Coming Home

The galloping hoof beats of a continuous fetal monitor are still ringing in my ears as I try to sleep at 4am. My 15 month old and 3 year old are a tangle of limbs and warmth in sweaty sheets, their hands and feet draped across my sleeping husband. The evidence of a hard bedtime is present in the living room: dinner dishes, craft projects, toys, the bathwater still in the bath. I've been gone since yesterday morning. As my 3 year old son woke up to the dawn yesterday, I whispered in his ear, "Mommy has to go to work today." "But why didn't you tell me you had to work?" he asks.

Adrenaline pushes me out the door and oxytocin keeps me at the long birth. As the day wears on, every now and then I look at my watch: "They're eating lunch now. Now dinner. Bedtime." I feel completely present at the birth, and it surprises me to look down and see that two hours have passed. Time moves differently at a birth than it does at home. Shadows lengthen outside the hospital and the tea lights and Christmas lights I set up on arrival at 8am begin to make sense. "Those are pretty," the laboring woman murmurs, and I'm grateful; I feel useful. Baby is born vaginally at midnight and she turns to her husband and the fear turns to magnificent pride. "I did it!" A VBAC after a traumatic first Cesarean. I feel like a lizard sunning herself in the bask of this woman's oxytocin; she is glowing with it, it is coming off of her in waves. What can be more gratifying than this? This was a good birth. I know this glow will carry me through the next birth, and the next. They aren't all like this.

But after she latches for the first time, gets her meal, and the goodbyes are said, my mood crashes in the car. It's dark and it's cold and I stupidly promised my 3 year old a toy before I left at dawn. "Bring me something while you're out, Mommy." Now a trip to Walmart, the only thing open at 3am and the guilt of this being the 5th birth in 6 weeks drives me to buy extravagantly, an EZ Bake Oven, $40 we don't have.

Now the hoof beats of the baby's heart remain in my ears long after the monitor has been turned off. The clients had wanted the monitor to be turned up as loud as it goes for the entire labor, a reminder of their healthy baby laboring with them, and I feel like a child who has been at the beach all day, and I can still feel the waves carrying me up and down, up and down. I finally drift off to sleep at 6am. My fitful sleep is punctuated by her wild eyes during a hard contraction, by her husband's worried, anxious face, by the oxygen mask she wore when pushing, by the way she looked, paralyzed with fear when she thought her early labor was stalling. "This is normal. This is not a stall. 4cm is like this."

I drift on the surface of sleep for 2 hours, and soon everyone else in the bed is stirring. My family life has begun. My husband wipes sleep out of his eyes: "Oh, you're back!" "Mommy!" 35 pounds of pajama clad loveliness suddenly sits on my stomach. And my 15 month old wants to nurse.

But the thing about birth is that you're not present when you get home, not really. I should sleep, but I don't. I get up to be with everyone. I'm eating breakfast, I'm drinking coffee. I'm nursing, I'm reading books, I'm making lunch and taking walks. But I can still hear the galloping hoof beats of the monitor. I can still smell amniotic fluid and meconium. I can still see her eyes and her husband's face. A big part of me is still at the birth, suspended in between those hard contractions, immersed in the rhythm of labor. Coming home is harder than just coming home.

#birth #breastfeeding #working #mothering #doula #parenting