Why I Really Wanted a Natural Childbirth

Eight years later, I finally understand

Photo by inkdrop/Canva Pro

When the contractions started in earnest, my mother and daughter were absorbed by worms.

It was an unnaturally hot day in Portland, Oregon — in fact, it had been an unnaturally hot month, reaching tropical temperatures that our lone window air conditioner was ill-equipped to battle. We were walking on Mt. Tabor, a shady urban oasis of trails and evergreens, killing time as I sweated and waited to give birth. My son was in no hurry. He was already 12 days late, and I was getting impatient.

My mother found a worm along the trail, and she picked it up for my three-year-old daughter to examine. Worms, bugs, and other creepy crawlies have never phased my mother. When I was six years old and we were traveling in Indonesia, I awoke to find the owner of our hostel walking across the room with a very large stick. “What’s happening?” I asked, wiping sleep from my eyes.

“There’s a scorpion in the bathroom,” my mother said matter-of-factly.

At the same Indonesian abode, geckos crawled freely on our walls. When I expressed trepidation, my mother said, as though stating the obvious, “Relax. They’re just lizards.”

In fact, I had a sneaking suspicion that the primary reason I was about to attempt a natural childbirth was to prove to myself that I was as tough as my mother. She had given birth naturally — twice. I greeted the world not in a hospital, but in my mother’s bed after a leisurely 52 hours of birthing.

As my mother and daughter groped through the soil to find more worms, I felt an intense clenching somewhere around my midsection and then a letting go. The contractions felt more or less as I had imagined them. I never had the pleasure of experiencing a contraction during my first pregnancy, as my daughter was breech and had to be cut out of me before she even attempted to make her way down the birth canal. I had felt robbed, somehow, of a pain that was rightfully mine. Instead, I was numbed with needles, submerged in the fog of anesthesia.

Now, the pain belonged to me, and it seemed that the long, sweaty weeks of waiting were drawing to an end. That evening, after tucking my daughter into bed, I brought out my yoga ball, determined to put it to use. For years, it had been rolling around our house, taking up too much space, and now I could finally justify the purchase. The contractions were coming faster and more furiously. Soon the timer revealed the magic number that would prompt a call to my midwife, who told me it was time to pack my bags.

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At the hospital, it was deemed likely that nothing much would happen until the following day. My midwife asked me if I wanted an Ambien. “I don’t know,” I said. “Do I?”

I took the Ambien. I later wished I hadn’t. It worked unnervingly well. The contractions still awoke me, but in-between them, I lapsed immediately back into a lush, velvet sleep before the tightening in my stomach, like a clenching fist, once again jolted me to consciousness. By the time morning came, a fuzziness filled my head like static, and a heaviness bore down on my eyelids.

I was feeling decidedly grumpy. If you had asked me to describe the emotions I anticipated feeling during labor, “grumpy” would not have made the list.

Finally, in the early afternoon, my midwife arrived, a different midwife from the previous evening, and not the one I was hoping for. But as it turned out, she was nothing but a blur in the background. It was my doula who strode in, looked me in the eye, asked if I needed anything, and actually seemed to care about my answer. I didn’t know what I needed, other than getting this baby out of me, so she made a few helpful suggestions. “Do you feel like a bath?” she asked.

Why yes! A bath was exactly what I wanted! As I submerged my foot into the not-quite-hot water, my grumpiness evaporated. The water was everything that the violent contractions were not. It required no enduring, just a gentle letting go. I stayed in the tub until the novelty wore off and the water began to cool. When I re-emerged, my midwife was nowhere to be found, but my doula had not abandoned me. There she was, asking how I was feeling, and cheering me on through each contraction. She kept telling me I was doing “awesome.”

I wanted to take her home with me. Every new mom needs a personal doula for a few months. Maybe years. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I knew this would be the last time anyone would be fully attentive to my needs for quite a while.

Once the baby was born, Dad would be busy keeping the first child entertained and preventing the house from slipping into utter chaos. Oh, and in our case, just starting a graduate program with a 1.5-hour commute each way. The first child would be busy being a child and perhaps a little caught up in feeling sorry for herself. The second child would be busy being a baby. He, of course, would find the concept that mom has “needs” utterly laughable.

My doula’s true talent lay not in meeting my needs, but in anticipating them, in fulfilling needs I didn’t even know I had. Her “surprises” were beautiful in their simplicity. As my contractions began to intensify, she presented me with a gargantuan plastic cup of ice water. It had a straw. It was sublime. Never has anything, previously or since, passed through my lips that was so intensely delicious and so complete in its perfection. The straw was a masterful touch. Later, when I was on my knees, my forehead pressed into my yoga ball, all I had to do was tilt my head, part my lips, and gasp, “Water.” And there was the straw, ready to carry that clear, cold, impeccable liquid to my mouth.

It was while I was kneeling on the floor that my water broke. I had completely forgotten about this milestone. During my first childbirth, “broke” is too severe a word for the gentle trickling, initially mistaken for urine, that meandered down my leg. It wasn’t so much a breaking as a leaking, a gradual deflating. Now here I was, nearly 35 hours into labor, and suddenly something burst inside me. It drenched the floor, the water warm and thick and gushing.

No matter how much a hospital might try to “civilize” childbirth, no matter how quickly they whisk away the tarnished sheets, there was no denying the fact that I was practically naked on my knees, moaning through contractions, soaked in my own bodily fluids. Everything was warm and damp, thick with an animal stench.

At this point, the midwife was looking at the device monitoring the fetal heart rate and frowning. One thing you don’t want to see during childbirth is your midwife frowning. She suggested that we move to the hospital bed. Following my primal instincts, I climbed into the bed on all fours, a kind of cat-cow, determined to finish what I started.

That’s when the pushing began. The contractions, according to my doula, I had handled like a boss. But I wasn’t quite prepared for the pushing. On the long list of things that women never tell other women about childbirth was that the contractions continue through the pushing. As I felt the wave of the next contraction, my midwife told me to push, and I thought, “How?” My muscles weren’t aligning properly. The muscles I needed to push were presently busy being assaulted by the oncoming contraction. They were not interested in multi-tasking.

So I took a deep breath and pushed. As I exhaled, a loud, guttural roar that I didn’t even know my vocal chords were capable of making, escaped my lips. I was pure animal. I was on all fours on a hospital bed, roaring. I couldn’t silence the roars if I tried. There was no other way to motivate my muscles through the simultaneous onslaught of contracting and pushing.

A thought occurred to me then, through the haze of sweat and stench of blood. All the senseless violence that men have engaged in through the centuries — perhaps all of it stems from the fact that they have witnessed the strength of a woman giving birth, and they feel inadequate by comparison. They invent pain to prove that they, too, can endure it. They cannot bring humans into the world, so they take them out instead.

I laughed a little in spite of myself as I prepared for the next push, thinking about centuries of war and slaughter stemming from the awe of watching a woman roaring on all fours and feeling jealous of a pain that only she will know. Because even right then, in the thick of it, I was grateful this was happening, grateful that I wasn’t lying on my back tied to a table, grateful that the pain was raw and real and not obscured by numbing agents.

I took a deep breath and gave myself a little pep talk. “This is it,” I said. I summoned every last ounce of strength that was still in me. I pushed and roared and pushed and roared. My doula cheered me on.

And that was, in fact, it. My son officially entered this world. I found out later that the umbilical cord was wrapped three times around his neck — hence, my midwife’s frowning at the heart monitor when she gently suggested we moved to the bed. She unwound the cord so swiftly, I don’t even remember a pause between his exit from my body and his first cries. All I remember is turning over into a sitting position and reaching for my baby. I got him, still a slimy mess, and I clutched him to my chest.

Childbirth had not been so much a religious experience as a heavily physical one. I was happy as hell that I had done it, and not particularly upset that I would never be doing it again. My midwife was impressed by the vigor with which I had pushed and the efficiency with which I had propelled my baby down the birth canal. My doula was completely smitten with me. She was probably just doing her job, but as far as I was concerned, she could keep on lavishing the praise, and I would soak up every last morsel.

From here on out, I knew, the only one receiving the praise would be the baby. No one would be fetching me ice water. Everyone would be frustrated with me. I would never be doing anything right.

If I was paying enough attention to the baby, I would not be paying enough attention to my partner. If I was paying enough attention to my partner, I would not be paying enough attention to my first-born daughter. If I was paying enough attention to my daughter, I would not be paying enough attention to my job. And there would be no room in there, of course, to pay any attention to myself.

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In the months leading up to my son’s birth and for years afterwards, I couldn’t quite articulate why a natural childbirth had been important to me. Like waking up at 2 a.m. to hike up Long’s Peak in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, it was something I wanted to do, even though I knew it would be painful and not much fun.

Yes, I wanted to know what a contraction felt like. I wanted to know if I, like my mother, could endure the pain. I wanted to know if I could bring life into this world, just as my mother had before me, just as the centuries of tough-as-nails women had before us both.

During my first birth, a C-section, I had been on my back, shaking with cold, wincing at needles inserted cleanly in my veins. The cutting open of my flesh was happening to another body, one I could not feel, obscured by the sterile blue curtain that shielded me from my daughter’s unnaturally sudden entrance into the world.

Of course, I was grateful that a C-section was an option when my daughter was declared breech. Of course, I don’t think less of any woman who gets an epidural. As I pointed out, at the time, my own reasons for refusing one were hazy at best.

It’s only with the wisdom of retrospect that I realize I was subconsciously trying to reclaim a power I always knew I had — a power that over the years, and particularly since becoming a mother, the patriarchy had diminished, denied, obscured.

We seldom talk about how much mothers lose when they have a child. Yes, I gained a human life when I had my firstborn, and all the joys that came with it, but in the process, I lost a part of myself.

As I made the physical transformation to a milk vessel, I lost autonomy over my own body. As I navigated the frantic realities of being a working mom, I lost ownership of my career. As my partner and I attempted to communicate above the din of our new life, I lost a relationship that was predicated, first and foremost, on us. As the clutter built and the walls closed in, I lost freedom, solitude, mental space.

Motherhood is a journey our culture tends to trivialize, commoditize, romanticize. We don’t take it seriously. We’re expected to be “back in business” weeks after giving birth, as though we should be able to pick up where we left off, as though something profound did not just take place that shook us to our very core. When we struggle, we’re told that we should stop whining and suck it up like all the moms before us, or that the latest and greatest product will fix our problems, or that we shouldn’t worry — the joy of watching our baby smile will eclipse all else.

Since having my firstborn, in the midst of the chaos, clutter, and condescension, it started to feel like life was happening to me. I could label every item in the pantry (yes, I actually did this), but I still couldn’t seem to wrest control.

I didn’t want my second childbirth to happen to me. I wanted to own it. I didn’t want to be strapped down, prodded with needles, separated from my own body. I wanted to be nearly naked and roaring on all fours.