Pixie came to visit on Friday. When she arrived I was a week late & very blue about it. We caught up with her on Saturday night at C'est What? and I consoled myself with amusing anecdotes & lots of yummy appetizers. Later that night we ended up at her ex-boyfriend Paul's apartment, discussing religion & drugs & babies & all sorts of things. Scott, of all people, was there. Scott, who fell out of my life the week before I was married, and who magically reappeared the day before I went into labour. The universe is laughing at me, I think.

They drank old Irish whiskey, muttering about the bouquet & kick in the way of all semi-serious whiskey drinkers. I sat spread-legged on the floor & mixed up my words. It was terrific; one of those nights when I felt like I could've just stayed there all night long. I left happy, even if I did feel like I'd be pregnant for the rest of my life.

The next day we finally got the right combination of herbs at Noah's. I actually spent wayyyy too much time at Noah's - we were trying to meet up with Pixie, but she was late, so I sat on the floor next to the sales counter while the Boy's annoyance picked up steam. By the time she & Paul & the Boy & I met up at the Second Cup, it was very late in the day to begin a 6-hour course of treatment so I half-resolved to let the matter go. But Pixie was so excited at the mere chance of labour that she got me a cup of water from the counter & told me to get going. Natural remedies - blech. The herbs tasted like lawn clippings. I was glad that I'd diluted it way more than I'd needed to.

I had been experiencing very mild contractions all day. Mostly they just made me lethargic & prone to sitting down, but that's not terrifically out of phase with my normal behaviour so I was keeping only a glimmer of hope alive. As we got home & I worked my way through the doses, the contractions started to pick up. I started running to the bathroom with each one (much to my annoyance). In between cramps I shuttled between 2 books: The Hip Mama's Survival Guide and Wormwood (a collection of short horror stories). Yeah, I know how schizo that is. Especially when you consider that I was able to read only 2 or 3 lines at a time - I was flashing on parenting topics and horror plots like a flipbook. I wasn't wearing pants during this phase, so every time I ran upstairs I had to close the door to the family room. My dad was sitting watching teevee, and I didn't want him to see me in my underwear. (Little did I realize how little clothing I would wear in the immediate postpartum period. Forget pants - it was a good day if I was wearing underwear.)

This is my strongest memory of this phase in early labour: running to the bathroom, reading tiny snatches of books and getting pissed off at the constant door closing. Six hours after I started dosing myself with cohosh the contractions were 8 minutes apart, but I was still trying to be cool. We phoned Loftwyr & Gilamonstre at 10pm to tell them that we were possibly maybe on our way over. I took a Gravol & went to bed.

Twenty minutes later I started feeling horrible. Like, seasick Montreal alley horrible, for the first time since that alley in Montreal. (Media to the contrary, not every woman throws up during pregnancy. I'm living proof.) I was chewing up a Rolaids tablet when I suddenly knew that I was going to be sick. The Boy came running with the garbage can and my small, no-appetite dinner rushed away from me. I started to shiver & shake from my heels to my hair.

"Boy," I said through chattering teeth, "I think I'm in real labour. Let's go to Loftwyr & Gila's house."

People always ask me how long the labour lasted. This moment - holding the flimsy, dripping wicker garbage can and forcing myself to give the go command through numb lips and chattering teeth - was when I started counting.

I found a new shirt and told my dad that we were going into the city. He promised to call my mom and we in turn promised to call him when we transferred to the hospital. My mom was working an all-night shift, so I knew that the two of them would have to see us in the morning. I had been worrying about this trip to Loftwyr & Gila's for months; suddenly everything was resolved painlessly. We were going to the city to labour. My parents were otherwise occupied. End of discussion.

As soon as we got into the car, the entire day caught up with me. Somehow the shakes became bearable and I was able to doze between contractions. Maybe doze is too strong to describe what I experienced: I would just get started on the wild free-associative state of dreaming when another contraction would yank me into waking. By then I had got over my previous conviction that the PMS-like cramps I'd felt that afternoon were in the same league as actual contractions (although I had not got over my desire that they be the most painful cramps of labour. As the contractions intensified, I felt a continual and useless nostalgic attachment to the cramps of the previous stage. In a few hours, when I was even more tired & unable to relax for even 2 minutes between contractions, I had a desperate longing for contractions that let me doze.)

We got to Loftwyr & Gila's house and I fell onto the couch. It was in trying to bury myself in the cushions that I realized my fatal mistake: the house has one bathroom. That bathroom is up a lot of stairs. And no matter what the natural method books said, I was in no mood to celebrate the unexpected opportunity to walk a great deal during my labour. We called Hectate and she reassured me that everything was progressing as it should. She said she'd meet us at the house soon, and that I should keep moving. (Apparently writhing on the couch didn't count.)

Sometime in there my water broke. That was amazing in that it'd happened exactly like the books said it would: as I lay on the couch I felt a pop & a gush that soon subsided to a trickle. The waters were clear, a good sign. The Boy tells me that I insisted on paging Hectate again, which certainly seemed sensible to me at the time. I'm not sure if I was more concerned or proud; considering all of the paranoid fantasies I'd entertained in the week before birth, I was especially relieved that no interventions were needed to ensure that labour kept progressing in a normal & uncomplicated fashion. Too bad about the couch, though.

Once Hectate arrived, she and the Boy submitted me to various tortures including:

• checking my blood pressure & the baby's heartbeat
• making me go to the bathroom every once in awhile to relieve pressure on my insides & check my metabolism
• preparing glasses of water and juice to keep me hydrated
• forcing me to change position from time to time in order to keep the baby in a good delivery position, continue the strong labour and give some pain relief
• speaking to me encouragingly and telling me how strong and amazing I was

Hectate was fantastic from the moment she showed up. I didn't have the psychedelic hippie kind of natural labour in which I was overcome with love for the world and all of my labour partners. Instead, I felt a low-key, generalized hatred of everyone who wasn't enduring the pain along with me - a hatred that included everyone who crossed my line of sight. I also tried to shut down from time to time. This is my typical response to extraordinary demands made on me in times of stress; I will decide that I can't possibly do anything more than exist so I won't try. During my labour Hectate consistently asked me to do things I didn't want to do, all of which could be clustered under the general category of "move." I didn't want to try new positions or go to the bathroom or walk around or get in the shower or even lie on the other side - but everytime she would ask me to do something, the exact same process would shoot through my brain. First, the hate: how dare she ask me to do ____ when it hurts so much?! She's never had a baby.. Second, the refusal: no. I can't do that anyway. Finally, in a process that wasn't even formalized thought, I would find myself doing those things. I had read enough about labour and had enough reassurance during my pregnancy that I recognized each request as a positive one that would help me through the experience. And I trusted Hectate. So I did what I've never done as an adult: I obeyed her without letting my resistance come to the surface.

At around 3:30, however, I thought I'd hit my limit. I was between contractions. Hectate was out of the room momentarily. I turned to the Boy.

"Kill me," I said quietly. "You have to kill me."

He smiled & gave my hand a squeeze. "I can't do that sweetie."

"Please." I was proud of myself for keeping my voice so reasonable. Surely he'd be convinced by my rational arguments. "You need to kill me now."

"I can't. But you're doing a great job."

I gave up. Hectate returned.

"Hectate." I tried to smile reassuringly. "The Boy said he won't kill me. So you have to. Please kill me."

I got my reassuring smile back. "I can't do that, Amoret. It's a bit beyond my professional guidelines."

"But you have to kill me." I could feel another contraction building and a whine crept into my voice. But once again I was denied. Next time I labour I'm surrounding myself with people who find me really annoying, so they'll kill me when I ask. Apply now.

By the time we headed to the hospital, it was 5 a.m. Amazingly enough, I had spent most of the night moaning and creeping back & forth to the bathroom across the hall from Loftwyr & Gila's bedroom without seriously disturbing either of them. In fact, Gila only realized that we were in the house when the door closed behind us on our way to the hospital. (Or more accurately, when the door closed on my hand. The Boy was extremely apologetic, but I was too far-gone to even pull my hand back from the jamb). She rushed out to the car to wave goodbye, but I was feeling another contraction just then, so it was a supreme effort to blow her a kiss without wincing. I was shocked that they hadn't heard us to that point, as I was vocalizing quite loudly at this point in the labour, something low between a moan and a note.

(Oddly enough, "singing" through contractions was the best thing I could possibly do for myself: it kept me breathing, it let me get some of the pain out, it let everyone know when I was and wasn't available for conversation and the effort it took to keep my voice low (on Hectate's advice) meant that there was a little bit of me that didn't get consumed in the pain. There weren't many other natural techniques that helped me: water wasn't soothing, movement tired me out, visualization was a joke, counter-pressure usually made me feel worse, and as for breath, well, forget about breathing in patterns. The best I could do was get in a few normal lungfuls every contraction.

(When labour finally ended, I found it oddly hard to stop singing through the pain. Even after Hectate froze me & started stitching, I babbled on. But that may have been because the local anaesthetic felt so damn good. Freezy happiness.)

I continued moaning/singing all the way to the hospital. Hectate met us at the entrance with a wheelchair, and she pushed me up to a swank birthing room while the Boy parked the car. A contraction hit while we were wheeling down the hallway; my cry echoed down the hallways and refracted back to me. It was way too early for someone to be this loud, but I was far beyond caring.

When we got to the room, Hectate recommended a warm shower as a pain reliever. I figured it was worth a shot. My inner monologue had been chanting, 'I can't take this, give me drugs' for quite some time, so a change was welcome. Unfortunately, the contractions were so close together that I couldn't do anything but sit miserably on the shower chair, one side scorched with the hottest spray I could stand and the opposite side wet and freezing cold. Reacting to the pain with superstitious animal logic, I couldn't bring myself to turn around & even up my skin temperature, lest my movement make the pain worse. I sat there - naked, huge and half-boiled - for a long time. Hectate took my blood and listened to the baby's heartbeat, all without making me get up from the shower chair. Finally, in a moment of isolation, I broke.

"Boy," I called out tiredly, "can you tell Hectate that I'm not coming out of the shower until I can start taking nitrous?"

I was afraid that I was being unreasonable, and that I'd let down some pristine standard of drug-free midwifery. In other words, I was afraid that I'd pissed off Hectate. But she was quite cheerful. "The Boy tells me that you're making a stand," she said when she came into the bathroom. I nodded. I may not have even opened my eyes. "The nitrous will be here soon."

As soon as it arrived, I got out of the shower & the Boy helped me into a hospital johnny. Pixie had arrived, and I greeted her wearily. "I buckled," I announced to the room, "I held out for drugs." Everyone smiled and reassured me. Hectate clipped an ID bracelet on my wrist (as soon as a patient starts taking drugs, she needs to be identified. I think this would be sensible policy in many situations.) I started huffing the nitrous - and everything improved immeasurably for about 20 minutes. I don't mean that the pain went away; I sucked back nitrous for four hours and it didn't reduce the pain one whit. In fact, I clung to that mask like a drowning victim until they took it away from me, fearing brain damage. (What-ever.) But my extreme attachment didn't really have anything to do with pain relief. What the nitrous did was make me feel like I could handle the pain. It made me feel like I was in control. For the first fifteen minutes or so, it even made me feel incredibly witty. After that, it just made me less frantic.

But for those first fifteen minutes, I was on fire. We talked about the full moon bringing in so many labouring women, and I joked about my werewolf baby (later on, when I came out of a contraction and found myself biting the Boy's wrists over and over, I said apologetically that it was the werewolf baby making itself known.) When Hectate reminded me to keep my voice pitched low during contractions so I wouldn't lose my voice, the Boy started throat singing and I was too high to get irritated. Pixie in particular thought I was hilarious during this interlude. But like I said, soon the drugs stopped working and I in turn stopped thinking that I was on the stage at Just for Laughs.

This is not to say that I let go of the facemask. A contraction would start and I'd pull the mask to my face. I'd breathe in as it crested, and then the pain would peak, the mask would fall away, and my oddly dislocated voice would cry out until the pain receded somewhat. By the time the contraction ended, my voice would seem my own again. I'd have a few sips of water & do whatever I needed to do - roll over, go to the bathroom, respond to Hectate, have a spoonful of honey, apologize to the Boy for some new outrage I'd purported on his hands, or do absolutely nothing - before the next contraction started. By the time I was in that hospital bed, all possibility of sleeping between contractions had vanished. They were too big & too close. My intellect receded. My sense of shame receded. My confidence in euphemistically written labour guides receded (cleansing breath my ass). I suppose I would've begged Pixie to kill me if I had had the energy.

Pixie was there for the next few hours; I mangled her hands while she and the Boy fed me sips of water between contractions & spoke soothingly to me during the worst of the waves. It felt incredibly soothing to have her in the room. She and the Boy have a similar ocean of good humour, and I bathed in their support whenever I was aware of the room around me. I was getting increasingly sketchy: every once in awhile, Hectate would leave the room to check on another client or the Boy would go into the hall for something and I barely noticed. Sometimes I would open my eyes and see the Boy holding my hand, sometimes Pixie, sometimes Hectate. My glasses had been off for hours, signalling my complete lack of interest in the outside world. I just wanted the pain to stop.

At 9 a.m. my mom came in (she got there after my last hit of nitrous, and for several hours she believed that I'd given birth entirely without pain relievers. Heh). Now, I have my battles with my mother. We're both stubborn & passionate & quick to decide anything & deeply devoted to helping people (despite themselves, dammit!). I knew that I was going to see my mother in the delivery room, but I hadn't allowed myself the luxury of anticipating her behaviour. It could've been anything: fear for me masked by anger, extreme weariness after a shift at the hospital, detachment as a polite form of disapproval. What she gave me was uncomplicated love & nurturing. She stroked my back lightly during contractions and spoke quietly of my bravery. When the time came to push, she held up the left side of my body and cheered me through each bearing down. She was unexpectedly amazing, and I'm deeply grateful for her.

As I careened through the first stage, huffing away, I laboured on my side. I knew that I'd picked the least effective labour position but I was pretty sure that I couldn't handle anything more complicated at that point in the night. Who knows - I may've been wrong about that limit as well. But Hectate didn't push me too much, and I was able to hobble to the bathroom from time to time, so I did spend some time on my feet. Maybe if I'd been on my hands and knees, I would've had a faster labour. Then again, maybe if I'd had a faster labour, then I'd've been a lot more sulferous & mean to my labour partners. One never knows.

I was only 9 centimetres dilated when I hit transition. This meant that I started to feel the overwhelming urge to bear down before my body was quite ready to release the baby. I tried breathing through the contractions, but Hectate ended up manually pushing back some of my cervix when it was showtime. And then there was the second stage.

Transition and second stage weren't at all fun. My subjective experience of the Sprout's passage down the birth canal was eternal, a wash of unending pain. Locasta and a midwifery student were in the room by then, but I didn't open my eyes to look at them until it was all over. The contractions had been more intense as we came screaming into morning, but the bearing down was a complete loss of control, an instant plunge into pain beyond my wildest dreams. Contractions would begin, my mother and husband would pull my legs up and my chin toward my chest, and I would be asked to "push low." Hectate told me to stop singing during contractions and use the energy to get the baby out. By this point I was so far out of my head that I didn't mind being manipulated like a life-size mannequin. I also didn't care when they told me that my crowning baby had "lots of hair." I just wanted to know why it was taking so damn long to get it out. I felt in those moments like I'd be in labour for the rest of my life.

And then there were two or three more contractions - my hand was guided down to feel my baby's hot, wet, hairy scalp as it travelled downward - every part of my labia caught fire & burned - and then the Sprout's shoulders were sliding out of me. It cried for a second, then took in a deep lungful or air and lay on my chest with wide open eyes. I looked down at this hot, wet, strong-smelling being as they towelled it off. All I could see were the top of its head and one eye. I waited for the euphoria, but instead I just felt bemused. In truth, I was still convinced that I was just in between pains because I was destined to labour for the rest of my life. It took awhile for my body to believe that it was over, and until that sunk in, I didn't move very much. There were a few almost painless pushes to expel the placenta, then I was done. Lots of hugs.

Visitors streamed in & out of the room and I began to snap out of my fugue. The Boy tells me that as soon as the Sprout was born, I came back from the outer orbits immediately, so suddenly in fact that he only then realized in that moment how far out I'd travelled. He said it was like my personality rushed in to fill a vacuum. The baby & I lay breathing together. The Boy cut the cord & a sample was collected for research purposes. Exhausted & utterly without shame, I realized dimly that this new being had both peed & pooped on me almost immediately. Still, no one seperated us to clean us up - and I relished being left alone.

People came in & asked the sex, but none of us had bothered to check. The Boy lifted up the blanket covering the baby on my chest and discovered that it was a he. A Blake. A Blake Donald; one name pointing to our literature geekery and the other pointing to my most-recently deceased uncle. I missed my Una this time, but that's okay. There's always next time.

I watched my tiny Blake snuffle around my chest avidly, less than an hour old and already strong enough to lift his head and search for a nipple. Feeling my sense of humour return, I told everyone that the snuffling came from being frightened by a pig while I was pregnant. With some help from the student midwife, we got latched on. I could feel the blood pulse out of me with every suck, but I was assured that this was the best possible sign. And since the endorphins had begun to flow, I couldn't help but agree. I felt better than I'd felt in weeks. Even when Blake went over to the corner to be checked out and Hectate started stitching me up, I was on top of the world. I was numb to my lips, I was hungry for the first time in days and I didn't have to pee for the first time in months. I was living the life.

For the next few hours, all I did was bask, eat food, and chat with everyone while we waited for a room to open up in another floor of the hospital. Hectate fed me fruit salad. Stacy came by with an awed expression and a huge hug. Grandparents flowed in and out to marvel at their newest family member. Pixie took him into the hall to see everyone that didn't have a chance to get into the room, and held him during his first sneeze. I told stories & collected compliments & watched the Boy with his baby. It was very cool.

Not, ultimately, cool enough for me to want another baby ever again...but very cool. Singular. Intense. Difficult but worth it.

Booty Call: Day 276 - Blake is born!!

2 years ago today: unofficial Aleta Day & the MathMobile. Like anyone cares. Viva Blake!!