My baby turned eighteen this week.
Let me tell you something about having a child who is a legal adult: it’s weird. Nobody ever told me how weird it would be. We just don’t talk about it. We spend our entire pregnancy obsessing about the birth. What if I poop when I’m pushing? What if my baby is ugly? Then we obsess about our newborn baby, who is never ugly! How can I make sure that my baby never gets sick? Or hurt? Please, God, don’t let my child be…average!
And then I blinked, and now she’s an adult. And I just realized that she could have a baby and name it Orville and there’s nothing I can do to stop her. I could have a grandchild named Orville. That’s weird, right?
This whole sense of no longer being in control of my child is freaking me out. I think that’s what I miss most about being pregnant, just knowing where she was at all times.
So now she’s eighteen and living on Kauai as this brilliant and beautiful woman I have the privilege of claiming as my daughter. I am very proud of her, but I’m also proud of myself. She’s my first child, which is kind of like the first pancake. I know I made a lot of mistakes with her as I figured out how to raise kids. I’m so glad she knew how to borrow a stranger’s phone and call me when I lost her at the mall when she was five. But I really did the best I could, and she knows she has a strong mother who loves her.
She will always be my firstborn, which is special because she made me a mother. My due date was December 15, which was also the day of my last final. I was signed up for classes beginning right after New Year’s, so I agreed to an induction on December 20, figuring I could go right back to school two weeks after giving birth. Like many other young, first-time moms, I had no idea. But I was blessed with an efficient uterus and a general distrust for medical professionals, so I managed to push all ten pounds and thirteen ounces of her fat little body out of my vagina without any pain medication.
My labor at the beginning seemed like a piece of cake. I was already 5cm before they even started the Pitocin around 10:00am, and I contracted for hours without really feeling a lot of pain. I started to get cranky around 3:00pm, so I diligently started to apply all the valuable principles I learned from my Lamaze class. When the contractions got intense, I breathed hee hee hooooooo while the contraction climbed higher and higher and I thought I was going to explode. I started to hyperventilate and finally figured out that the only way to control my breathing was to scream like a banshee. It became my birth song as I slipped into another realm of consciousness. When they offered me drugs, I thought to myself, I’m already on drugs. My body is making all the drugs I need. I wanted to hang from the light fixture, but settled for supporting myself from the bed rails. The nurse was afraid I was going to break the bed, and told my husband to hold my hand instead. He wisely chose to ignore her and focused instead on obeying my orders to rub harder and harder on my sacrum.
The next day, my entire lower back was bruised, I was weak from anemia, and I had horrible pain from the episiotomy. But I felt wonderful. I was in love with my beautiful baby and was entirely impressed by everything she did.
There are many details I could relate about my first birth experience, but this is one detail that I still treasure. After they weighed the baby, the nurse was the first person who said anything to me. She said, “What a job you did!” At that moment I was actually wondering if I would die, but with those words I was suddenly awake, confident that I could now do anything. I am still grateful to that nurse for lifting me up with that simple praise. It taught me some important lessons about birth. The first is just that women are incredibly powerful, but their strength can be diminished if they are not properly supported during birth.
I have supported many women in birth since then; many have been stay-at-home moms, teachers, and office administrators. One was a doctor, another was a midwife. There was a VIP waitress, a missionary, a model, and one who cultivated medical marijuana for $100/hour. (I may have considered a career change for a minute there.) One was a biostatistician who had run a 100-mile marathon.
I’ve seen many women give birth naturally, and many who have had various interventions. Some suffer difficult complications and tragic heartbreak, while others experience only joy. But at every moment I am at a birth, I think these words: “I am enough.” For me as her doula, it means that at each and every moment, I will do my best to support her in whatever way I can. For the mother, these words can be her mantra. It doesn’t mean she has to do it alone, or without any help. It doesn’t mean her birth will be perfect, or that nobody will make any mistakes.
But she is enough. If she has a natural birth without any drugs or interventions, she is enough. If she gets an epidural, she is enough. If she has a cesarean birth, she is enough. If she feeds her baby with her breast or a bottle, she is enough. If she stays home or goes back to work, she’s enough. Good enough, strong enough, smart enough, just enough!
I think that was the part of my birth to Story that was so amazingly transformative for me. It was so big and powerful, but I was enough for it. And I learned from the mistakes made at that birth, and did better with the others.
Now my daughter is a woman, and someday she may have a child, in spite of the fact that her mother is a doula. I hope I can be there to support her on that day (many years from now, please). It will be her birthday again, because she will become a brand-new mother. I don’t know what her birth will be like. I’m glad I didn’t know all the scary things that can happen when I was having her. I almost wish I didn’t know what I know now.
And I can only pray that she doesn’t name the baby Orville.
-Heather
