it's the small things: waiting for Declan

The journey to bring our second-born child earthside has been anything but quick with a year of unexplained infertility and back-to-back miscarriages, so a two-week victory lap just seemed par for the course-- an ironic twist to my ceaseless prayers for my pregnancy to continue each week. I anticipated that this baby would come after his due date like his older sister, but as 40 weeks inched closer and closer, I began having contractions almost daily and thought he might actually mind the clock, especially after my midwife confirmed that I was already four centimeters dilated at my 39-week appointment.

So two days before my due date, I stopped working and began hibernating. For the next 15 days I paced my neighborhood and/or Target aisles for miles, climbed stairs for half an hour at a time, drank 60 to 100 ounces of water daily, slammed protein and fiber-filled food continuously, took naps, planted the front garden-beds, passed all of the late-term prenatal tests, almost drank a castor oil smoothie (but chickened out), and tried to inexplicably connect with my cervix, repeating "open, open, open" over and over in my head.

Labor symptoms came and went but eventually stopped altogether. Baby's eviction by Pitocin was scheduled for May 19th, exactly 42 weeks.

But on the morning of May 18th I woke up anxiously, staring at my belly as I sat up. Somehow it looked smaller. Was my fluid low? My mother's intuition was waving red flags, sending up smoke signals, and blaring loud sirens even though the baby kicked and jabbed with as much gusto as ever. I knew it was time. I called my midwives and asked to move up my induction. Chris and I casually packed up, I curled my hair, reviewed the Daniel Tiger episode about what to expect when mom has a baby with Mary Allison, ate an early lunch and ice-cream cone at Chick-fil-a, and waltzed right into the labor and delivery unit at 11am, just as scheduled.

Soon my midwife, Yelena, and nurse, Esta, joined us in room 611 and we discussed how to nudge my body into labor while hopefully avoiding enormous needles, IVs, drugs, and surgery. Because I was (still) four centimeters dilated and had given birth before, we decided to break my water-- my last shot to avoid Pitocin. Then we would wait.

So Yelena tried to break my water... but no water came. For several minutes we waited for the signature gush of fluid that would never come. Eventually a teaspoon of amniotic fluid trickled out, she estimated. Surprised, she looked back at my charts and confirmed that my fluid levels measured perfectly just two days before. Remember those alarm bells that greeted me earlier that morning? Mother's intuition is spot on.

Thankfully the baby's heart was still thumping right along and within minutes of my "water-breaking" I began having contractions three minutes apart. I had had so many contractions over the previous two weeks that I was basically unimpressed and might not have even noticed them except that they registered on the squiggly-line machine. So I put on the bright yellow hospital tube socks with the non-slip grippies on the bottom and began my march around the L&D wing occasionally passing by a room filled with a women shouting obscenities, or one with newborn baby cries.

After an hour or so of pacing the halls, my back labor was in full swing so we returned to my room where I knelt silently over a birthing ball, riding the waves of intensity and lightening until my legs shook.

I remembered this deep, trembling throb that rattles your mind almost more than your body from my first labor. I hoped the hot water of the bath would weaken the pain enough to refocus my mind and prepare myself for the greater pain ahead. I settled in and repeated the same short prayer that I meditated on throughout my pregnancy: "Let me remember my child-- the one for whom I suffer, the one for whom I wait, the one I already love."

As I kept my baby boy in the center of my mind, my thoughts also wondered back to my miscarriages, wishing the temporal, physical pain of labor could have replaced the far deeper suffering of grief and loss. In some bizarre hormonal haze, this ache made concrete the last 25 months it took to get to this point. To get to birth.

The transition from (the relatively) reasonable pain level to unbearable was much quicker than my labor with Mary Allison, and right behind it came the urge to push-- irresistible and immutable. After a couple of pushes in the tub, I crossed the hallway back to my room to meet my long-awaited son.

I'm not sure how I ended up giving birth on my feet. The position was impulsive and visceral. I rooted my feet into the ground, gripped Chris' hands, and waited for each surge to bring my baby forward.

Before his body was even born, he started screaming with his head lodged between my legs bringing a sigh of laughter into the room. Even I remember smiling. With one last push he came barreling out-- loud, huge, and red.

Finally. No more waiting.