Where do babies come from?
A birth story
I rest my hand on my son’s back as he sleeps, his small torso pressed up against mine, his right arm draped over my breast, his face pressed into the sheet of the bed beside me. I feel the flutter of his heart, which beats like a tiny bird learning to use its wings.
He is 100 days old now and we are navigating the impossible terrain of attempting to find structure and routine in the squalor of the life of an infant. My paid leave is over, and I am shocked at how brief and paltry twelve weeks feels now that I have reached its end.
Is it really possible that just three months ago this being was still inside of me, still waiting for oxygen, waiting to break free?
Every baby begins with an idea—what would it look like to mix my DNA with yours?
The timing of conception, the stages of pregnancy, and the reality of birth is so much more nuanced and heartwrenching than our romanticized Hollywood stories.
I am holding gently the memory of his birth as the fine details blur together much the way dreams do, trying to retain the shape of the 36 hours that transpired between my water breaking and his birth.
I found out the week before my due date that I was Group B Strep or “GBS” positive, a fairly common bacterial infection that colonizes about one third of pregnant woman. While it is almost completely harmless when treated with antiobiotics during labor, it can also lead to acute complications for baby before birth. This was the first truly “bad news” I’d received in 37 weeks of pregnancy. I prayed that my labor would begin without my water breaking to protect the baby from the worst-case disease and to protect my hopes for my birth experience.
I planned to give birth at the Connecticut Birth Center, a facility separate from the hospital, and had become attached to my idea of a perfect birth: unmedicated and natural, collaborative and easy. I’d listened to the Bradley method birthing book early in the Camino and had been practicing all its recommended exercises: squats, cross-legged sitting, and kegels. I prayed for a water birth in the birth center’s glorious jacuzzi-sized birthing tub. But with GBS, if I wasn’t in a clear active labor contraction pattern (one-minute contractions less than five minutes apart) within eight hours of my water breaking, I would risk out of the birth center and have to give birth in the hospital.
At the same time that I’d become attached to the idea of a natural labor, I’d also vilified the medicalize hospital birth. A C-section baby of a C-section baby (having a baby with another C-section baby), the genetic interpretation of my circumstance made it seem highly unlikely that I could do anything but give birth by C-section. Add to that the fact that one third of American babies are delivered by C-section and the odds seemed greater still. And yet I longed to escape that pattern. I convinced myself that if I was relaxed enough and prepared enough, I could give birth naturally.
When my water broke at 8am on the morning of Thursday, May 26—three days before my due date—it was almost exactly like what you see in the movies. I was sitting down to meditate when—kasploosh, a water balloon popped. I ran to the bathroom to contain the damage and stood there, helpless, as amniotic fluid dripped down my legs like rain down a window pane. It just kept coming. My water breaking started the clock on my eight hours, and I hadn’t had even one contraction yet. The hospital birth seemed inevitable. I started to cry.
Andy came in and pulled me in for a long hug.
“It’s okay, my love,” he whispered. “I know it’s not what we wanted. But it will be okay,”
“I know,” I moaned back quietly through my tears. “I’m just so disappointed.”
GBS protocol requires IV antibiotics immediately after water breaks to protect the baby from the worst-case scenario, so we went first to the birth center for the IV, then to my accupuncturist in the hopes of kickstarting contractions. A few lazy contractions started to come through, but none were especially serious and their timing wasn’t consistent. By 4pm, it was time for another visit to the birth center. By this time, I also had small flecks of meconium (baby’s poop plug) in my amniotic fluid—another risk factor—so a hospital birth was inevitable. Still without contractions, I went home and ate some dinner. My doula arrived and I lay on my bed at home trying to relax to see if that would let the contractions arrive. Nothing but a few strays. At 8pm, we headed to the hospital.
We had been warned that labor and delivery was busy and we might need to wait in triage, but a friendly nurse named Caitlin greeted us when we arrived and showed us directly to the birthing suite. Though there was only a hospital bed instead of the comfy queen bed l would have enjoyed at the birth center, there was still a luxurious birthing tub. I silently held out hope for a natural water birth.
Nurse Caitlin was attentive and kind. She launched right into questions, asking us about our birth plan, committed to helping us honor the preferences we’d hoped for at the birth center. After we’d gotten settled and taken care of the necessary paperwork she asked, “Did you really walk 500 miles?”
I smiled. “Yep. Across all of northern Spain.”
“That’s incredible!” She said, amazed. “When I first saw that number, I thought it was a typo,” she explained. “Like, did she walk 50 miles? But then I saw the countdown over all those prenatal visits and I was like, ‘wow, it really was 500.’”
She gestured to both Andy and me, with a question. “So were you both big hikers before you did this hike, or…?”
Andy understood that she thought we had done the walk together.
“Oh, I didn’t do it,” he said. “She did.”
Caitlin looked at me, incredulous.
“You walked 500 miles alone?”
I nodded.
“Well, I walked with different people along the way,” I said. “But yes. Mostly alone.”
“Wow…” she said, almost at a loss for words. “That’s… incredible.”
I knew that birth was the last leg of the journey, the final stage I’d spent those 500 miles preparing for. It was finally here. In the weeks before my water broke, both my parents had spoken often about their experience of my birth. The story I had always heard was both simple and terrifying, that my mother labored with me for 52 hours before I was delivered by emergency C-section. But as my due date approached, new details emerged. My parents went to the hospital after my mother’s first eight hours of labor at home at which point her contractions stopped for hours. The Pitocin and the epidural came much later. While my mother remembered that fetal distress had justified the C-section, my father recalled that the doctor was looking for a way to help end my mother’s endless labor, perhaps exaggerating the risk of what showed up on the fetal monitor to do so.
As the nuanced details of my own labor emerged, I realized how easy it is to concisely summarize a birth experience. It is so much harder to recall the details that transpire in a unified, coherent way.
Around 9:30pm, the midwife on call came in to visit. I was glad it was Kate, the same midwife who I’d seen the week before, who had tested and diagnosed my GBS. Midwife Kate assessed that my cervix was not even a little dilated. She prescribed a cervical ripener—street name “Miso”—to thin the cervix, which would hopefully also remind my uterus it was time to start contracting.
I took the pill at 10pm, expecting it to take four hours to kick in. My doula went home and Andy posted up on the bedside futon to try to get some sleep. An hour later, I was clutching the railing of my hospital bed with full-on contractions. I tried to keep myself silent, thinking it was important that I let Andy sleep, but it didn’t take long for him to wake, hearing my stifled moans.
At this point, my sequential memory grows dim. The hours between midnight and 7am string together like a slide show or a stop-motion video. I lay facing a clock on the hospital room wall, and everytime anything happened—I received a dose of medicine, had a contraction, or was visited by a clinician—I would try to mark the time in my memory, but that part of my brain was offline. Instead, I have only glimpses of moments that seem to end before they even begin, punctuated by images of the clock in my mind, but not in any coherent order.
I am kneeling on the floor, my body draped over a birth ball. I am laying in the empty bathtub, Andy behind me, trying to relax my body. I wish desperately to take a bath, but the GBS means that, while not strictly prohibited, it’s ill advised. For hours, it seems, people urge me to take a shower (the midwife, my doula, the nurse, even Andy) and I resist, thinking it a poor substitute for a bath, but finally I relent, dragging myself from my hospital bed in slow, aching steps. I sit naked on the tiny bench in the bathroom shower while Andy covers me in hot water, a warm wet blanket draped over my legs to keep me warm.
As these events transpired around me, my conscious mind traveled inward and I am consumed with the feeling of my uterus contracting inside my body. I’m not sure anyone was keeping track at that point, but it felt like my contractions were so long and so frequent, I almost didn’t have time to rest between them. I thought about the hundreds of miles I had walked on aching feet and reminded myself that this would be over much more quickly. There was nowhere to go now. I just needed to be present, and relax.
By 7am, Midwife Kate judged that my cervix was fully dilated and it was time to start pushing. This was an enormous relief because pushing let me resist the pressure of the contractions, rather than just letting them happen to and through me. But then the situation changed.
An hour later, when the staff changed shifts, Midwife Jane checks my cervix and says she feels the right lip of the cervix still preventing the baby’s head from descending. For the next hour, I need to stop pushing and let the contractions do their work to continue retracting the cervix.
This might have been the hardest hour of my life. I’d been in full-on active labor for almost twelve hours and had not slept for 36 hours. Instead of bracing against the pain of the contractions by pushing, I have to just let them come. Here again, I recall a moment inside of myself, remembering the day I spent walking directly into the wind across the bleak flatness of the Spanish meseta, the wind clawing at my face with its relentless pressure.
If you can walk for eight hours directly into the wind, I remind myself, you’re strong enough to do this.
But my stamina is fraying. As the pain intensifies I started to lose confidence.
“I can’t!” I yell. “Please! I can’t do this anymore!” between contractions that force me to surrender to deep, guttural groans.
By 10am, it’s time to push again, but I feel my fortitude fraying from the fatigue. At 11, Doctor Gilotti, the OB/GYN on call, checks the baby’s station and determines he is at an angle, that we might try vacuum suction, but that he needs to descend more.
Midwife Jane brings a birthing stool and I climb out of bed, attempting to squat on the floor with its support, but I can barely hold myself upright. Back on the bed, I push and push and push. Nurse Liz brings a mirror so I can see the pulse of his head making way as I bear down. With a finger, I reach inside myself and feel the softness of his wet hair slicked against his scalp.
He is so close, I think. He is almost here. If only I can push a little harder, a little longer, he will be in my arms.
I try, harder than I have tried at anything. I push so forcefully I feel blood vessels breaking in my ears. But it is not enough.
By 11:30, I am nearly unresponsive (my memory of this time has completely lapsed). Doctor Gillotti, examines me again and determines the baby has not descended enough for vacuum suction to be helpful. At this, Midwife Jane suggests it might be time for an epidural.
On some level, my body knew it was reaching its limit, but as soon as I heard this suggestion, my heart sank. My dream of natural birth was over.
At noon, the anesthesia team arrives and inserts the tap into my spine. (It takes two tries for them to find the right placement). As soon as the epidural begins to flow, the contractions recede, like noise-cancelling headphones blocking out a deafening sound. For two hours, we all sleep and at 3pm, Nurse Liz gently urges me awake.
“Time to start pushing again,” she says with a grim smile.
For an hour, I push, but this baby is not coming.
At 4pm, we add a Pitocin drip to intensify the contractions. Even with an epidural, I can still move my legs and I squat on the hospital bed, my arms over a bar for leverage, and try to bear down even though I’ve lost all sensation in my torso. The baby doesn’t move. Doctor Gillotti comes by again. This time she’s concerned. The baby hasn’t moved enough and vacuum suction poses a risk.
“If you were my daughter,” she says matter-of-factly, “I’d do the C-section.”
Doctor Gillotti is one of the most senior physicians in the hospital. She has delivered thousands of babies in her life. Even though I know she’s right, I don’t want to believe that I, a C-section baby of a C-section baby (having a baby with another C-section baby!) must repeat history.
Deep, aching sobs well up inside me and I cry pools of tears into my hospital pillow while Andy holds my hand. I cry for my son, for my mother, for myself, for all the dreams we invent that go unrealized. I think of the Camino, how the journey we are meant to have finds us, even when the journey we’ve envisioned isn’t possible. Finally, the body-wracking sobs subside and I reach a place of surrender.
By 7pm, I am on my way to the operating room. When I arrive, the surgical resident asks if I can move myself to the operating table. As I crawl over on my hands and knees , Nurse Liz pipes up:
“Of course she can. Didn’t you hear what she did?”
The surgical resident looks momentarily confused.
“She walked 500 miles!” Nurse Liz says, gleefully.
Midwife Jane laughs and gives me a smile.
I lie down on the operating table and the anesthesiologist plugs more numbing agent into my mainline IV and epidural. The IV fluid burns going in but pretty soon I can’t feel anything from the waist down. Doctor Gilotti and the surgical resident get to work. At 7:31pm, they remove the blue drape, leaving a transparent one, so Andy and I can watch our baby come into the world. Doctor Gilotti seems to tug one, twice, and three times before she lifts him out. His purple body taught, his face screwed up to cry, his hands balled into fists, William Felix Bonner Cabell announces his arrival at 7:32pm. His umbilical cord, nearly an inch thick, pulls taught from my abdomen. Overcome by wonder and disbelief, I marvel at this being my body has made.
The surgical resident clamps and cut the cord and hands Felix to Nurse Liz to be weighed and measured. Weighing in at 8 pounds 14 ounces with a head circumference in the 98th percentile, he likely would have had to find just the right angle to make it out at all. A few minutes later, Midwife Jane lifts him onto my chest. It wasn’t the skin-to-skin snuggle we would have had with a natural birth, but it’s the best we can do. Draped across my chest, he bobs his head until he finds my breast and latches on. For days, I had walked with his growing weight in my belly. For months—years, really, I had waited for a child to make me his mother. And now, here he is. Completely perfect. And he is mine. His thick thighs and long legs jiggled and I thought of the miles we had walked together that have made us both strong.
Later, I will learn that Felix’s short umbilical cord had a true knot in it, which, if pulled tight, would have cut off his blood flow and threatened his life. While I had been trying desperately to realize my idealized dream of a natural birth, I like to think Baby Felix was protecting himself, refusing to descend. As I held him in my arms for the very first time, I surrender the idea that he could or should have been born any other way. I give thanks to all the angels who have watched over me these many months, for the weeks of meditative silence that helped me prepare for this moment. Overcome with gratitude for my exceptional care and the health of both my baby and me, I smile through my exhaustion. We have finally arrived.
Thank you to everyone who has followed my journey, and for those of you who joined as paid subscribers early on. I am still “pregnant,” though not with child. The book I am hoping to write is finally taking shape. But my maternity leave is at an end and I am taking stock of how to continue to support my family and write the story I need to tell. If you feel called to become a paid subscriber, now would be a wonderful time for you to join me on the next leg of the journey.