You Can Sleep in Your Own Bed

#10 You can eat and drink whatever you want, whenever you want

Shelly’s mouth tastes sour and stale, like a hard brown lime. It’s really unfair, she thinks, to feel nauseous on top of everything else. Emotionally, she wants a fudgy chocolate brownie. With peanut butter frosting. In fact, she wants to be held by a fudgy chocolate brownie with peanut butter frosting, and fall asleep in its embrace. That’s the most comforting thing she can imagine. Physically, however, the thought of consuming anything makes her stomach acid boil. Can she handle some toast? Ew. Pretzels? No thank you. She sips ice water and wills herself to keep it down.

#9: You can do it in the water

Shelly begins to fill the tub. She loves baths, and she hopes the warm water and buoyancy will provide immediate pain relief.

She is disappointed.

She breathes through her nose. She cups her hands and attempts to splash water up onto her torso, which juts out from the surface like a snowy iceberg. As the water chills, she drains a few inches and adds more, as scalding as she can stand. She lays still and tries to access her inner calm…except she’s never really had much calm, inner or outer. The pain intensifies. Her stomach is only clenching sporadically, but when it does, she grips the side of the tub and moans.

#8 You don’t have to go anywhere

Shelly cannot stand this bath any longer. She feels the need to do something to make this official. She stands up, and her body begins to shake—a trembling that begins somewhere in the recesses of her brain and skitters down her spine to her toes, a tremor that means something big is happening, and it’s happening now. Time to call the midwife.

“Kris? I think it’s time. No, they’re all over the place, but…” Long, grinding pause. Contraction. “They. Really. Hurt.”

Kris says she’s on her way, but with traffic, she’ll arrive in about an hour. Now there is nothing for Shelly to do but wait. No bags to pack, no car to chauffeur her, officially, into “active labor” by way of the hospital. As Shelly feels the ache spread from her flank down the back of her legs, she frantically wonders, Is it really too late? Is there any way, now, that I could still go to the hospital and get an epidural? She knows the answer. She made her decision long ago.

But she really wishes she could change it.

#7 You can control the environment

Suddenly, Shelly is gripped with all-encompassing anxiety.

“We haven’t made the bed yet!” she groans to her husband. “We need to put the shower curtain between two sets of sheets.” She clenches her teeth and flaps her hands in front of her like a stimming toddler.

“Come here!” she shouts to her husband, who was dutifully stripping and remaking the bed. He puts his hands on her hips and says something reassuring. She hears but does not comprehend; she can only puff out her cheeks, shift her weight, buzz her lips, flap her hands. She looks up at him and remembers how he kissed her the first time behind the high school. This man, the father of this and all future unborn children...she hates him. But she can’t help it: hatred is her hallmark of labor.

#6 You can move around

Shelly is stuck on the toilet.

If she stands up, she knows she will have a contraction. Of course, by staying there, she will also have contractions, and she will have to endure them in an agonizing seated position. In fact, only the continuation of contractions will eventually bring relief. Ricki Lake said something like that in the birth documentary Shelly watched. You cannot move backward, only forward: toward the pain, into the pain, through the pain.

But Shelly doesn’t want to. So, she decides, the baby will have to be born into the toilet. Because, if she stands up, she will have a contraction.

#5 You have a close relationship with your midwife

“Stop it, Kris, don’t touch me!” Shelly bellows.

“If you don’t like it, push me out,” Kris says, matter-of-factly. Kris, an older, no-nonsense woman who reminds Shelly of her Grannie, arrived just minutes after Shelly’s frantic shaking had transformed into a focused, concentrated, full-body squeezing. Kris had not, in fact, allowed Shelly to have the baby in the toilet, but demanded that she move to the bedroom. Then she had mentioned something about a ‘lip’ before plunging her hand inside Shelly’s body. The pain is searing, scorching, unendurable.

In the future, Shelly will view Kris as a beloved friend, as someone who led her safely through the valley of the shadow of death to the other side. She will become intimately attached and deeply grateful.

But at this moment, Shelly hates her.

#4 Natural birth releases endorphins, and can even lead to orgasm

Shelly’s body is slammed by continuous contractions without intermission. Her limbs quiver much the same way her senile grandfather’s do. She is hot, no, she is cold. No, she is definitely hot. The pain is changing, it is burning.

Someone is rubbing Shelly’s back. Is it her husband? The doula-in-training who sauntered in too late? Whoever it is, she hates. Someone offers her coconut water. She’s never liked coconut water, it tastes like piss. She hates it. She hates them.

The pain is screaming. She is screaming.

“Stop touching me Kris! Stop it, stop it, get away from me!”

“I’m not touching you honey, that’s the baby’s head.”

The baby must come out. She hates this stupid baby.

She takes a huge breath and pushes.

“It has dark hair!” someone chirps, and Shelly hates the chirper. The head is crowning. Shelly feels her flesh tearing, and it is agony. It is never-ending, because suddenly, the contractions cease.

Shelly lays on her back, the baby’s head halfway protruding from her privates, in total stillness.

“Gah! Why aren’t I having another contraction!” she shouts at the room in general.

“Just relax, take this time to relax.” But it isn’t possible to relax with a softball protruding from your nether regions.

After an eternity that lasts 90 seconds, a massive surge expels the baby’s head a few inches further. It is sliding out slowly, when suddenly Kris mutters “shit.” The baby is hooked beneath the armpits and pulled swiftly from its canal of birth.

The baby is plopped unceremoniously onto Shelly’s chest, but she barely glances at it. “Is he okay?” she says loudly, the moment of the revelation of his gender overshadowed by the sheer amount of blood spattering the midwife’s clothes, the dark stain spreading over several pillows, the droplets flung in a spray over the sheet on which the midwife stands.

“He’s fine.” The doula smiles unhelpfully. Shelly can’t remember her name. There is a lot of commotion happening around her feet.

“Am I okay?” Shelly asks, raising her voice in both pitch and hysteria.

“You’re fine!” her husband says, his face a little pale, but his smile genuine. “Everything is fine.”

“Just a mess,” says Kris, her sensible demeanor returned. “Everything’s fine.”

Shelly looks down at the baby, who does, indeed, seem just fine. “But you yanked him out of me!”

“No I didn’t,” Kris lies. Shelly will have a hard time forgiving her for that in the future, when she learns that the umbilical cord, wound tight around her son’s neck, burst upon his entry into the world, spraying blood hither and yon. This didn’t pose a danger to the baby, as long he could breathe, which was why Kris had hastened his birth along by use of her two sharp pointer fingers.

Does it matter how he arrived, as long as he is safe and healthy? The tension freezing Shelly’s body begins to thaw. She delivers the placenta, which feels a lot like delivering a baby, except that it has no bones. All the while, she stares in wonder at this amazing little creature, squirming on her chest in a way that is somehow familiar, but feels inside out. He sucks on his lips and blinks his big gray eyes. She does not immediately feel love, but she feels reverence, for this existence which before this moment seemed a bit imaginary, and for this process, which before this day was also a vague reverie, but in its fulfillment was more of a night terror.

#3 Birth at home is often faster, due to the lack of interventions

5:36 PM: Shelly makes the “this is it” call. 7:11 PM: The baby is born.

#2 Unmedicated birth is empowering

8 PM: Shelly gets into her own shower. The useless doula hands her some Ibuprofen, and she takes it. She stands there staring down at her stomach, which has transformed from a taut, round ball to a sack of misplaced organs, hanging limply from her abdomen like a deflated balloon. She can stick her hand into the void and almost reach her spine, which she does. She is trembling again, but it is with relief. The ordeal is over, and she has survived, and now a tiny baby who she had never seen before a few minutes ago is sleeping on her husband’s chest.

What else am I capable of? Shelly wonders. She feels like she’s been run over by a train; she feels like she could scale Mt. Everest. She is exhausted. She is elated. She is ravaged. She is the most powerful being on Earth. Her womb is empty, but her soul is full of light.

#1 You can sleep in your own bed

9 PM: Kris and the worthless doula have left. Shelly sits up in bed, propped up by several clean pillows, wearing a large t-shirt and an adult diaper. She eats a tall sandwich on homemade bread. She nurses the baby, and her husband swaddles him and lays him on the bed between them. Shelly is more tired than she’s ever been in her life, but she lays down and spends hours just staring at this newly minted, not-yet-named little human. He is perfect.

When Shelly wakes to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, it will be her husband who helps her walk there and supplies a fresh ice pack. No nurse will turn on all the lights at 1 AM and start kneading her sore stomach like a ball of bread dough; no pediatrician will stroll in at 3 AM to unwrap the baby, glance at it from a few feet’s distance, and then leave.

The pain was real, but it is gone. The nightmare is already fading into forgetfulness, and Shelly knows. She will have all her babies at home.