Ezekiel's birth story

I wrote most of this birth story the morning after Ezekiel was born. Then life happened and I just never got around to finishing the story and sharing it. Today I remembered, typed the last few things, and so here you go: the birth story of our sweet little Ezekiel.

I began having steady contractions on Saturday evening. I’d been having some fairly steady braxton-hicks contractions all week in the evenings, so I wasn’t sure for a while whether to think that these were more than that or not. Priscilla and Abraham had been sick and quite needy that day and for the few days before, and Keith and I were fairly worn down from just coming down with something on Saturday as well. Fortunately, Keith had let me sleep for much of the afternoon, so I had a bit of energy in the evening as we were taking care of our little ones and putting them to bed.

By 8:00 pm, having put our children to bed, I was finding my contractions to be fairly consistent. I called Carrie, my midwife, just to let her know that something might be happening, and then Keith and I sat back for a while to time the contractions. They weren’t very strong, but they felt like early labor and were about 30 seconds long and two minutes apart. So we labored for a few hours, called Carrie again, eventually called Keith’s mom, Carmen, and they both came over. Carmen arrived at about 12:30 and Carrie arrived at 1:00. By this point my contractions had picked up quite a lot more. They were a minute long and two minutes apart. I had hopes that the baby would be out by morning and that we would get to introduce him to his siblings when they woke up for the day.

I was trying to embrace the contractions more than I have in other labors. These early ones weren’t very painful and I really wanted our baby’s head to get applied to the cervix early on and start making it dilate in early labor, rather than at the end; our other babies have not moved down very quickly and so I have felt like I have labored many pointless hours before because they didn’t actually get down to the cervix. So I sat in the position that I discovered in Abraham’s labor that works really well for me: leaning in a reclined position on our bed, legs bent at the knees and folded at the side in the butterfly position. I don’t know what it is about sitting like that but it takes away so much of the pain for me! I wasn’t sure if I was really having good contractions so I tried to lay down once or twice but the pain of having contractions on my side was so overwhelming that I sat up again and labored like that through the night.

My contractions slowed down after about 2:00 am. Carmen and Carrie curled up on our couches... poor Carrie, she literally was curled up on our little loveseat... and Keith went to sleep and I dozed between contractions. Abraham was still feeling sick and so Keith was up a few times taking care of our sick little boy, and maybe once with Rilla too. I was glad everyone was able to get some sleep, although I felt bad for bringing Carrie and Carmen over in the middle of the night when obviously nothing much was happening. By morning I was starting to wonder if I was even in real labor yet, since everything seemed to be going so slowly.

Keith’s dad, Steve, came at 5:30 am, although apparently it was actually 6:30, because we’d forgotten about the time change that night and asked him to come at 6:30. So I felt kinda bad about that too because he’d gotten up so early to drive 45 minutes to our house to get the kids, and then he just sat and waited a few hours at the kitchen table. I stayed in our room as everyone was waking up but I could hear poor little miserable Abraham. He was so surprised to see everyone in his house and wasn’t super pleased about it. He kept saying, “My Mommy! My Daddy!” and would fling himself into Keith’s arms every time somebody else tried to comfort him. After a while Rilla woke up too, and having been long prepped about the day when she and Abraham would get to go be with Grandpa while Mommy had the baby, she was totally sweet and happy and excited. I held them both for a while, trying to comfort Abraham especially.

I think Steve left with the kids at about 8:30, after they’d had some breakfast and cuddle time. I tried to eat a bit and continued trying to all day. That was a big blessing; I was able to eat a little bit now and then (just yogurt and such) and I was able to keep drinking water with lemon juice in it, several glasses of it, through the labor. I’d hardly eaten on Saturday because I’d felt so sick, and now going into another day of not eating seemed like not the greatest way to keep my strength up! So I kept having very small bits of food when I could. (I did throw up a few times, but I expected that anyway.) Eating food boosted me up quite a lot in the few hours after the kids left, as did talking out my concerns with Carrie. I wasn’t feeling fearful like I did during Abraham’s labor, but I did feel discouraged that everything was taking so long.

Keith fell asleep at 9:00 or so and slept for a good three hours, maybe more. I kept thinking about waking him up but labor was going so slow and he was so sick that we just let him be. I’m so glad, because when he woke up later he was so much better able to be a good support to me after having had some rest! I’m sure it made the whole day much better for him.

Meanwhile, I hung out with Carrie and Carmen in the living room. I went from feeling discouraged to actually feeling quite chipper. My contractions were consistent, they were productive, and I got moving around a little bit now and then, always retreating back to a corner of a couch after a while to sit in my favorite butterfly position. We talked and visited and even laughed some, and they did laundry and dishes and tidied the house, which was horribly messy after a few days of everyone taking turns being sick. I sat on the birth ball for a while, squeezing Carmen’s hands during contractions while Carrie did lower back pressure. The lower back pain was quite low, which she said meant the baby was quite low, so I was of course glad about that. At 11:00 or 12:00, I went from feeling really energetic to just crashing asleep between contractions.

The next several hours kind of blur together. Somebody woke Keith up and he came and sat with me and those hours were just lovely. The contractions were painful but not overwhelming, although the lower back pain was pretty horrid. Carmen made a rice pack for me and that was so good... we don’t have one, and somehow I always forget that I want one until I am in labor. The baby was still laying way far on the left side and I was concerned that he was going to come out with his face up instead of down, making the pain a lot greater. He did really well all through labor though, not showing any signs of distress at all.

The weather outside was very March-like. It had been sunny for a few days, but it was raining steadily on Sunday morning. I love the rain and the way the air smells, so I had the window open for a while, although I don’t know what I was thinking because it was ridiculously cold outside, but apparently nobody points out how much heat you’re wasting when you’re in labor? Anyway, the rain stopped, and later in the afternoon in began hailing. Keith and I were laughing because there are so many robins that like to flock to our yard at this time of year and when the hail hit suddenly, they got caught in it and were all flying like mad and it was pretty funny.

Earlier in the day, Carrie had pulled my “Keep a Quiet Heart” book by Elisabeth Elliot off the shelf to mention a few things about it. I asked for it and opened to a specific little passage that I knew was the one I needed to read right at that time. I did, and cried, and rested, and prayed, and trusted God that He would get me through this labor thing. I will have to share the excerpt on here in another post. It’s about “yes, you have to do the hard thing to get through,” basically. Keith read that to me again as we labored in the afternoon, and I cried again and trusted again.

By 4:00 pm, I was dilated to 8 cm. That was about where I thought I was, as I’d been feeling a bit transition-ish and starting to have the urge to push a bit. So we decided to do some more good contractions and then get into the tub for the planned waterbirth. Things were moving along and I was feeling ready! And then... things just stopped. My labor slowed completely. I was having one contraction every five or eight minutes and those were only 30 seconds long. So I got out of the tub and Keith and I went back to the couch and enjoyed the bit of respite before the end. We sang praise songs together and watched the snow falling thickly outside the window and talked about what we wanted to name our son. We hadn’t completely decided until then but we decided then and it was good and fitting that his name means “God is my strength” because that was certainly an appropriate description for the way our labor went with him.

At 5:30, there still wasn’t much happening, and now I started to feel confused. It didn’t make any sense to me that things would stall right then. Baby was at zero station, my amniotic sac hadn’t ruptured yet, and I just didn’t get it. I was all ready to get in the tub and do some quick pushing and get him out, but there just weren’t any contractions! The discouragement was beginning to sink in and after a few hours of having decent amounts of energy, I was now feeling exhausted and defeated. Carrie began asking me to change positions, which I was not at all pleased about. My butterfly position was just fine with me, but she pointed out that it was going to be hours and hours and hours before we saw the baby if I didn’t move around and get things going. She asked me whether I’d rather sit comfortably for another seven hours or have the baby out in an hour, and I never really answered because I just so hated the idea of being in pain. So I tried, but it hurt, so I complained, and that’s kind of how the next few hours went. My body was feeling pretty tired and I couldn’t stay in one position for long so we tried squatting, and hands and knees, and side-lying, and even lying on my back. Finally the water broke at 6:15 or so and that helped bring baby down a little bit more.

I told them all that my lower back felt like there was a train going through it. (I was getting pretty whiny.) It hurt SO much. I’d had back labor with Priscilla’s birth and I dreaded the thought of having it again. But there just wasn’t much to be done at that point except keep going. Not that I wanted to! I was definitely losing any desire to do this at all. We were all on our bed now, Carmen and Keith alternately speaking words of encouragement and helping encourage me to bear down. It just didn’t feel right, though. There was a small lip of the cervix that was a bit swollen and maybe that’s why, but even though I knew I was fully dilated and that I should use my contractions to bear down, it just didn’t feel right. Finally I did it anyway, at least trying to breathe down if not actually bear down. I was confused why we couldn’t get in the tub; after having waterbirths with our first two children, it felt really foreign to be out of the water while in the last stages. I was reluctantly, petulantly letting Carrie direct me now. I moved from hands and knees to squatting with Keith holding me up to finally, wonderfully having Keith sitting behind me on the bed while I leaned against him.

Still the baby didn’t seem to move down. I started pushing one little push during each contraction. Carrie held up the lip of the cervix inside (that hurt) and I pushed and finally felt him move down. So I kept pushing... this was all one not-very-strong contraction and he kept coming and then his head was partway out and my contraction was over. But it felt terrible. Not that satisfying, glad-I-can-push-him-out-now feeling that I remember from other labors. Just really painful and I didn’t want his head to stay partway out so I pushed a bit more, although I wasn’t contracting, and his head came out the rest of the way.

The hard thing here was that while everyone was excited and saying his head was out, I couldn’t see him at all because of the angle. (I was semi-reclined.) Carrie told me to reach down and feel him, and I’d done that with my other labors, but I was so miserable and gripping Keith’s hands so tightly that I couldn’t bring myself to let go of Keith even to feel the baby. So I was looking down and all I could see was my big huge belly. I was waiting for another contraction to come quickly so he could come out the rest of the way, and I was waiting to hear him or see him or for him to just slide out, but nothing really happened. I didn’t have any rush of energy to get him out, I was just exhausted and waiting. And I was watching Carrie closely, trying to understand still what was going on. I was confused and trying to understand why he wasn’t coming out the rest of the way.

After another minute or two with no contractions, Carrie told me to flip over to my hands and knees. I knew this was because he should have been out by now, couldn’t be out only partway for very long and still get enough oxygen. This part of the story, meanwhile, was really traumatic for Keith; he had no idea why I was flipping over and he was pretty freaked out about whether the baby’s head was going to be okay while I turned, so he was asking Carrie anxiously about supporting the baby’s head. Anyway, the reason Carrie had me turn was because we were dealing with shoulder dystocia... the baby’s shoulder was caught on my pubic bone, and one of his arms was pinned behind his back so he couldn’t move to come out. So Carrie reached inside and moved his arm around to the front and told me to push. I said something brave like, “I CAN’T!” and she said something sweet like, “Jamie, you HAVE to!” and somehow that was a relief to me, to hear in her voice finally that there was something kind of wrong, maybe it gave me the impetus to finish. So I pushed, or tried to, and screamed... which really freaked Keith out even more, and made me sad because I didn’t want our baby to hear me scream... and so I pushed and Carrie kind of pulled and he slid out. It had been about three and a half or four minutes since his head was out, which is about as long as you’d want that to take.

So he was out! Oh, what a wonderful relief to be out of labor and to know our little son was okay! But I hadn’t seen him at all yet, because I was on hands and knees. That was weird because with Priscilla and Abraham, I’d been able to feel them with my hand as they were coming out and able to see and feel them instantly. With Ezekiel, I now had to flip back over to lean against Keith as Carrie brought Ezekiel up to my chest for me, and then I finally could see him and hold him. So I kept holding him as the cord blood finished pulsing and then as I pushed out the placenta.

I had watched some videos and read a few things about letting the baby lay on your chest and kind of crawl on their own to the breast to start nursing. I was kind of interested in trying it, so I laid Ezekiel on me for a while but then ended up helping him there because he was crying a bit and I didn’t really care as much about seeing him get there on his own as just wanting to comfort him already. He latched on and nursed for two hours! We just sat there in the same spot, Keith and I admiring our tiny new son and feeling relief over getting to hold him safe and sound at last. Carmen brought me fruit smoothies and water and food and such. Eventually Keith cut the cord and all that, and when he was three hours old or so we got around to weighing and measuring him. That’s one thing I love so much about homebirths... there is no pressure to do all that stuff right away... it can wait while I bond with my new baby!

So that is Ezekiel’s birth story. Here are his newborn statistics:

Ezekiel Keith
born March 11th
9 pounds, 8 ounces
head: 14.5 inches
length: 22 inches
born at 7:39 pm

He has been a darling boy right from the start. Priscilla and Abraham have accepted him willingly and seemingly without jealousy, although there have been tears when it’s bedtime and Mommy is holding a crying baby and can’t hold one of the older children. Other than that, things are transitioning beautifully and we are all enjoying him very, very much.

A few more thoughts about birth: It was pretty strange to me not to be in the water and not to see the baby or touch him while he was being born, since my experiences with Priscilla and Abraham had been different. It was also really shockingly messy; giving birth in the water is much less messy than giving birth out of the water! I suppose the one nice thing about not being in the tub was not having to get out and walk to the bed. Keith and I both had to take a day to process feeling slightly traumatized by the way things unfolded in the last few hours. The lack of strong contractions and lack of desire to push at the end were both things that really surprised me. I was disappointed about not being in the water, although Carrie also explained later that she’d suspected there was going to be a stuck shoulder to contend with, which is why she didn’t want me to be in the tub during delivery. In some ways I thought maybe I would have liked to know that during the final stages, but really... I’m sure it was better not to know! I was disappointed too about not being able to see him and feel him as he came out. But really... I am just glad that it all went so well. Thankful for an excellent midwife who encouraged me to keep going, thankful that we were able to get him out before more time elapsed. Thankful that he is so beautiful and healthy.

As I finish this up at almost six weeks postpartum, it all feels quite distant now. And yet not. I understand now why moms always bring up their birth stories as though they just happened yesterday; there is something about the intensity of childbearing that keeps the memories forever fresh in a mama’s mind.