crunchy parenting

It’s my 31 Days To Build A Better Blog Challenge:Blog of the Day Day! Thanks to Nirvana Mamma for all the tweet & comment love, and to all the lovely mamas and bloggers stopping by to say ‘hi’!

I know it’s a bit long, but for all the new visitors, I thought I’d share something a little more personal today…

Recently, I was touched and moved by Adriel’s post over at the Mommyhood Memos, on her birth experience. While she had been hoping and planning for the typical crunchy birth experience, a la midwives and such, her little bundle of joy was discovered to be breech two hours into labor and she was whisked away to the land of.. well, something that wasn’t quite planned.

I love her post because it was so close to my own experience in many, many ways. I was in labor with Spice for about twelve hours BEFORE pushing. Two hours into pushing, my water still hadn’t broken and we start discussing whether they should break it, or if we should transfer. I start crying, since I DON’T want to go to the hospital, and other than being tired, I feel fine and the baby still seems to be fine. So while I’m upset that we’re thinking of transferring rather needlessly, my water breaks and things start moving again.

Three hours later, I’m still pushing and downright exhausted. The midwives can see her little head every time I push, but then she just slips backwards again. We talk about transferring to the hospital again and the idea that they can try a vacuum-assisted delivery before a c-section has me hopeful.

The car ride is torture. Only 20 minutes, but I’m still needing to PUSH every few minutes and trying to stop that is like trying to stop an earthquake. I could have sworn I was screaming and howling in the back of the car, but both the spouse-unit and midwife claim I was pretty quiet all the way.

We get to the hospital and it’s everything I hate. The attitude of the staff, the horrible smells of disinfectant, the fact that they make me SIT IN A WHEELCHAIR to get to the room when all I want to do is walk along and squat through the pushes, for chrissakes! They make me get in bed, strap an IV to me, and my OB/GYN comes in, cool as a cucumber. He tells me we’re going to try this once (with the baby suction cup thing) and if it doesn’t work in five minutes, we’re doing a c-section and would I like an epidural? I cringe, but I’m freakin’ bone-weary and after a few seconds of eye-contact conversation with the spouse-unit, we agree: a) if this delivery works, it’ll be too fast for the baby to get any possible effects of it, b) maybe it’ll help me summon up the energy from god-knows-where, and c) if it doesn’t work, I’d need it for the c-section anyway.

The anethesiologist comes in and he becomes the epitome of what I hate about conventional medicine and birth practices; he’s full of snarky comments about “failed homebirths” and thank God I wasn’t paying attention, or I’d have thrown something at him and ended up in the psych ward.

Not long later and my OB/GYN comes back in and says something cheery like “Let’s do this” and suddenly I’m aware of lying on my back with my legs up, classic laboring-mother-in-the-hospital-pose, with all these faces staring at me and telling me to push: the doctor, some nurse, the spouse-unit, the midwife, my doula. I start pushing and they tell me again to push and I argue that “I AM pushing” and they’re practically yelling that I’m not. To my horror, I realize that it’s the epidural, that where before I could feel the bowling ball in my hips, now I can’t feel a damn thing. It’s a truly shocking thing to feel that you’ve lost control of a part of your body so fast.

I think that’s when I panicked. All I could think of is the part of our childbirth class where we prepped ourselves emotionally for what a c-section might be like. I have the horrible vision in my head of being laid out crucifiction style and that’s all it takes for me to start pushing so hard I feel my eyes starting to pop out of my head.

And that’s it. Spice slipped out into the world — upside down! At some point in labor, she’d flipped around “sunny side up”, and not even the doctor had noticed. No wonder she’d been stuck for hours. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, including yours truly. She cried from across the room where they were weighing her, etc., and they wrapped her and brought her straight back to me to nurse.

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Ironically, the hospital was ready to discharge me an hour later, but their policy is that all babies be cleared by a pediatrician first, so we ended up having to spend the night and wait for one in the morning, just for that. Bleah. Even funnier was arriving home around noon the next day to find that the spouse-unit had lost the house keys. But I had my little wonderchild and the endorphins were still going, so other than having to wait a bit longer for a shower, I was a happy mama!

To this day, I’m so very aware of all the ways things could have gone differently, despite my most valiant and crunchy attempts. I may be insanely crunchy sometimes, but I try to reserve passing judgement for the mamas that truly know better and still make bad choices.

On the other hand, my feeling is that if you attempt to educate yourself about childbirth & parenting, to make a better life for your child, I don’t think you can be held responsible for “acts of God” or things that just don’t go as planned. That’s just life, and like falling while surfing, you just have to roll with it and make the best of it.