Leisure and Labor

“Can you feel that?” the nurse asked.

“No,” I said.

Because I was over 40, I was in the hospital being checked two days before my due date. The placenta of older mothers, my obstetrician had told me, sometimes starts to deteriorate toward the end of pregnancy. Tests on my placenta showed it was “borderline okay.” If they felt it was necessary for the health of the baby, labor would be induced. But when the nurse started monitoring me, they found I was already in the early stages of labor. I didn’t feel anything but remembered I’d had crampy feelings at home the previous day.

At the hospital, I was hooked up to a monitor in a labor room overlooking the cityscape and winding river. I spent the first few hours lying down comfortably, alternately practicing deep breathing and relaxation and reading Jane Austen. I’d decided to read during labor, or at least to see if I could. The nurse, a calm, reassuring young woman who obviously had a vocation for this work, seemed a little puzzled.

“Are you able to concentrate on that?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered, in the early pages of Emma. Jane Austen is one of the nineteenth-century English writers I frequently reread. She seemed the ideal choice for my pre-birth reading.

“That’s a contraction,” the nurse said a minute later, looking at the monitor. “Can you feel that?”

“No,” I said.

Again, the nurse seemed puzzled, but I saw no reason to worry. If she knew a contraction was happening, what did it matter if I couldn’t feel it? I assumed it wouldn’t continue this way.

After a couple of exchanges like that, though, I started to feel like I was rudely ignoring the nurse. After all, I was kind of supposed to participate in the process. Then I definitely did feel a contraction—an awesome, machine-like, precise application of pressure, not painful, and then release. The pressure and the release took the same amount of time, with a brief pause before the release began. “Wow,” I said. My body had started its automatic process that would carry on to its conclusion.

My pregnancy had gone smoothly, and I’d enjoyed nearly every moment of it. I was fascinated by all the physical and emotional changes. I’d heard so many different stories about when women first noted signs of being pregnant. For me, it was a sudden keen hunger along with a complete absence of PMS cramps. So we were not surprised to hear the test result. “You know your body,” said the woman on the phone.

I’d chronicled the pregnancy in emailed updates with questions to my mom, sisters, and aunts, who lovingly responded. I was not exactly looking forward to—but equally curious about—what labor and delivery would be like. I had no idea if I’d be able to do the breathing and pushing when urged to, but I didn’t think about it much ahead of time. I’d read that women did all kinds of exercise and special diets to prepare for birth, which might help but were not a guarantee of an easy labor.

My husband and I had been to our hospital for a childbirth class, and there would be a follow-up moms’ group to help us get through the early days. We were the oldest couple in the class. While listening to the instructor and going through the exercises, I kept marveling at the mere fact that we were there among this group. At one point the guys were supposed to assist in some way, as the women lay back on floor mats as if on a hospital bed. The guy next to us, who’d been squatting, suddenly lost his balance and fell over. His wife raised her head and commented, “You’re fired.”

At the end of the class, we watched a video of a woman giving birth. My wonder at our taking part in this suddenly soared into a mixture of grief over past childlessness and joy at coming motherhood. I broke down and cried throughout the video; no one said anything to me.

At our first moms’ group we talked about our labor stories as much as our babies. One young woman said, “I told my husband: That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Eventually the contractions became painful,¹ and my husband started rubbing my back. At this point the experience became less like leisure and more like labor! But it was still early labor. Over the course of the day, the initial plan of two hours of monitoring was first extended to an additional two hours, then to an overnight stay of monitoring but I could order my dinner, then to a speeded-up induction with no food allowed—I watched my husband eat the dinner I had ordered. Then he went home to get our bags that we had foolishly not brought with us.

When he had been away for a while, getting help with moving the bags to the car, things accelerated. Theo began to stop being the “perfect baby,” as the nurse had dubbed him (we didn’t know the sex of the baby then), and showed signs of stress with a decelerating heart rate. When this happened the third time, it was quite alarming:  A nurse rushed in and called loudly for help. Suddenly I was surrounded by three nurses and the doctor on duty, a young man. An oxygen mask was slapped on me and an IV inserted into my left wrist, after an initial painful assault on the other wrist, while periodically I had to roll to the side and get up on hands and knees on the bed to help the baby adjust his position and get his heart rate going.

I managed to reach my husband on the phone to tell him we were proceeding to a C-section. He called my sister Monica, who had been kept up to date all day. Both arrived, to my relief, before I was taken into the operating room.

Next: Birth

1. I can’t remember the painful contractions now! But I recorded it at the time.