The Day We Met Aeli

*I started writing this on Aeli's sixth day, and just today got to finishing it. Turns out, being a mom to a newborn is seriously-full-time.*

Aeli is being changed right now. His father has gone from diaper-novice to near-expert in six fast days. He's got cloth bottoms now (Aeli, not Stefin), which result in giving him a derriere so thick his body looks like soft little bell.

He is crying- which means no tears, but big inhales and exhales from his itsy-bitsy lungs, which have only been operational for just over a week. It is painful to hear him wail: so stressed by being naked and laid out all exposed, but it manages to be okay because he stops as SOON as he is picked back up. Presently he is being rocked by Stefin, and he looks idyllic.

I want to write about the birth before the combination of oxytocin and time thoroughly wipes the details from my memory. Already, I have noticed the memories of specific thoughts and sensations have become more faint. I am mixing up the order of things, recalling bits and pieces of the labor like patches of one huge, rumpled, painful (and beautiful!) quilt.

Contractions started while we were walking around the outside of the Celebration in the Oaks at City Park. We had just bought tickets to use on Friday, since we had been told that if we entered right then, we would promptly be kicked out ten minutes in. So we walked along the perimeter. I'd been having Braxton Hicks contractions for weeks, but the contractions that started as we strolled around the park made me want to ask my cohorts if we could slow down. This was new.

We tried to sneak in through a maintenance/employee entrance, but were caught. We joked about somehow using labor as an excuse.

On our way home, I asked my dad if he would still leave the next day for work, as planned, if I went into labor. He said if that happened, he'd probably be able to find a way to stay.

That night at midnight the contractions still hadn't stopped, and I could see a regular pattern. I hadn't been able to sleep at all, because I was feeling so anxious/excited. I woke up Stefin and we called Emmy, our midwife, around 1:30. We fixed ourselves a snack and went back to bed, although there was little-to-no sleep to be had.

By four, the contractions were enough to make me whimper in pain, and my mom came in from the front room. When my dad woke up and learned it was happening, he called in to the assistant Chief Pilot and took some emergency leave.

After pancakes with ricotta for breakfast, we took a stroll around the block, interrupted every five minutes by me bending over or squatting down "oooh-ooh-ooooh"-ing through a contraction. An old guy walking his dog looked at us with concern.

Labored in the front room for awhile; Stefin read to me in between bouts of me folding over upon myself and rocking side to side. The midwives worked on their knitting.

After a few hours, the midwives left to get something to eat. In their absence, my body moved into the second stage of labor: transition. The intensity of the contractions went from Volkswagen Beetle to twin-engine airplane. We knew for sure this was the move into the most intense- and usually shortest- portion of labor when I waddled, bent over, to the bathroom and promptly threw up three or four times. "Here we go," I thought to myself, watching separate spills of miso soup, chocolate banana smoothie, and yogurt with fruit splash into the toilet.

Transition, described in our purple book ("Prepared Childbirth: the Family Way") as lasting 60-90 minutes, turned into the longest six and a half hours of my life. Now that I type that, I'm not sure it's entirely true- because time seemed not to really exist in any normal way during this period. I wasn't noticing hours- I was living contraction to contraction. At the beginning they were a few minutes apart, and my chosen method of coping was having Stefin grab my arms while I pushed my head into his chest and moaned, rocking back and forth. By the end they were coming about thirty seconds apart from one another, and lasting a minute each. There was no position that was comfortable. For some of them I lay in the blow-up kiddie pool that was set up in our nursery/office; for some I was on the bed, pushing my feet into the midwives' hands or sticking one leg up in the air like a broken spoke on a bicycle wheel; for some I was on the toilet, which was an awful feeling; for the last bit I needed everyone's (Stefin, my mom, and dad) hands on me and Stefin's face right in front of me helping me breathe instead of scream.

I could feel a surge of a different energy right before a contraction would start. At that moment, I would give myself an assignment, a strategy to distract myself from the pain. I tried little games: saying the alphabet backwards (but I couldn't speak, and backwards was too hard, so I just said them forward in my head until the contraction started subsiding and Mom and Stefin could hear me, "Q, R, S, T, U, V...." and then let out an exhausted exhale), listing as many scenes as I could think of from A Prayer for Owen Meany ("Your mother has the best breasts of all the mothers," Johnny's mom sewing all her clothes, the dressmaker's dummy as an angel, Owen at the breakwater, practicing the shot, the finger- at least no one's cutting off your finger!...). Eventually it wasn't any use anymore. I couldn't think at all. Stefin would say, "Breathe," and I would grind my teeth and use all my might to say "I. Need. You to. Show. Me how!" It sounds crazy, but I really could not maintain any controlled breathing without someone modeling, doing it along with me, right in front of or beside me.

We were moving into pushing but I was still a centimeter and a half away from completely dilated. Contractions got a little more space in between them, and, after whimper-grunting through them, I would use that pause for 90-second naps. I remember thinking, "It will be okay. I'll either die or I'll have a baby. Either way, it will end." The midwife was using olive oil to massage the reluctant lip of my cervix open the last bit. I had just accepted this as my eternity. This was life now. This was all there was.

They told me that I could start pushing during contractions whenever I felt the urge to. At the beginning pushing didn't seem to do anything. Soon enough though, the baby was doing some serious moving down, scarily evidenced by his heart-rate, which would drop significantly during contractions as he navigated the tightest squeeze through my pelvis. The midwives were all hands and heart-monitor, scrambling around my naked legs and belly. I wondered how they would transport me to the hospital if they decided they needed to. Getting up was certainly out of the question.

Somehow or another, the little one managed to squeeze through, and as he sat in the birth canal, his heart rate was staying within a comfortable range. Everyone calmed down, and Heidy, sensing my absolute exhaustion that was slipping into apathy, looked up from between my legs and said, "Do you wanna feel the head?"

I reached down and felt a warm, hairy baby skull: softer than I expected. The light at the end of the tunnel. We were both at the end of our tunnels. One of us a bit more literally than the other.

Every contraction I would push and feel his head push farther toward it's exit. My mom, dad, two midwives, and Stefin watched from all sides. Their eyebrows would raise and they would cheer "C'mon c'mon c'mon!" as the baby's hairy head would start poking out; their faces would relax and they'd all sigh as the contraction ended and the head retreated back inside my vagina. At the end of an hour, my labia ablaze in what the midwife called "the ring of fire," this baby was about the come out for reals.

Pushing felt like ripping my body apart from the point between my thighs. I thought, "I'm going to explode. Either he's going to come out, or I'm going to explode. And then we'll just deal with it." I had visions of my legs and torso torn apart: being sewn back together like the rag doll in A Nightmare Before Christmas.

A pause between contractions. If no one has ever mentioned it before, it is useless to push in between contractions. I tried once anyway. Nothing. (Duh.) A surprising calm surrounded us. I noticed Nick Drake playing. When had anyone turned music on? The lights were dim; I was exhausted. I had no idea what time it was. I felt like this was all my life was. I was only capable of being in that moment. No brain power left to conceptualize any others.

The next push came and everyone's voices went up. This had become a pattern though, and I had been telling myself not to trust it. But this time- instead of descending eyebrows and exhausted sighs, voices stayed up- and I heard the midwife saying "Here he comes, here he comes," a chant as much as a statement. A collage of sounds and sensations: my eyes were closed from the strain of the pushing. (Then open, then closed again.) A Fear & Loathing landscape of images from the room, and the back of my eyelids: red, black, red with lights, my father, red, black, purple, my bare, shaking knees, the midwife, and my mother behind her, Stefin laying beside me, head-to-foot, the joint between the ceiling and the wall, the kitchen doorway, the lamp by our bed, legs feeling useless ("What good are we?" they seemed to say.)

"Here's the head!" Heidy said, "Another push, another push."

I was already yelling, a strange, guttural sound I had never produced before. With the next push, it raised a decibel or two. I don't know where that extra burst of power came from. I was quite literally giving it everything I had. "RaaaaaAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!" and then:

"Here's the body, good girl. Good job Carrie."

I felt him kicking and squirming inside of me as his shoulders and torso were coming out.

I heard Bob Marley singing now. "Every little thing, is gonna be alright."

And suddenly, there he was. Purple and wet and squinting on my chest. His little arms and head moving slowly around. He looked a little bit like an alien. (I'm tearing up again now writing about it.) But he was beautiful. He was there. This whole being. Who I had known for nine months, but never seen before. It was a very extreme, very intense feeling of "Wow- it's so nice to finally meet you." Like we had been pen pals throughout a formative period of life.

I wasn't surprised by the gender; both Stefin and I knew it already. We'd had strong feelings throughout the pregnancy so, even without a sonogram to confirm it, we knew we were going to be meeting a baby boy.

My mom broke my spell-like gaze, "Okay, so can you tell us his name now?"

"Aeli Abra," I said, watching his face wiggle around like a fish in Jello. The midwives were recording Apgar numbers, looking at Aeli, my bottom, dealing with the cord.

He wasn't breathing yet; the cord was still pulsing. We gave him to Stefin, and on Dad's chest he took his first breaths, noted by his little tiny cries.

The cord stopped pulsing, I delivered the placenta, Stefin cut the cord. I don't remember what order all that happened in.

We had a baby. We were overjoyed. We were all tears and smiles. We were exhausted. We were parents!

I have no idea how my body did that. It was the most inSANE, exhausting, painful, incredible, f-ing miraculous thing I've ever experienced. I can't believe how many women are walking around right now like the world is a normal, no-big-deal, type of place. This is one of those things that makes you go, "Oh my god!?!?!?! The rest of life is tater-tots compared to this!"

If you can't tell, I'm still stupefied.