Facing fear: the story of my son's birth

                                 

A few days before my son was born, I told Simon that it felt like Christmas eve everyday, waiting for Christmas morning to come.  What better day than Christmas eve to write out the story I have long been wanting to pen, the story of my own son's birth into this world and all that the journey to his birth represents for me.

To start off his story, a bit of my own first.  For many years now, the concept of being "true" to oneself has been important to me.  My early years were most noticeably plagued by a deep shame of self, and attempts to escape myself in various ways.  Onlookers would say that watching me run amok brought pain to them, but my own pain deafened me to their words of warning and concern.  Fear was my most constant feeling.  I struggled with it in many forms: anxiety attacks, obsessive compulsive thinking and action, insomnia.  I hated how I felt.

Broken relationships riddled my life.  I had experienced a sort of self-inflicted heartbreak over and over, and yet I kept running into the chaos.  Not much has changed in that regard, I just suppose I have a greater awareness of God's grace and a conviction of righteousness (two things I didnt have in the past).  Most days, I still feel really broken. I still have more anxiety and OCD thinking and problems sleeping than I care to admit.

So, enter here a pregnancy I didn't expect.  I had given up the dream years before, and wasnt quick to resurrect it.  My husband wanted a child, I wanted to want one.  I was afraid, I will admit. I feared the very possibility of losing something I wanted so badly in my soul.  It was easier to not want it.  But God longs to give us the desires of our hearts, and He had not let the dream die :)

I "fell pregnant" (as they say in SA) within one month off the pill.  Right then and there I should have seen it as a sign from God that "he's got this", some holy assurance that I need NOT fear.  I brushed that wholesome thought off and ran for my fear tent.  I camped out in that tent every single day.  Surely I would have a miscarriage...my mom had talked of her pain from such a loss.  Surely I would have a child with special needs...Im 36 and way too high strung.  Surely I had drank too much coffee/done too many drugs/stressed too much...you name it, I feared it.  My husband is much more patient than I give him credit.  Sadly, what was meant to be a blessing was most of the time a source of consistent tension and disagreement between us. Until...

Until everything changed.  24 weeks into our son's gestation, the doctor we had painstakingly decided upon died of pnemonia.  I cannot tell you how much prayer it had taken me to accept he was going to birth my son, and just when I liked him he died.  My sweet happy cookie monster doctor with a kermit the frog voice I rarely understood had abandoned me!  What was going on?  Fear RUSHED in as I thought of having to make so many decisions all. over. again. 

God is so gracious.  What happened from here on out will forever be a banner of His love over my family.  It's funny, but at the end of 2014 while on holiday with friends, we had a running joke that said "Jesus, take the wheel" because of some near death type behaviour my friend engaged in while driving us down the side of a steep mountain (crazy friends).  However, these words became the theme of our story for the remaining 16 weeks.  Jesus really did take the wheel.  And shove us into the back seat in the process.

In an equally magical and God-sort of way, Simon and I found ourselves pursuing "natural" birth.  Now, in the USA that means exactly what it sounds like it means: imagine bush ladies in the Amazon having babies.  But in SA, it simply means a vaginal (as opposed to a caesarean) birth because of SA's high c-section stat (86% of all private hospital births end in c-section).  I knew I wanted to have my baby the natural way in the SA sense, but I had never ever ever thought of having it natural in the USA sense.  Looking back, I still dont totally know how i ended up wanting that...but I did!

We found a doula and a midwife through the grace of God and Google, and before we knew it we had thrown our insurance plan and coverage and list of doctors on our "scheme" out the window of this train and were trusting God to complete the good work He had so clearly started.  Simon and I were fired up about this new plan.  And whats more, we were truly united.  We had found one another in the idea of really entering into the pains and joys of birth together.  (As I said, we run toward the chaos 😄).

Fast forward 3 months to my last week of pregnancy.  We've done everything we could to prepare for this "natural" birth, from classes to books to exercises and stretches to plans to freeze-dry the placenta (dont ask if you dont wanna know and dont plan to judge me!).  Simon headed off to bed while I stayed up to enjoy my first night of midwife-ordered bed rest.  My iron levels were low and nothing i was doing to raise them was working so the plan was to do NOTHING but eat iron-rich foods and wait. 

I went to the bathroom around 11:30 pm and peed for a very long time! So long that I started praying "Oh God, this is it. Is this it? It's it, right? Oh my God, this is IT!"  And really freaking out that I was now going to try and do this like the bushwomen! I must be crazy.  And just like that, all the fear came rushing back in.  Somehow it had gone dormant for all these blissful months but now it was back and ready to rumble.  I felt completely out of my depth. So I prayed again.

I will never forget the peace that rushed over me in that moment.  It was like I entered some sort of trance-like state.  I started to glide like a fairy as I felt God speak truth to my spirit that this plan was His will for us and He would enable me to endure it.  Before I knew it, it was 330 am and I had facebook messaged my way through 3 hours of contractions!  Ah, technology that allowed me to chat to my dear friend in Australia who had just done natural birth half a year prior.  What a God thing!  Gotta love time zones in moments like that :)

I decided to wake Simon because up until then I had truly enjoyed being alone with Jesus (and Tessa) in that place.  Much like the wee hours of Christmas morning that I had delighted in as a child, I was content with anticipation and sure of one thing:  I CAN DO THIS. 

Simon was amazing.  His first response when I woke him was to gently take me by the arm and lay me down with him in the bed and pray.  We prayed through a few contractions, and then we both got up to get ready.  Showered, chatted to family, coffee for him/tea for me, I turned on an episode of Seinfeld but it totally robbed the moment of any sacredness.  I switched the TV off quickly, and took my yoga ball to the sunroom to watch the sun rise.  I rode the waves of contractions and slowly began to feel things amping up.

Midwife and doula had both said things would be fine and they would see me soon, and we all decided to wait until after 8 am to leave for the hospital.  Living in Fish Hoek means we had to decide this beforehand because it takes a while to get out of the town due to heavy construction and morning traffic.  I felt totally in control of this whole thing and trusted my gut to wait at home.  Suddenly, I knew our waiting was done!  I crawled into the back seat of our car just as the doula arrived at our house and we convoyed over the mountain toward Vincent Palotti in morning rush hour traffic. 75 minutes later (!!!!!!!) we arrived.  I will never hear JIll Phillips sing "Labor of Love" and not think of that car ride.  It was my sanity!

"It was a labor of pain, It was a cold sky above, for the girl on the ground in the dark every beat of her beautiful heart was a labor of love."

Love was driving out fear, and as we made our way up to the labor ward I rocked my way up onto the bed and was measured at 6 centimeters!  What an encouragement.  My husband offered to hang up our christmas lights and bible verses and help make the room homey like good Amazon bushpeople do, but I think we all realized there was just no time.  I got into the bath and what joyous relief flooded me.  Little did I know that the bath, while comforting, would let me down in the end.  2 more centimeters later and my labor was slowing down.  Contractions felt very intense, like someone was slowly giving my insides an Indian burn: twisting half of me this way and the other half of me that way.  

Sweet midwife was the poor soul who had to keep informing me that things weren't really moving forward.  Surely she is wrong!  she advised me to get out of the bath and let gravity do its thing, and boy did that make a difference.  I felt my sons head literally move into my pelvic cavity.  It was seriously sore.  So sore I started to feel like I couldn't cope.  Up until then I had surfed those waves of pain like a boss, and had found such solace in Simon reading me passages from the Bible and looking me in the eye as a new contraction came, breathing me through it.  I had felt myself overcoming fear at its core.

But I started to lose focus.  Hard as they tried, no one could reach me.  Not Simon, not Joy the doula, not a good Tom Petty tune playing in the background.  Suddenly, the voice of an angel (my midwife!) says to me so sweetly "Ashley, you are in a time warp.  What feels like hours to you is only moments.  You are almost there."  And like a good Christian, I snapped at my angel:  "You keep saying that!!!  But how long is it REALLY??" I think I quickly apologized to her, and to Simon who I had told to shut up when he tried being nice (the prenatal class warned us about those moments! Sorry babe!).  But seriously people, this was pain I had not known.  Each contraction, and they were almost on top of one another, felt a bit more impossible to manage than the one before. I lost my breath each time, becoming wild eyed and scared.

Sandy asked to have a feel.  As she did, she used her fingers to hold my cervix open just enough that JP's head could pass over a lip that was holding him back slightly, and HELLO it was time for action.  Sandy grabbed a birthing stool (so long, dreams of birthing in a bath) and sat me on it, and sat Simon behind me in a chair to provide support.  She coached me through the next 20 minutes of pushing, and with each set of 3 very hard core pushes I could literally FEEL my son coming out of me.  I felt every single second.  I will never forget it as long as I live.  I was desperate for this naturalness to be over already! And yet, as JP came into view, I wish to God I could hold onto that moment forever.

I knew when it was my last push. I knew that this was it.  I gave it everything I had within me, every doubt and anxiety and worry and sense of shame that had been attached to me all these years, I pushed them all out as I pushed my son out too.  I felt myself giving birth to me. I know it sounds airy fairy, but i really had like a caterpillar-butterfly moment with myself!  I was a new person on the other side of that last push.  Vivid as anything, my son slid out and was placed on my stomach.  I naturally pulled his slimy fish body close to my chest and heard a "No no, leave him lower, you will rip out the placenta". Holy moly, it suddenly hit me...this child is ATTACHED to me!  I looked down to see the umbilical cord pulsating, keeping my son alive!  I cannot describe this moment, awakening me to the reality that we were one beyond anything or anyone.  

As my sweet husband looked down at our son, and up at me, everything in his eyes confirmed everything I was feeling:  there was nothing more to fear, Ashley.  You are firmly in the heart of Jesus and He has remade you.  You have overcome.

They say you forget the pain...I beg to differ!  That pain was important for me, hard earned and I dont want to forget it.  That pain was a choice.  I had wanted to feel It.  Somehow that had made the joy more real for me to, and it was real! Oxytocin flowed like wine amongst us all :)  It was such a seriously awesome 24 hours after this, just the 3 of us (and 100 nurses coming in and out all night!) in a beautiful recovery room at the hospital.  

Simon asked me "Would you do it again?" a day later. I said no pretty quickly.  But, if he asked me now I would say yes.  yes I would. I believe in that decision we made to have a natural birth.  I believe its the choice God would have us make again.  To face the fear, to face the pain, and to overcome.  It's not for everyone, I dont expect or impose it upon others by any means.  But for us, it is right.

John-Paul William Smeddle

God is gracious, a small servant, strong willed 

Our son is aptly named.  He is all these things! He is teaching us more than we could have imagined.  He is our little overcomer! He was determined to survive through 9 dramatic months in my belly, and through 13 dramatic hours coming out of my belly, and now living with US...ha!  He's the best.  We say it over and over, he's the best.

Thank you God for your grace.  We celebrate your victory in our lives.