And then there were four…

Baby Rhubarb is here…

Rhubarb AKA “Rue-Bear”, born at 10.04am on 25th October, weighing a rather hefty 9lb 10oz

He’s chubby, he’s smooshable and he is one lucky baby. We went through some hellish moments to get him here – all is fine but boy what a journey. It’s going to take me a few posts to get it all down, so bear with me, but the littlest Skipper is now 3 weeks old and pretty darn fabulous.

So, here goes – the first instalment in the longest week of my life:

TUESDAY

I went into labour 4 days overdue, after deciding to give myself one last baby project to do. You know the theory: you have something you’re determined to finish and you simply CAN’T have a baby until it’s done. Well my crafty psychology totally fooled my body into labour after I was done crocheting this sleepy sheepy for the imminent womb-fruit:

(A most excellent pattern by Harugurumi)

Bosh. Crochet hook down. One final ante-natal yoga class attended. General late-pregnancy griping in full swing. Bedtime.

I woke up at 2.20am (incidentally, the exact same time I woke up in labour with Moomin, and coincidentally the exact same time Moomin was then born, 24 hours later) with contractions I couldn’t talk through. I’d just had a dream I was in my parents’ old house, talking to my mother-in-law while having contractions. She noted that I was having trouble keeping up the conversation through each wave, which I suppose was my subconscious telling me to wake the fuck up and call somebody! I went to the bathroom and got through a couple more contractions on all fours there, just to see if this was real or not. Um, yeah, it was real. Went back to the bedroom to prod Husby awake.

“I need you,” I said.

“Mwhaah?”

“I need you to get up now.”

“Seriously?”

“I need you to inflate the birth pool.”

“But… seriously?”

Yes, he did get a smack at this point. Several, in fact, and then I had to smoosh my face into a pillow to breathe through the next contraction.

Husby got up and started flapping in a rather adorable useless-man way, while I called our doula who came straight over and congratulated me on a particularly heavy contraction when she found me hanging off the towel rail in the bathroom.

Husby wrestled with the pool and I got to use the breathing techniques I’d learned in ante-natal class which were frankly awesome considering I’d had no gentle run up to labour (yet AGAIN. It’s really not fair that in both my labours I’ve been thrown in at the deep end!). Moomin woke up about this point – he had a horrible cold and his cough woke him up. He was kind of delighted at all this action, and Husby took him down to my in-laws’ so he could go back to sleep (hahahaha, he didn’t. The kid was awake from 3am for the rest of that day!). I think the midwives turned up at about 5am though I had no idea I’d just got through 2 hours of labour – it felt like twenty minutes to me. My doula, Jill, was amazing. She and Husby took turns pressing down on my back and filling the pool, because OF COURSE we didn’t have enough hot water and OF COURSE I had another back labour, despite Rhubarb being the right way around. I guess that’s just where I feel my contractions, but I was quite fucked off at the prospect of all that back pain again. I could deal with the sensations in my womb, but the back ache……. ach.

Started begging for the pool but it wasn’t full yet. Managed to fend off a rather young and irritated midwife who wanted to examine me regularly, and instead kept on moving: hands and knees, leaning on the birth ball, leaning on a dining chair, leaning on Jill/Husby. I didn’t care WHO was rubbing my back during a contractions, just so long as SOMEBODY was. And each person had a different technique. Jill dug her knuckles right in there, pressing down on pressure points and opening up my pelvic bones. Husby’s massive hot hands swirled round and round the small of my back. The midwife rubbed firmly up and down my spine. The student midwife was tentative and oh-so-gentle but even that was good. I ate spoonfuls of manuka honey and carried on begging for the pool, and according to my notes, at around 7.30am I was in ‘established labour’ and I could get in.

Oh. My. Fuck. Never felt anything so fricking glorious in my life. I think my actual words were: “Yes motherfucker.”

I slept with my head and arms hanging over the side of the pool in between contractions, which by the way, were getting intense with a capital “hellyeah”. Trying to channel Ina May Gaskin into my bones, I attempted to greet each one with the frame of mind that it was one step closer, one more fraction nearer, a little looser, more open… I had my eyes closed for most of the time, but I remember holding Husby’s hands, hearing what he was whispering to me, breathing in time with me though he said later he couldn’t keep up with the breathing techniques by this point. Jill telling me I was beautiful and doing so well. It was getting tough but I knew I could do this, knew how important it was to do it, to complete the mission, after the feelings of failure with Moomin’s birth. Fuck it, I WAS doing this, and I could tell things were getting closer.

A growing pressure and faint urge to push, which became stronger and stronger until there were sounds like lions in the pool and I was grunting my throat raw. But things weren’t quite right – not that I could know for sure. With Moomin’s labour, I was numb from the epidural at this point, having become exhausted after twenty-something hours of labour, so I didn’t know what it was meant to feel like to need to push, or go through transition. I guessed it was transition because I felt like running away and was sobbing into the water saying I couldn’t do it. Of course everyone got excited at this point, realising that the second stage was coming.

Exceeeept, it wasn’t.

Well, it was, kind of. I continued my Amazonian growling pushes for another hour, and I could feel something descending, but it wasn’t the head, it was my waters. And it wasn’t coming down like it should. As each contraction tailed off I repeated “come on baby, come on baby” but I could tell it wasn’t coming. I desperately needed that baby to come through my pelvis but it couldn’t. The midwife (a different one, a better one, come at the shift change) examined me for the first time and found an anterior cervical lip. She tried to push it back during a contraction but it wasn’t going. The pool was collapsing too, the liner didn’t fit right and had let water behind it and we were kind of sinking…

So. Out of the pool, onto the sofa. “Try NOT to push,” says the midwife. Uhhhhh, right. Ok so la la la, contraction coming, breathe breathe breathe HOLYFUCKSHITOHMYLORD you said DON’T push? I tried, I really did. Until I couldn’t not push and then I had to “ooooooh” it out and apparently that was good but I couldn’t tell which way was up, didn’t care that we’d just drycleaned the sofa and oh, there’s daylight outside, when did that happen? Four contractions on all fours on the sofa and suddenly something went pop. I told the midwife and she said I must be mistaken (because, you know, I’m not intensely feeling everything inside my body right now or anything) and my waters hadn’t gone. I said I didn’t mean my waters, I meant the lip had popped past the head and noooooooooow those pushes were doing their job. Oh yes, and oh no and oh my god the baby’s coming. Well. Slowly.

On the floor now, knees on bare wood. Freezing cold but nothing to do but push, and that baby’s coming down now, and there’s a mini bag of waters coming first. Things stalled a little. The midwife checked the water and there was meconium. Shit. Literally. She called paramedics just in case we needed to transfer if the baby had inhaled too much but at this point things weren’t panicky. Then the head was crowning. I reached down to feel it and had no fucking idea how this was going to work. I mean, really. But, you know, somehow, it does. A miracle I really don’t want to imagine too clearly.

The head was out. I had it in my hands. And this is where everyone is jubilant and things should be shiny and peachy and you know in a few simple pushes your baby will be in your arms. I was panting, “Hey baby, hello baby, we did it baby, well done baby, clever baby…” and the next contractions came and I pushed and nothing happened. And again, and nothing happened.

And I still had my eyes shut but I heard the worry pass between the midwives, my doula and Husby. They moved so fast, and I want to hug them forever for how quickly they acted. “Get on your back.” I did. They tried to turn him but he was jammed stuck. “Get on your hands and knees.” I did. They tried to pull one arm out but no joy. The paramedics were in the room now. I was leaning on our armchair, arse in the air, being yelled at. “Can you feel another contraction coming?” I didn’t know what the fuck I felt, because I had two pairs of midwife hands inside me, trying to move my stuck baby. I pushed anyway. “Get on your back!” Again, I did. Lying in my doula’s arms, I pushed as hard as I could. So many people here now, and the two midwives trying with all their might. Suddenly an arm, then a slithery body, then the anticipation of that magical “he’s here!!” moment and all will be well.

No.

He’s purple. Lying on his back, serene, perfect, eyes closed, one tiny hand on his tummy. And he’s not breathing.

Three weeks on and I can’t help but stare at that particular bit of floor and visualise him there like that. There was a silence, then words that I don’t remember hearing but know were said:

“There’s no heartbeat.”

“Start CPR.”

And a paramedic is pressing on his little chest, and there’s an oxygen mask over his little lips and I am rubbing him with a towel and stroking his chest and his stomach and his legs and his feet and holding his limp hands in mine and cooing to him as if he’s just asleep: “Hey baby, come on baby, it’s ok baby, we’re here, come on, come on honey…” and Husby is beside me crying and my doula has me in her arms but she’s not saying anything, she’s not saying it’ll be all right. I’m not crying yet, but then it’s all taking too long. He should be back now, he should be responding, he should be crying. He should be alive.

There was one moment, and it was the only one in the whole of the following week, where the thought crossed my mind that he might not come back. I feel ashamed to even have felt it. To have even considered what life would have been like to lose a baby. How life goes on, if it can at all. My heart, soul and something deeper that resides in your gut and makes you move and breathe and exist when all hope is gone – they all reach out and clutch on to anyone who has experienced the worst possible thing I can imagine. I can’t imagine it, but I came close, and all the times I’ve cried since that moment, I’ve cried for them as well. Time stops in that moment. I had those thoughts, but I thank everything in this world there is to thank that I did not have to live that reality.

And now I’m crying, not wanting to acknowledge the possibility, one possible fork in the road at this point, and then:

“I have a heartbeat,” says the paramedic.

His little chest is moving. I feel it with my fingers, a tiny heartbeat. And not long after that, a gasp. An awful, laboured, silent gasp from my baby’s mouth. And another.

“He’s trying to breathe, that’s good.”

And he’s pinking up, slightly. I have his hands in my hands and they are still warm and they will stay warm. He’s no longer blue. He won’t be turning cold.

And that’s all I can type tonight. There’s a whole lot more, and if you’ll indulge me I’ll write up the rest in separate posts, but at least you know how it ends. All is well, but the journey was a hard one.

All I can say is I’m grateful to the ends of the earth and back. For luck, for the help we received, for the strength of our little Rhubarb.

And he’s here.