Anybody who’s given birth has enough material to write a chapter of a book. And anybody who has given birth for the first time has an experience all to her own. My friends and I notoriously tell each other the same story again and again, and like Dory (in Nemo), we listen to each other as if we were hearing it for the first time. The anesthesia helps us on that one, I think. Clearly, our feelings, and emotions never wane about the day our first born came.
It doesn’t matter how many books you’ve read, although reading up is a good way to go about the process. I read somewhere that you’re supposed to conserve your energy for all the pushing you have to do during delivery and that it doesn’t help to use up all your strength cursing at your husband during labor. That was helpful! I’ve also read that natural, un-medicated birthing was the best. I told my OB about not wanting an epidural. I wanted to give birth as naturally as I could! She gave me a smile. A smile I could only understand the day I went into labor. Two years later, then maybe more, I could still remember that smile on her face the day I so casually decided on the matter. It said I was up for something heroic, and only heroes, physically tested in battle, can do.
Labor took a good twelve hours, half of which I faced bravely without the epidural. The longer I went into labor, the more out of body I felt. I wasn’t screaming, or crying, or whining. I was saving up my energy for pushing. But there was enough pain to recap, my adolescence, my first heart ache, my failures, and my disappointments, my regrets and every bit of traumatic hurtful thing that ever happened to me. I said to myself, this is what dying must feel like. There was so much pain, and there was so little of me lying in that labor room. I was looking at the clock thinking, ‘this is taking far too long.’
Doctors and nurses were busy all around me. Mothers in labor were rolling in and out. For some reason, the labor rooms were full, and some mothers had to bunk with another…haha…kind of like the red cross in battle. And I could hear almost everything from everyone. Somebody was going to have a c section because, apparently, she’s been in labor since the day before. Somebody was heaving like she was giving away her last breath to every person she ever came across. But nobody was actually cursing at their husbands. I guess that stuff happens only in the movies.
I was lying in my own private section, with a devoted nurse (kind of like an angel) jotting down everything on a sheet of paper. I was as limp as a rag doll. By the time somebody decided to give me the anesthetic (I wasn’t really sharp on who decided on it-- which the doctors warned me of, by the way, and made me sign a waver for.), all of me was somewhere zen-- er, else. My impressively visual self couldn’t remember what anything looked like. It took three people to curl me up for that first doze of comfort. I was quiet, lifeless, not a sliver of anticipation in my face. When the anesthesia hit me it made a load of difference. I began to read a book. I felt the contractions coming, but my ‘self’ was beginning to come back to my body. I was getting ready to give birth. I remember telling my friend, I was going to push “para sa lechon!--sa binyag”.
I gave birth at 8:57pm, to a 7.2 lb baby, 49cm long, after six hours of indescribable pain, 6 hours of tolerable pain, and five pushes. Yes, five pushes. Even I couldn’t believe how God could let me off that easy. It felt like I was out of the delivery room in twenty minutes. My chunk-of-cheese (a name I fondly call him now when he’s being an angel) was crying until he was swaddled tightly in a blanket. He looked at me as if to say “mom” in confident silence. I’ve crossed the threshold. I have performed a right that only women have the opportunity of. I have given birth.
