Birth Stories - Carmen

   When an experience that lasts nine and a half months is entirely positive, it's truly a gift. a professional horseman, being large and clumsy cramped my style way too much and I was terribly frustrated. The one thing that consistently put sunshine in my otherwise grumpy life was my visits to my midwife.

My husband, Jeff, is a professional polo player. When he's not playing polo, we train and sell polo ponies together. One of the many unusual facets of our life is our nomadic lifestyle-a band of gypsies would probably be more stable! Polo seasons last one to three months. Employers usually change each season. These sponsors offer housing and stabling along with the job, so it's off to a new location very often.

We were in the process of acquiring contracts for the spring when I started looking for a midwife. I found the Family Centered Maternity Care & Birth Center website and it looked just like what I had in mind. When I first contacted Michelle, we thought that we would be stabling our horses on a farm near McKinney so that seemed to fit pretty well with Michelle's plans to move her clinic from Dallas to Garland-not close but not too far. Well, needless to say, things changed as they frequently do in our business and we ended up in Burleson instead, though not before I had fallen in love with Michelle and the birth center.

Jeff made the sacrifice to drive me to Garland for my prenatal appointments (he never missed a visit) on his day off and Michelle was amazing enough to see us on Mondays even though the birth center isn't open on Mondays.

I find it amazing that the pieces of our lives fall so perfectly into place by what seems to be just pure dumb luck. I had read the testimonials on the birth center's webpage before my first visit to Michelle. I had a lot of learning about pregnancy and childbirth ahead of me and I was nervous about labor and delivery. I knew how I felt about natural childbirth in theory but I was uncertain about how I would actually handle the situation when the time came. Unknowingly, reading the testimonials was the first "comfort measure" that I would take. It was very soothing to peek through a window into other women's experiences and see that they were not overwhelming or frightening. I really enjoyed reading about a lady named Delilah and the birth of her daughter, Virginia. The story was long, humorous and so comforting.

My first visit to Michelle was great. I loved her immediately and we laughed together while she answered my questions and concerns. I was filling out paperwork in the office when this cute blonde walks in with three of the cutest kids. We started to chat and low and behold-this was Delilah! Michelle suggested Jeff and I take childbirth classes from Delilah.

Delilah and I later compared notes and realized that Michelle had seen an opportunity and given us both the nudge we needed. I didn't know what kind of classes I wanted to take …or when… or where… Delilah was thinking about getting qualified as an instructor but hadn't yet committed herself to doing it. Delilah ended up using Jeff and I as her "guinea pig" students, teaching some of her first classes to us in our living room. Pure dumb luck!

Delilah came to my baby shower and brought what is now a treasured token of my son's birth. She put a bowl of beads and a stack of note cards on the table. Each of my friends selected a special bead and taped it to a card with a note of advice or good wishes. Jeff later strung them into a necklace for me and I used them as a focal point during labor.

Through the spring and summer Michelle and Delilah supported and guided me. Michelle looked after my mind and body. She was always just a quick phone call or email away and always encouraging and confident when I was sure the world was ending. When Michelle wasn't on the job, Delilah and Jeff were, somehow keeping me on track when ante-partum depression tried to swallow me up.

On August 21, I got up and went to the barn and did the morning chores, feeling crummy and irritable the whole time. I nailed a shoe back on a horse and did a pretty bad job. I finally gave up on doing anything productive and went to Cracker Barrel with Jeff and a crowd of polo friends. I spent the afternoon bumming around the house watching TV and trying to sleep. I called Michelle around six and told her that I had been having contractions off and on all day and had started spotting. I didn't think I was in labor but I wanted her to have as much warning as possible in case that changed. It did.

Around midnight I started really having contractions. Everything I had read and been told made me expect contractions starting out about fifteen minutes apart and gradually getting closer together. Michelle suggested I call her when they were eight to ten minutes apart. When I started having contractions, they were two and three minutes apart-and I didn't want to talk through them. I was hurting and getting frantic and I don't think Jeff had a clue what to do because he wasn't very helpful, which was annoying me.

Jeff called Michelle and she alerted the troops and was on her way. He helped me find a somewhat comfortable position on the bed with my string of beads and made me a cup of hot chocolate. I think that was the best hot chocolate I've ever had! Michelle and her assistant, Shanna, arrived along with Delilah around 2:30. Jeff held my hand on the bed while Delilah rubbed my feet. That wonderful hot chocolate left a lot to be desired when it came back up. I remember thinking during my reading and what we discussed in childbirth classes that I wouldn't throw up because I just never throw up. Right….

Around 5:30, I was getting more uncomfortable and tried sitting in the bathtub. The relief was amazing but by dawn I was pretty miserable. I think that is when I started sitting backwards on the toilet. I have no idea how long I spent in that position but the "backwards on the toilet" period of my life was hell. Not only was I in a lot of pain, all I could think about was how much longer I had to go and how much worse the pain was going to be. I remember telling Delilah that I just couldn't do this. She laughed at me and said "Honey, you ARE doing this." I told Jeff I wanted to quit, that I wanted drugs. I don't remember exactly what he said but the general gist was I needed to cowboy up because it was too late for that now. I remember him forcing me to look in his eyes and talk to him. I think he was making me count or breathe with him; I do remember how deep blue and beautiful his eyes were. It was very hard to focus my attention on him and he was very persistent about making me look at him. He told me later that for a while I was in a pretty dark place because I was concentrating so hard on the pain I couldn't get myself away from it. In retrospect, I know he was right.

At some point, I moved to the bed. I laid down on my side and found a breathing pattern that worked. I don't know how long I was there, time lost all meaning. Delilah told me later that I was there about an hour and a half-she could have told me it had been ten minutes or two days and I would have believed her. My whole life was my breathing pattern, nothing else really existed but that included the pain. Then someone told me I was in transition and it was time to start pushing. Transition? Pushing? Wasn't transition supposed to be a whole lot more painful and didn't I have a lot longer to go before that happened? Pushing meant that Quinten was nearly here… what happened to all the pain I had imagined I had to get through to get to this point?

Jeff sat on the bed beside me and held my hands so I could pull against him. I couldn't see him because I wouldn't open my eyes but his voice was like the north star-every time I got lost he told me what to do. I braced against him and pushed when he told me and rested when he told me; I lived by his voice.

After an hour and a half of pushing, I was thoroughly convinced that Quinten was NEVER coming. Jeff and I were given a mirror with an etching of a polo pony in it as a wedding gift. Delilah asked me if I had a small mirror in the bathroom and of course I didn't so she looked around and saw the etched mirror on the wall and brought it to me. She held it so I could see and dad gum it, they were telling me the truth-he really WAS coming after all. I'll always remember seeing Quinten for the first time with the image of a polo pony superimposed over his reflection.

Quinten arrived with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck so I rested while Michelle untangled him. Delilah told me later how amazed she was that while Michelle was working on the cord, Quinten's eyes were wide open and looking around before his shoulders were even out.

When I finally saw all of Quinten, it was 1:20 pm on August 22, 2004. He was wearing the cutest expression of shock, amazement and annoyance. What do we all think when we first see the world? They laid him on my stomach and my mom, who arrived sometime during my time warp on the bed, cut the umbilical cord. I rubbed him dry with a blanket while I held the oxygen mask to his face. I don't know what I said to him but it seemed like we had the most important conversation.

They took him from me (but not out of my sight) and weighed and measured him. Shanna helped me deliver the placenta. My body didn't feel very different when I delivered Quinten, but the instant the placenta was delivered I was not pregnant any more. The sensation was amazing. Originally I had thought the idea of planting a tree with the placenta was a little far out for me but I later read about the Navaho tradition of burying the placenta near a child's home to give him roots and somehow that appealed to me. We froze the placenta to bury when we finally buy our own farm.

I was bloody and drenched in sweat. I showered while Quinten's Daddy gave him his first bath in the kitchen. Once we were clean, we snuggled back in bed together while my mom ("Panchita" to Quinten) and Jeff made phone calls. Michelle, Shanna and Delilah headed home for some much-needed rest after thirteen hours of helping me deliver Quinten.

Our friends, Cissie, Audrey and Christine, arrived complete with party hats and flowers to celebrate Quinten's birthday. We toasted him with champagne and chowed down on his birthday cake ("Sorry kiddo-you have to wait for the breast-milk version this year!")

I thought that I would never be brave enough to let him sleep in bed with us (surely we'd smother him?). Wrong! No way was I letting him away from my body!

There are so many things I am so grateful for. I am grateful to my husband, who in spite of his doubts, let me have a home birth and who supported me through nine months of pregnancy and thirteen hours of labor. I am grateful for the coincidence that brought Delilah into our lives and for the help she gave me in bringing Quinten into the world. I'm so very, very glad that when I thought that the pain between where I was and when I thought I'd see Quinten was going to get so bad that I would need drugs to survive, that no one in my support group would listen to me. My one and only regret is that I ever allowed that thought to cross my mind. I never needed drugs, just a little more faith. I'm glad that though I desperately wanted an intact perineum, I ended up with a tear rather than an episiotomy. I'm glad for the funny things I remember from being in labor: my water exploding all over everyone, explaining to Delilah between contractions (after I decided that the word "HO" was powerful medicine for pain) that "ho" was the signal for cavalrymen to execute a previous order on horseback. I'm grateful to my dogs, Minnie Pearle and Ember, and my cat, Simba for standing guard by my bed while I was in labor. Most of all, I'm so grateful for our beautiful baby boy.