob has fixed us each a plate of pasta, which we eat while everyone sits with us.
*
Eventually everyone leaves and Rob and I finish eating our dinner and go up to bed at our regular bedtime. How peculiar to go into labor in late afternoon at a public library, come home, have a stillbirth, eat dinner and go to bed. Such little disturbance in the fabric of tie has happened with this death. The world feels still and holy and normal and sad all at once. I am no longer pregnant; I am postpartum; I had my baby; my baby is gone. He does not sleep with us in our bed this or any other night. I do not nurse him. But I met him, I saw him, I held him. Our bed feels at once empty of our little boy and perfectly normal, just Rob and I as it has been for a long time now. I don’t experience a deep void, a black hole, the way I’d expected I’d might. Our lives are the same and our lives are not the same at all.

In bed, Rob and I stare at each other and hold hands, blinking in the strange reality of it all, until we fall asleep. During this first night I wake a good deal, seemingly on newborn schedule: at 2 AM, at 6 AM, but otherwise I sleep relatively well, considering what has happened. And I am awake in time to see, out our bedroom window, a beautiful sunrise over the harbor: Day’s sunrise.

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Posted by Arielle Greenberg · Filed Under Homebirth Stories 

About the Author

Arielle Greenberg
Arielle Greenberg is the author of My Kafka Century (Action Books, 2005) and Given (Verse, 2002) and the chapbook Farther Down: Songs from the Allergy Trials (New Michigan, 2003). She is an Assistant Professor in the poetry program at Columbia College Chicago and lives in Evanston, IL with her family.

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