Jai Ram’s Birth Stories

Here I share with you the stories of my first two births. The story of the arrival of my third child, on her due date, has been 18 years in the making. I trust the timing of all births. Perhaps soon, it will come…!

AMRITO’S BIRTH

I take a deep breath before writing this story and tears already come to my eyes. Not because it's so awful – it’s 2015 as I write this, 4 days shy of 13 years since that day and much has happened since to help me process and heal. But because I am so grateful.

13 years ago I was living in Berlin and was pregnant with my first child. I was booked in to a birth house, of which there are many in Berlin. The system was a rotational roster of midwives, and you met with as many of them as possible during your pregnancy. Sometimes at these meetings I would cry because I felt pretty alone. I'd had 8 months of learning German from scratch so far, so my German was very basic. I somehow thought “Well, I think I've got a pretty good pain threshold. How bad could it be?” and I didn't really inform myself too much. We went to a birth preparation course but my husband had to translate everything and I found it hard to connect.

The due date came and went and Amrito was very content to hang around in my womb. The midwives began suggesting ways to bring the birth on and I tried them. Eventually they suggested castor oil in orange juice, which brought on cramps and diarrhea.. but not the contractions! My memory is a little hazy, but eventually labour did begin, 10 days after his due date, and off we went. 

I got into the bath at home and focussed on my breath but in retrospect the surges were still irregular and mild and I would have been better off going for a walk, chatting, watching a movie, and conserving my energy and focus for later. But I was pretty serious about it and didn't have the benefit of hindsight and so I knuckled down.. 

After some hours we called up the birth house and the midwife on duty said she would meet us there. As luck would have it of the midwives I'd met she was the one with whom I felt least connection and her English was not great. When she arrived she seemed irritated and was having some kind of issue with the manager of the birth house, it seemed to me at least.

So my husband and I went into a room on our own while she did stuff in the office and I continued with the surges. I think I was only a couple of centimetres dilated when I first arrived so she left us to it. In hindsight, I didn't realise how important it is for a woman in labour to feel connected with those around her, and actively encouraged and supported. So in spite of my husband's caring presence, I felt quite alone. I isolated myself in my own mind and tried to cope.

After some hours there was a bigger surge and the waters broke. We called the midwife to come in and she saw that the water was brown, which meant the baby had pooed in the water. This is a sign of stress, though it's not clear when the baby pooed ie. how recently. Policy dictated that either the baby was born within an hour from then or we had to go to the hospital.

The midwife gave me some kind of injection (I don't know what that was) and I began to panic. In my memory she was rough, the way she spoke to me, and impatient. I didn't understand her properly, nor she me probably and my husband himself was in stress. I was then given air from a mask, and the whole thing began to take on a scary turn. 

Of course, the baby was no way going to come out like this within the hour, so it was off to hospital. We drove there, the midwife was not allowed up with us. When I got there I just remember the coldness and clinicalness of the place, which was a shock. We found our way to the right place in the hospital and then the talks began. I got angry and refused to try to speak German with anyone. I demanded they speak English or get someone who could. They examined me and where I had been 7 centimetres or something dilated at the birth house, I had gone back to 4. By this stage, as far as I was concerned I had been in labour for more than 12 hours. They started talking caesarian. 

The hospital staff told me I would need to have a sintocinon drip to reactivate the labour. I didn't know much about this and it felt strange and wrong that the experience had taken this turn where I was discussing things, very intellectually it seemed, with staff. I felt I had to seize control at this point, but I also didn't know in which direction I should or could steer it.

The rushes from the sintocinon drip were very painful, and at one stage almost continuous and I wasn't dilating again. They told me my baby's head was coming down at an angle and was not going to come into the pelvis or press on and open the cervix further. The pain was so intense that they offered me an epidural. At this point the thought of not being in pain was very attractive and I was still holding out some hope that I could still give birth vaginally.

They wanted to wait for a break between contractions to get the needle in to give me the epidural, but one never came, so they did it anyway. Perhaps the pain went down then, I don't remember, but eventually it became clear that it was going to have to be a caesarian.

Surreally, I found myself getting prepped for the caesar. The screen went up. They cut me open and tugged out my baby. They brought him up and tried to put him on my chest but I was shaking so hard from shock and from the drugs that I couldn't hold him really and I felt numb, physically and emotionally. My husband went with him and sang to him while they did the tests and then insisted they bring him back to me faster than they wanted to. 

Then I was in a room with him and an angel of a midwife was there, who directed me to put him on my naked chest and I will never forget how he wriggled his way up my chest, nuzzling and bumping, found my nipple and began to suckle. He was like a little animal and I remember being surprised and impressed that after all that had happened his instincts were still so strong and healthy and everything felt so natural. My husband and I had had the feeling through the whole labour, in spite of worries voiced by staff that he might be in trouble, that he was strong and he was ok. We talked a little to the midwife about what had happened, began to come down and normalise and rehumanise somewhat.. and that was good.

Over the next days I kept my baby in my bed with me, refusing to put him even in the cot next to bed except very rarely. I held him as close as I could. I refused all pain killers, not wanting his system to have to cope with anything more, and I got up and walked around with him as much as I could. To the dissatisfaction of the hospital staff, we checked out as soon as we could.

Back at home I struggled to come to terms with things. My baby was healthy but I felt still somewhat numb. I couldn't carry him around to settle him and so I felt doubly useless. He seemed to cry a lot and I didn't know what to do. For the first few weeks I felt disconnected and strangely detached. Only much later did I identify this as postnatal depression. My mother came from Australia to help, and that was good. I took a homeopathic remedy, Sepia, that worked wonders in lifting my mood and slowly I began to feel lighter and more present and to reconnect with myself and come alive to my baby. From then on things got better and better and as I healed physically I was able to revel in him and love him and feel part of the world again, where I had felt I had been missing in action for some time. In Berlin it had turned from winter to spring while I had been out of the world.

JOHANNA’S BIRTH

A mere 6 months after his birth I fell pregnant again. To say this was a shock is to grossly understate it! It was one of those radical moments where there seemed to me to be two available paths: drown in overwhelm or rise to the occasion like never before. Sink or learn to swim, quick smart. I am grateful for that as for me at that time it was totally a choiceless choice.

So, I began to learn to swim. This was 2002 - before the era of online communities and teachings. You knew what you knew and you met who you met and it was all an individual, one at a time, face to face kind of experience, not the exponential explosion of information and collective learning that we currently see. For this too, in retrospect, I am grateful as it meant, initially at least, I had only myself to refer to. I explored my experience. I asked myself questions about Amrito’s birth, still so fresh in my mind. What happened? What did I miss? What could I do differently? What was I afraid of? What have I learnt? What is the role of relationships and support people in birth? And, maybe most critically, what do I NEED?

I learnt to begin to listen to my own feelings, instincts and intuition. I learnt to express my needs to others. I found a place to birth that I had actually felt drawn to the first time, and I made a connection with a midwife who was heaven sent. I asked her all my questions.

I meditated and did Kundalini yoga for pregnancy almost every day and learnt to trust myself. I looked into my mind and what it was up to.

I revelled in Amrito and prayed that he would learn to walk before the next baby came.

I informed myself about all the options and addressed all my worries and fears as they arose.

I made it well known to my doctor who would be present for the final stages of the birth only that I had my own opinions on things and I tested him by asking tricky questions. He didn’t agree with me on some issues, but still I felt respected and we came to some compromises on certain things where I was willing to make concessions. By the time the birth came, I respected him and he me. I felt him as an ally.

Finally, the day came to meet my baby. I was ready, inside and out. Prepared in all the ways I felt I could be and ready to let go and let it unfold. The prescribed day for being “allowed” to be “overdue” arrived. My team wanted to induce me, and I knew I wanted to avoid that. Especially I wanted to avoid have sintocinon, as I’d experienced a kind of hyper reaction to it and wasn’t keen to again. I wanted to not start out in that way. I agreed to a prostaglandin gel on the cervix. Nowadays I would question even that, but at the time it felt ok to me and I trusted that feeling.

We drove to the birth house (on the grounds of a hospital). I got the gel and something started happening, but also not really. I went home at the end of the day and felt fed up. Tired. Over it. Don’t want to have a baby after all, kind of mood. I went to bed. My husband, bless him. sat with me and gave me a Sat Nam Rasayan (meditative healing) session, in which inner resistances can be met and resolved. I gently enquired, as I’d practised doing: what is happening in me right now? Is there an emotion, idea, thought, belief of some kind stopping things from moving right now? Something that needs to be met, seen, felt so it can move on?

As I lay there I remember suddenly being filled with the thought that had gone with me into my first birth: for me, birth has to be long and complicated. I saw that thought in me clear as day and I just looked at it. “Really?” I asked myself. “Is that true? Based on what?”

Just asking that question was all it took. The thin veil of untruth dissolved. I had been period cramp-like contractions up to that point. But now a new feeling came. A surge. A large, effective-feeling surge rose up in me out of what felt like nowhere (or out of the inner ocean) and whoosh! The waters broke. The strong but ultimately thin, made-to-break amniotic sac broke. Eagerly I looked at the bed to see the colour of the water. Clear! Not brown! Yes!!!

We drove back to the birth-house. Somehow I have a memory (dreamlike now, as I had already left the world of the ordinary at that stage, the journey to the stars to collect my baby’s spirit had begun) of sitting on a bench at the side of a traffic roundabout. Maybe my husband was parking the car, I don’t know. It seems weird, but also a perfect metaphor for my state. The world was turning, the people and cars were going round, doing what they were doing, oblivious to me, while I sat in a suspended state of peace, just with myself, my baby and my breath, in a time outside of time.

We got to the birthing room, which I was already familiar with. The space was beautiful, the lighting soft, the atmosphere calm and unrushed. I had music playing. The playlist of mantras I had assembled resolved into one singular track as time went on - a kind of rhythmic, heart-beat like pulsing music that I wanted on repeat. A warm bath was in the centre of the room, not the bed. There was a rope suspended from the ceiling that I could pull and hang on if I wanted, to take weight off my legs and pelvis. My husband was there and my midwife, who I loved and trusted. I'd asked all my questions, prepared everything I could and now it was time to just do it. I had done everything possible in my power to do. Now, time to let go.

And it was all systems go. A flow from beginning to end. My midwife later said it was a picture-book birth. I let myself move however I wanted. I conserved my energy. I used the gravity, I swayed and moaned and sighed.

I loved it. Well, maybe not every single moment. Transition came. I was over it again. Another crisis of confidence. I dropped my bundle and felt I just wanted to collapse in a heap, wailing pathetically “It's not fair, it's not fair!!” .. which for me as a huge stoic by habit and upbringing is truly remarkable and I consciously allowed myself to be "pathetic" at the time. That allowance was of immense benefit to me right then. Because, having allowed it, soon after came the biggest ecstasy. 

Manja my midwife took me by the hand at this point and took me to the bed, suggesting I lie down and rest a little. I did. Then she said, Go to the toilet. So I wandered out into the corridor but was so out of it that I didn't remember where the toilet was and had headed off in the wrong direction. Whilst wandering, I felt just amazing suddenly. Something was very different. There were no strong sensations. No pain. Nothing. I wondered if I was going to have a baby at all. I just felt super clear. Super happy and radiant. I just felt outstanding. And then, out of that silence and stillness, they came: the pushing surges. Whoah!! I grabbed a chair nearby, rounded my back instinctively, and pushed. Turned out I did need to pee, and did so. On the floor (parquet, phew). WHATEVER! was my thought. It just felt too good to care. 

That first surge having passed, I headed off again to the loo (wrong direction still) but half way down the corridor I felt the next one starting to come so went to my chair and had another surge in standing, lower back curved, peeing some more on the floor. Awesome!

This cycle continued for some time, as it was really working for me. I did have the presence of mind and the conscience to think, I'll just pee over and over in this same place rather than all over the place. Just that wildness and focus and pure, effective power made any other thought meaningless. 

Then it became just plain old hard work. I went back to the room and sat on the bed. Baby was coming but it was TOUGH work. The doctor was there then and began to suggest it was not going fast enough. I found out later my midwife disagreed and wanted to give me more time, as the surges were more spaced out (which I now know often happens and is perfectly natural). I was deliberately only partially aware of them and just kept concentrating my strength. 

I did end up having an episiotomy, which likely would not have been necessary had I been given more time. In the end, a certain sense of time pressure did intrude. Yet I was beyond all that. I was just so in it and felt so victorious already, so that the episiotomy didn't bother me at all. I was just ready to see my baby. And then, THERE SHE WAS! 

A girl!!! I was ecstatic. I felt so strong and womanly. So victorious. Her birth was a total blessing. A healing. So much joy and celebration in the room. So much oxytocin and so much love.

The doctor stitched me up as I held her and I remember cracking jokes and just being so high and happy.

My Johanna Deva. What a gift.