[part one, part two]

I didn't bring up the castor oil in my first post is because who wants to know that my son was propelled into the world by the aftershocks of contracting bowels? Certainly not him. I'm sorry boy, if you ever read this: I would have invented a better beginning for you, something Dickensian, perhaps, or something like the nativity of a scion in a Rougon-Macquart novel. But your mother had to be all "honest." I was against the castor oil from the beginning. I was deeply aware that the story of a man's birth becomes a part of his personal mythology: I would have invented Herodic adversaries, astronomical anomalies, inclement weather, stealthy flights, shepherds. Athena burst from her father's head, fully clad and armed; Aphrodite rose from the foam of Cronos' testicles; Dionysus was rescued from Semele's womb and sewn into Zeus' thigh. And yet none of the gods or heroes entered the world as the direct result of self-inflicted diarrhea. Needless to say, I expect mighty things from you.

It's not as though you won't fit right in here, though. Your sister is currently obsessed with diarrhea. I once made the mistake of describing it as "when your poop is like brown water." She made me repeat that four times just so she could soak up all the gloriousness. Then I made the bigger mistake of teaching her "The Diarrhea Song." You'd think I hung the moon. Her favorite verse is the one I invented in a church camp cabin the summer before fifth grade: "When you give someone a hug/ and it ends up on the rug / diarrhea [fart noise, fart noise] diarrhea [fart noise, fart noise] ." Now we sing together: "When you drink some of that castor/ to make your baby come out faster/ diarrhea [fart noise, fart noise] diarrhea [fart noise, fart noise]." Yes, humor in our household exists in a state that would make Cracked magazine, circa. 1984 look like The Economist.

I really should have put a warning at the top of this post, like the kind they use to sell super-violent, disgusting albums and video games to children. Really, I'm just using all this talk of diarrhea to warm anyone still reading this up for the coming descriptions of amniotic fluid, blood clots, and gooey placentas yanked out of vaginae by cartoon-sausage-like umbilical cords. For all the talk of how "beautiful" birth is, there is much less acknowledgment of how humbling it is, too. I suppose to many it's all a disgusting reminder that despite being made in the image of a god, we still come into the world like goats or dogs or chimpanzees.

So the room is dimly lit when the midwife offers to break my wife's water. The lighting seems wrong to me, the same way it seems messed up that the investigators on CSI consider the evidence under atmospheric wall sconces and not the overhead lighting of your typical laboratory. Babies, like suspects, I figure, should be first exposed under fluorescent lights. My iPod is playing Music for Egon Schiele by Rachel's somewhere on the far side of the room. The nurse is on the phone with the regular labor and delivery ward, telling them she needs backup right away. Wood is naked and still wet and warm from the bath. I am on my knees up on the bed with her when the water is broken, but I'm worried that it would be full of meconium, so I crawl down to watch it cascade in pulses, like a squeezed rag between her legs. "Meconium?" I ask, and the nurse shakes her head. I crawl back up to be by Wood's face and wait with her for the next contraction to start. Up until now, I'd been helping her work through them alone, without the nurse or midwife in the room, and suddenly with both of them there and a third nurse arriving to unwrap all kinds of stainless steel, I feel self-conscious, like they think we're doing this all wrong. I remember everything I'd read about Lamaze and the Bradley Method and the breathing chapter of The Birth Partner but it has all kind of gone out the window with my wife. She only wants me to count in her ear and massage her back. She sometimes responds to my suggestions about breathing, but then she gets pissed that I'm not counting out loud and I am in no position to argue with her about what is the right thing to do here. So I count, in front of the nurses and the midwife, and she rests on me between the next few contractions.

"I really, really feel like I need to push," she finally, breathlessly tells her midwife. "That time, I really wanted to."

"Let me check," the midwife said, and did her thing. "Well, you're fully dilated, so go ahead and give a little push with the next one."

"How do you want me to sit?"

"How do you want to sit?"

I can tell Wood is a little annoyed with the midwife's lack of direction. I'm sure she has nothing but good intentions, but my wife doesn't even like to decide what to order on a pizza. She remains almost paralyzed on her back. "Why don't you try sitting on your knees and bending forward." My wife rolls over into the position that probably got us all here in the first place. The midwife and the nurses stand poised behind her. I am up on the bed when the next contraction starts.

"OH MY GOD!" she shouts, followed by a long string of profane zoological sounds that throw me off my count. "KEEP COUNTING!" she roars. I make a guess about how long it's been. "OH MY GOD THEY AREN'T STOPPING THEY JUST KEEP GOING."

She's pushing. The nurses and midwife tell her to try not to push so hard if she can help it. "I CAN'T HELP IT!" she screams. The contraction finally ebbs. She looks at me and says, "Can't we turn this all off just for a minute?"

"You're so close," I say. "I don't think you would even believe how close you are. He'll be out soon, and then all this is going to fade into nothing."

"I would like that a lot," she says. Her eyes are closed.

I can see on her face the next contraction coming, and that's when her mother walks in the room.

"Oh my God I'm so sorry I'm late who'd have thought there's be so much traffic at two in the morning! And I swear, if you're going to own a gas station, you should at least know something about how to get around the neighborhood." Then she looks up and sees her daughter screaming on her hands and knees not wearing any clothes with blood and fluid streaming down her thighs.

"Oh," she says, suddenly ashen. Fully-coated, she brings with her a whiff of cold air and gas station coffee and fresh cigarette smoke. She comes over to Wood's side and puts her hand on her cheek but it's a lot of scene to take in, so she soon fades into an armchair across the room. I imagine it would kind of be like accidentally walking into the wrong theater during the climactic scene of The Exorcist. Except, you know, real. Later Wood's mother will admit this was the first live birth she's seen: Wood was born with forceps under anesthesia.

"OH MY GOD I FEEL LIKE I'M RIPPING APART!" she screams as she pushes. "OH NO I FEEL LIKE I'M RIPPING IN HALF."

This strikes some horrible vulnerability in my imagination: my poor girl, ripping in two! I imagine her lower torso rendered like concrete in an earthquake movie. The assuredness with which she says it makes me almost certain that it's true. I don't want to leave her steady grip, but I feel compelled to look, just so I can reassure her. Thankfully, nothing has ripped. The midwife confirms it as she busily rubs warm wet washcloths on the perineum. But there is blood up to her elbows. I return to face my wife, who is sobbing. "You're not ripping apart," I tell her. "I just saw everything." But then, again, on the next contraction:

"I FEEL LIKE MY WHOLE BODY IS RIPPING IN HALF." A minute more of pushing and all the air is suddenly sucked out of the room. All sound, too, except for this one sound that I can't quite put my finger on. I picture Hollywood sound effects artists trying to replicate it: a water balloon pressed into a bed of nails; half-set jello thrown against a wall; a jellyfish dropped from a ten-foot ladder. Squerlch. Thud. My son, slipping between the hands that were there to catch him, lands with a liquid parachute on the bed, gray as a submarine.

I feel a sudden aloofness. A buoyancy, I'm a few feet above myself, staring down at the room as they oblige my wife by letting him rest for a second on her breast, but as the midwife clamps the cord I notice the cold urgency as they stick a tube down his throat, sucking out the fluid, another instrument shoots a stream of oxygen just under his nose. I try to stay out of their way while holding his tiny hand. A nurse is talking to me: "Sometimes they're born so fast, they still have it all in their lungs and they don't breathe when they're born." How long? Twenty seconds? Breathe. A minute? Breathe. They are slapping his feet. Then I hear a small bird. Thirty seconds (an hour?) later, a phlegmatic shriek. I am afraid to say his name.

But an hour later I am up on the bed again, joking with my wife, our little Gram at her breast. "Some women push for hours," I say. "You couldn't even handle six minutes." She says she can hardly remember pushing. I tell her how she screamed about being ripped in half. She's embarrassed. It may seem like this is cruel, but really, I'm intensely proud. Though she's had twelve hours of contractions, true labor only lasted about an hour and a half.

Then I feel something wet on my leg. They haven't changed the sheets, so I peel back the blanket and look at my jeans and socks drenched from a pool of blood and fluid. I remember the nurse massaging the postpartum uterus, the way the blood oozed right there onto the sheets. "Look at all the blood on the floor, too," I say, and Wood peers over the bed. "Well, at least you didn't poo all over the place, too."

"Yeah," she responds. "Thank God I got rid of all that yesterday morning."

I can't just start where Jim left off, because he forgot to say anything about the castor oil.

Though my due date was actually February 10, as I'm sure we all remember, I'd stupidly and wrongly assumed that the baby would come much earlier. There were even a few times in mid-January where I convinced myself I was on the verge of labor. But as the days and weeks passed, I started to grow desperate. I tried to recall every detail about the day before Juniper was born, and every day I tried to do everything the same, like stepping backwards into footprints I'd already made in the snow. I had picked a fight with Jim that day and cried a lot. I had fish and chips for dinner. So for three weeks our lives were a lot like Groundhog Day with a lot of fighting, crying, and battered cod. Every morning I woke up more pregnant than the day before, with Sonny and Cher taunting me from the radio.

When I was about a week past my expiration date, one of the midwives in the practice I'd chosen mentioned castor oil. The next morning, at 5:00 a.m., I chugged a small glass of Diet Coke with two tablespoons of Castor oil mixed in. It was like drinking Aspartame-flavored Astroglide. Mmmm, Asparglide. After gagging a lot, I went back to bed, and woke up two hours later with the most urgent case of acute diarrhea I've ever had the pleasure of experiencing. The theory here is that all the intestinal cramping you experience shitting liquids can also cause uterine contractions to start. It's an act of sheer desperation, fathomable only to those women who would prefer spending the day sluicing out their colon to spending one more damn day gestating.

It didn't work. So of course, the next morning, I took more. My stomach, seeming to recall the previous day's gastrointestinal jamboree, sent it right back up the tube. Not being easily intimidated, a few hours later I took two more ounces that Jim mixed into a chocolate milkshake.

As Jim wrote, at around 2:00 p.m., I started to have regular, short, and not very painful contractions. I was terrified that they would stop, so I didn't sit down for hours, unless you count the toilet. At some point when we were out walking Jim said: "Hey, this is great! I bet we're home by tomorrow night with our son." I almost stuck his face in one of his annoying poetically-dirty snowbanks, I was so sure such blasphemous optimism would cause my contractions to evaporate.

And this gets us to where he left off. I'd finally progressed from 3 centimeters to 4, and by that time, the contractions were as powerful as I'd been wishing for them to be all day. After the midwife told us we could stay, I felt like I lost some of my sense of purpose. The thrill of actually progressing quickly wore off and all I was left to deal with was the pain. I couldn't talk much, and I was starting to feel myself fade in and out the way I had during Juniper's birth. Each contraction left me depleted, and I couldn't catch my breath between them. I knew I was only four centimeters, and still had a long way to go. As the nurse pointed out, "You've been having plenty of contractions, but your actual labor has only just begun."

I looked over at the soaking tub sitting in the corner. "It's huge," Jim had said when he first saw it. "I wonder how many gallons of chili you could make in there."

I knew I needed to get into it. The midwife warned that tub might slow things down or even cause the contractions to stop, but at this point I needed some relief, so I swore I wouldn't stay in the tub for too long and would get out if labor wasn't progressing. Jim filled the tub with water that was the perfect temperature to slip into, and as soon as I could I stripped down and climbed in. The relief was immediate -- I now felt relaxed and awake, and the pain actually started to go away between contractions, which remained as intense as they had been. In the tub, I finally had a second to acknowledge to myself that I really was in labor, and that the baby was on his way out of me and into the world sooner rather than later. I called my mom to tell her we were staying at the hospital. "I'm four centimeters," I said. "You can come now, but it still might be awhile."

When I first got into the tub, I had a hard time believing anyone would ever convince me to get me out of it. It felt that good. The contractions hadn't slowed. My bag of waters was intact. But after almost an hour in the tub, I had a pesky little urge to push and a new pressure with each contraction. I told Jim to give me just a little bit more hot water, closed my eyes during one last break between contractions, breathed, and told the nurse, "I know it's crazy, but I feel this urge to push." The nurse ran to grab the midwife.

"Get out of the tub," she said on her way out. "Now." There was a thin ribbon of blood floating in the water. I wasn't sure I had the strength or balance to climb out of the tub, put on a towel, and make it to the bed, but somehow, with Jim's help, I did it. He toweled me off and I remember the nurse commenting on the tattoo above my left breast. I was stark naked and didn't give this fact even the slightest bit of attention. I would be naked until long after my son was born and only then would I feel the need to cover up. I was in the world of pain and between pain. There was only that.

I crawled up onto the queen-sized bed, knowing the midwife would need to check my dilation. It seemed like the contractions were no longer stopping. There was no longer space between the pain. When I was sure a contraction had ended, I felt the dull certainty of her fingers inside me. "Nine," she said. I'd dilated five centimeters in less than an hour while I was doing something that made me feel so much better that should have slowed rather than hasten the process.

I remember their voices. I was on my side; my husband was next to me on the bed, a spoon. The midwife pulled open a drawer and pulled out her crochet hook in a sterile bag. "I think it might be a good idea to break your water," she said. Everything was calm suggestion with her, as if this birth was all up to me. I looked at her, wanting some actual direction, but only seeing an unflappable sense of service or duty in her eyes. She was there to guide me through this process, not force me. "Do it," I said, and then the plastic was in me, sharp yet distant, a twist, and the gush between my legs. The midwife broke my water, and it was almost over. But I didn't know that then.

Jim can tell the final part with much more clarity than me.

Onward to Part Three.

All day it rained in Detroit, and all the snow melted away, and it was like a full threat of spring for the first few hours of contractions. She'd been having mild cramping for days, nothing worth telling me about, not one contraction that followed another, just the occasional glimpse of a smile on her lips that would fade into frustration as the seconds ticked on and on. But on that rainy Sunday, rhythmic contractions started in the afternoon, so we went out and walked around the neighborhood a half dozen times in the rain without an umbrella. As it came down harder we stopped at the corner store for an umbrella and I remember watching neighborhood girls running from sheltered spot to sheltered spot across a parking lot and squealing in the open. So this will be the day that he will be born, I thought, and looked at the sky and considered it quite a portent of misery. What snow remained lingered on the edge of parking lots with that stubborn, urban patina: mercury and sick dog piss.

Wood has this thing about jinxes. She wouldn't let me be Gene Kelly, stomping on clogged drains, even though my heart made me want to swing from street lamps knowing that the day was finally, finally here. I'm not sure if I was more excited about the birth of my son or the end of my wife's anxiety. By now they were one and the same.

I was all packed and ready to go at a moment's notice so that we wouldn't have to have the baby sitcom-style in the back of the car with the evil mother-in-law gabbing away and the birthing-vaginas-are-gross jokes. But I didn't need to be ready. The contractions weren't very intense, and despite our best efforts to make them more intense, I somehow had time to make dinner, watch a Tommy Lee Jones-in-relentless-pursuit movie, take a shower, and put the kid to bed. We weren't even sure we should go to the hospital until my mother arrived, joining Wood's mom who'd been there for days, and we realized we didn't have enough beds for everyone, so, hey, why not go to the hospital and have a baby. Better than sleeping on the floor.

"Want to go to a movie?" I said once we got in the car. "I hear that Tommy Lee Jones-in-relentless-pursuit movie by the Coen Brothers is still playing up in Royal Oak."

"No, let's just go to the hospital."

"It's probably not as good as Double Jeopardy anyways."

Wood had been on and off the phone with the midwife since the contractions started. She'd initially told us the baby could come by nine o'clock, but we didn't get to the hospital until eleven. It turned out she was the only laboring mother on the floor. We had chosen an "alternative birth center" where they didn't even have the staff or equipment for medical interventions: no IVs, no monitors, no epidurals, and no pitocin. The center did have all kinds of strange chairs, yoga balls, queen-sized beds and hot tubs in every room. It was more like a Tokyo love hotel than a labor and delivery ward. Except the one nurse on duty wasn't a "sexy" nurse. She was more like a middle-aged lesbian gym teacher with an endless supply of rubber gloves. Wood's contractions were still so mild she was able to complete her paperwork during the middle of one without it affecting her penmanship. The midwife on duty was one we'd never met, an older no-nonsense woman who looked exactly like Wood's crazy aunt. Later, in the delirium of delivery, I think she even called this woman by her aunt's name. The midwife stuck her finger up my wife and said there had been no progress from the three centimeters Wood had been dilated at her last office visit. The words hit my wife a shot put to the belly. "I'll give you two hours to progress, but if nothing happens by one a.m., I'm sending you home."

This all happened during Juniper's birth: the hours procrastinating before we left for the hospital, the contractions that just weren't strong enough to advance dilation, the disappointing news after every finger test. In the first labor, the water broke early, revealing meconium in the fluid. The hospital wouldn't let us go back home, insisting we stay at the hospital with my wife attached to all kinds of equipment. I was so proud of her then, watching her handle all that pain and disappointment covered in wires attached to beeping seismograph machines and IV tubes. She stayed like that for hours, and the labor didn't advance, and there was little we could do. I say I was proud and filled with admiration for the way she handled this internal and emotional beating, but I must admit I was even more proud and astonished to see her go through this the second time, in those moments after the midwife told her she might have to go home. One look in my wife's eyes told me there was no way we were going home. This baby would be born tonight. Where before she withdrew inward, this time she confronts the pain directly. It is the difference between the soldier who does not give up his ground and the one who leaps up out of his trench and advances into the tracer fire of the enemy. As her body is begging her to retreat, to succumb, she stands up in the middle of the night and we walk and walk around the empty ward. The longer we walk, it seems, the more the pain accelerates. We walk up and down those halls for two hours, every few minutes stopping as she bends over some empty nurse's station covered in stuffed animals and greeting cards and the kinds of toys you get in happy meals, and I stand behind her rubbing her back and counting with her, each contraction a song that crescendos at 34 seconds, and the sound of her voice: "Tell me it's fading."

"It's fading," I say.

We do all this by ourselves. Occasionally the nurse stops us mid-step and uses a handheld monitor to listen to the baby's heartbeat. "Keep it up," she says. "You two are doing great." Twenty minutes later than when she told us she'd be back, the midwife returns and snaps on a rubber glove. It is time to check the dilation again. Hard to believe at the time, but an hour later they'll be trying to get Gram to breathe and the room will look like a troupe of marauding Vikings used it to perform the Blood Eagle on a group of Anglo-Saxon peasants. But for now everything is clean and quiet as the whole night and the beginning of a new life hangs on the finger rolling around my wife's cervix.

"Four centimeters," she says. "You can stay."

[Onward to Part Two]

[For those just tuning in, today was Juniper's first birthday, and instead of telling you about the bloody mary/mimosa brunch party we threw today (i.e. "drinking in front of children" or "Juniper's birthday bash: from noon till naptime, bitches!") we decided to tell Juniper's birth story. This is the second part.]

Click here for part 1 of the Birth Story

[Part 2]

Wood: Where we last left off, Dutch had just gotten me out of bed and and onto the yoga ball for about twenty minutes before my obstetrician arrived for the first time in person. With the OB in the room, Dutch went off to get something to eat. At that point, the nurses had been telling me that I was hardly dilated at all and our spirits were pretty low.

When my OB next checked the dilation while Dutch was gone, I was suddenly up to 5 cm. This was huge progress---just an hour earlier I'd been lingering around a pathetic 1 cm. And, god bless him, Dutch gets complete credit for that---for getting my ass out of the bed, unplugging me from the monitors, and sitting me on that heavenly yoga ball. Moving around aroused me from a state of semi-consciousness and allowed me to take control of my labor the way that I'd read about all those hippies doing. The pain was intense, but I felt more in control and more aware and more physically and psychologically engaged in what was going on.

Right around this time the doctor started the pitocin drip. By the time it started working I probably didn't need it anymore, and I'm pretty sure it just put the whole thing into highspeed overdrive. Dutch came back into the room and could immediately sense that things were different, set in final motion. The OB measured me again right then. "7 centimeters!" Dutch shouted and massaged my shoulders. "Woo-hoo!" The pain had intensified, but the huge visual jump in the contractions on the seismograph almost made up for it. Finally we were seeing progress on the machine. After so many hours of painful contractions that were just below the threshold of what was needed to make anything happen down in my cervix, the contractions spiked into a new section of the chart. It was such a relief to hear Dutch say, "Wow, that was a big one," and to think, goddamn right it was a big one. It was fucking huge. The pain was so intense and the contractions so close together that Dutch never got to eat his sandwich, which he tossed aside with his unused bag of doula tricks. I sat on the edge of the bed and he stood or kneeled facing me. I needed him within inches for the next hour or so.

Soon the OB measured me again and I was at 8 cm. She seemed astonished and said, "You really are gonna do this without drugs!" 6 months earlier when we'd discussed my birth plan and I'd told her that I wanted to avoid an epidural if possible, she'd responded that nearly all of her patients said that, but over 80% chose epidurals once in labor. And I'd appreciated her frankness because I was aware that it was very likely that I'd do the same. Hearing her tell me that I was going to make it without the drugs was incredibly empowering. Dutch had been telling me all day how tough I was, and it did help, especially the way he put it (Goddamn woman you are so fucking tough; Jesus you are one badass pregnant motherfucker; Christ woman you've got balls of steel you are so fucking tough) but for some reason getting the same kind of encouragement from my obstetrician---a woman who realistically didn't expect me to be as tough as I'd wanted to be--helped me unearth whatever reserve of strength I had left.

Pretty soon I had the unavoidable urge to push. I was under strict orders not to push until given the go ahead, but the urge was so strong that I couldn't help it. I even pushed so hard that I involuntarily peed all over the table, drenching the towels underneath me for the second time that day. Dutch called the nurses to tell them that I was pushing, and after my OB checked my dilation one last time, I was given clearance to go for it.

Dutch: Everything in the room was chaos except for Wood, who somehow in the middle of it all had a steady, calm determination and she alone seemed to know what was right. The OB was barking orders at the nurse to get that vacuum suction thing out of the wall and the nurse was yelling back that she didn't have one of the pieces that was necessary and the OB said, "Well, we're going to have to do it without it then." The OB was scrambling to get her scrubs and her gloves and her mask on, and two other nurses appeared out of nowhere with all kinds of medical gewgaws they were readying after snapping their gloves on. The OB said, "we're not ready but that doesn't mean you shouldn't go ahead. If you're ready we'll just have to be ready."

Until that day my only experience with labor was what I had seen on television, mostly sit-coms. Sure I'd heard the woman scream in pain while her husband, doctor, or Ross yelled at her to push, but as a day of real labor---my wife's labor---stretched on what shocked me most was how much stamina and endurance it demands. On television the pain seemed acute, the laboring mother rolling in her hospital bed with something like indigestion waiting until the time comes to push, and on television that's where it looks like the real pain starts sharp and violent. I had read enough to know that the pain is chronic, and that it is strong through the entire labor. But I didn't realize how strong until I saw my wife's face in every contraction, even at the very beginning, or when the psychological toll was even worse: when she was told after her intake that despite nine hours of pain no actual progress had been made. I knew this woman; in nine years I had seen her in every type of pain. And I had never seen her like this.

I suppose that chronic, stretched-out pain would make abysmal television. So it's probably better that I didn't tape every contraction or stick the camera in Wood's face while she vomited. I would have liked a photo, though, for posterity, a photo of those hours that preceded the pushing. From far away maybe, a little blurry, my face up against hers and my arms holding her how she asked me to. See, I don't know how it looked, I just remember how it felt, imbued with this awesome responsibility, alone in that room with her, so in love with her, swearing and cursing because it was just the two of us and it didn't matter what anybody heard. The pushing, though, I understand why that makes good television, although even that is sanitized behind virgin-white sheets held aloft to hide the genitals of actresses wearing two-hours' worth of professional makeup and hair. When it came time to push, Wood laid back on the bed and gripped the rails and she was lost to me. You could tell she was in some other place, somewhere distant and dark and we were just disembodied voices hovering around her body. She just waited for us to tell her to push, and she did, she pushed with everything she had and she looked almost ecstatic with the pushing. She could not get enough of it. My wife is not one to take things passively if she can help it. This was finally doing something. This was getting something done.

She pushed through one contraction, which receded, and the doctor asked me if I wanted to look: the head was partly out. Ribbons of blood had jettisoned from my wife's vagina. Streaks of it stained the OB's arms and the sheets and beads of blood sat quivering on the chrome of the stirrups. My baby's head was halfway out of the bulging inner labia and my baby's hair was matted and black and there was so much of it.

"She's got black hair!" I shouted excitedly up at Wood, who grunted with exhaustion. "I can see her hair," I repeated. "She has so much, and it's black!"

"Do you want to touch the head?" the OB asked me, and with that permission I reached out for it, running my fingers along the pulsating piece of foreign flesh stuck inside my wife.

It felt like a rotted apple, the soft pulpy kind you come across in the moist earth of an orchard in September, under trees pregnant with fruit in those days before the cold air will turn them naked and frightened. I was concerned that my fingers would leave their mark in the bloody scalp and that unhinged pangeic skull, and I drew them back, and shortly after that the next contraction started. Everyone shouted for Wood to push, and she did, her body stiffening and the latex gloves were cupped right there under her cascading gore, ready to catch the upset little creature trapped between two worlds, shoved out by fate from everything it had known till then, that amphibian world inside Wood. Her face, my first glimpse of her, twisted around by the latex hands to fit the shoulders through, and then the whole body came, as if freed from its ballasts it slid out spotted with meconium and blood, followed by the blue tether of her umbilical cord. And then she was held in the two upraised palms of the doctor's hands.

They took her to the side to make her breathe. I stood there and I didn't know what to do. In front of me lay my bloodied wife, wounded and exhilarated, abandoned by the OB who clamped and cut Juniper's cord at midway and then turned to Wood to work on passing the placenta. They hustled Juniper away to suck the meconium from her lungs. The blood on my own hands was already drying. And then the nurses were calling me to cut the cord closer to the belly. I looked at Wood after all those hours at her side and asked her permission to leave her, to go to where our child lay naked and screaming.

"Can I go to her?" I asked. "Of course," she said. "Go."

Wood: I don't remember much of that. I remember pushing. I remember the thrill of finally being able to do something productive. I remember Dutch touching our baby's head and looking excited and scared. I remember that my OB asked me if I wanted to touch her, and I remember refusing, not wanting to delay her birth a second longer and not really wanting to stop and think about how she was half in and half out, not really in either place.

And then I remember feeling very, very relieved once she was born. She was okay, and even though she wasn't placed immediately on my stomach the way I'd wanted because they had to make sure she didn't have any meconium in her lungs, I could tell by the way the room felt and the way that people were talking that she was okay, and I was relieved. A few moments later they brought her to me and I could finally see and touch the little creature who'd been inside of me for so long. And of course -- the pain was over immediately. And that was a huge relief.

I won't dare to put into words how that moment felt. Anyone who has held their child for the first time knows how it feels, and no amount of imagination can quite capture the gravity of the moment.

With all of the books I'd read about childbirth, there was nothing I was unprepared for, yet still, the labor and birth was nothing like I'd expected. I think of all the ways it can happen: in elevators, in taxi-cabs, at home, on hippie farms. I think of women who have caesareans that didn't want them, of other women whose babies are rushed off to the NICU, and others still whose babies come to them from other wombs, other countries. Like any experience in parenthood, it is different for everyone, and yet there are things that bind us together. That feeling of first holding your child is one of them.

Dutch: I think of my father at my birth, I think of his father at his birth, and the generations of men for whom all of this was forbidden or for whom it would have been out of custom to particpate in this way. This all happened somewhere else. Like a TV show or a movie, they got to pass out cigars, pace in the waiting room. They got to see their baby through the glass in a nursery. All silent climax and a denouement of pointing and handshakes.

Wood: My grandmother gave birth to eight children under general anesthesia, waking up to find her children already taken from her body, cleaned, and wrapped in blankets. I think of my mother who labored for 2 days without my father, eventually giving birth to me and spending several nights in the hospital alone.

I know there are people out there who believe births shouldn't happen in hospitals, who scorn "unnecessary" use of expensive interventions. When I was pregnant, I was one of those people. I was terrified to give birth in a hospital, and I didn't trust the medical profession or my doctors. I wanted a doula because I felt I needed another woman in the room to help me counteract the toxic hospital culture.

Hospital culture today, though, is at least nothing like what our parents and grandparents experienced. My grandmother and mother were denied support from their partners during labor. Their only company and support came from hovering nurses and overworked doctors. Dutch's grandmother, before she died last fall, told us how her sister, a nurse, managed to be in the room with her during Dutch's mother's birth in 1950. Even 86-years old and weakened by a heart attack, you could tell from her story how much that meant to her, having someone there she loved to help her through. That is how it should be. Hospitals are no place to face your fate alone.

When Juniper was born, I was never without Dutch. The pain was mine, but we went through the experience together, and it made facing the pain without intervention possible for me. Every experience is different, but one thing we have to be thankful about even in today's hospital culture is that if we are lucky enough to have someone as a birth partner, that person can be there for us for as long as they want to be. Most hospitals today even put cots in the rooms so that fathers can stay over night, as Dutch did, though he preferred to snuggle up in the tiny bed with newborn Juniper and I for most of the night.

Biology dictates that labor is a woman's burden. No man will ever know it. But society only needs to follow biology so far, and even though for thousands of years childbirthing---and childrearing---have been the province of women, that no longer has to be the case. Dutch was my partner in the room because he is my partner in life, and he has been my partner in raising this little baby to the beautiful little one year old girl who can walk and say words and look at us with understanding in her eyes.

Dutch: You can't really write about this without sounding trite or precious. But it is true that there is nothing that any man can do to match the beauty of what he sees the day his baby is born. No artist has ever bested it, as far as I can tell. The feeling you have at the end of that long process goes well beyond pride. Yes, I was proud of Wood: more proud than I have ever been of anything, I was proud to know that woman was my wife. But beyond pride I was in awe of her, so beautiful and vulnerable and Jesus, what a tough motherfucking chick too.

All of that stuff Wood wrote above, about me being in there; It's not about me. It should never be. But I am just so glad I was in there, to see it. This story belongs to her, but by virtue of being there I get to do some of the telling. Of course, there's nothing unique or special about any of this. As Wood suggests, this is how things are done now. Men are allowed to witness it; they are allowed to support and participate. Anyone who's gone through it knows, knows how you thought you loved your wife as much as you possibly could, that is until you see her go through all this (however it is she goes through it) and you realize that well of love is deeper than you thought, bottomless even. And in the end you get a little creature that you're responsible for, and all that love you're feeling for your wife, suddenly you realize you've got even more of it inside you, enough to fill the whole room.

And even from there, it grows so fast you can hardly believe it.

Note: Today is Juniper's First Birthday; while we celebrate, we wanted to share her birth story. We're writing this together, in the tag-team spirit of our blog, and we'll probably finish the story tonight or tomorrow.

Dutch: I had planned to videotape Juniper's entire labor, the whole process. When it came time to sit and look at the footage I did take on January 29, 2005, there wasn't much. The first scene on the DV tape is Wood sitting in the rocking chair in our living room watching The Wizard of Oz, sucking on a fruity popsicle; the camera stays on her smiling while she talks. Her water has just broken, she says. While she smiles and talks to the camera a palpable wave of pain breaks in her eyes, which clench shut as her whole face buckles before the camera turns off and I rush to hold her through it.

In the next scene we are in the intake room at the hospital; Wood has vomited all over the floor and she is sitting back in a hospital bed, like a postcoital demimonde in a photograph by van der Elsken, her face first recovering from and then anticipating pain. She raises her arms, her hands clutching each other behind her head like a POW after surrender. My quivering voice is heard off-camera, describing what this valiant wife has gone through the past nine hours, words of encouragement veiled as narrative drowned suddenly when the next contraction hits, and the cameras shuts off again as I again rush to her side.

The next scene on the DV tape is full of the sound of screaming. A nurse in blue scrubs rushes across the frame, away into the corner of the room, and the camera tilts and falls on Wood's face again, calm now, and tired but infused also with sparkling adreneline. "She's born," I say, and then my wife looks back at me and smiles, "yeah."

That long shot is followed by hours of frenzied footage of a chirping creature, blinking at the hospital flourescents with her tiny black eyes, poked and prodded, measured and weighed.

It is a strange memorialization of an even stranger day. As film it lacks drama. It lacks tension. It is all climax and denouement. There is no exposition, no complication, no conflict, no progression. Only pain and then no pain. In that way it is nothing like the day itself, which was all pain and confusion.

But the hours missing from the footage were hours that mattered, I do not want them lost in memory or eclipsed by the joy this child has brought us. I couldn't film those moments, hunched over my wife in our last hours as lovers and not parents, my head up against hers on a hospital bed while the pain dragged across an endless graphed page next to us, her body a seismic force unto itself, concave with pain, filled. I stood there empty, wishing I could take it from her. I understood why ancient men had written of this as punishment from God, as if to appease their overwhelming guilt. Nurses slithered in and out of the little room in their Danskos offering the constant temptation of a needle in the spine, and for hours the doctor announced no progress in dilation, finally ordering pitocin, while the woman in the bed writhed in a sea of wires and tubes and sank deeper into some place where I could not follow her.

Wood: On the morning of her due date I woke up at 3:11 in the morning, recording the time in my head before I even figured out that the contractions had started. I laid in bed silently, surprised in the sort of way where you aren't surprised at all that my labor would start precisely on the day that I had been counting down to for 9 months. I ticked off the minutes between contractions -- which felt exactly like the menstrual cramps my friend had described -- and waited. They were ten minutes apart, then seven, then five.

At around 6:00 a.m. the contractions were strong enough that I couldn't be still or silent any longer, causing Dutch to wake up. As I worked through a contraction, I heard Dutch realize what was going on and get excited. He jumped up and down on the bed, shouted something about my hospital bag, tried hugging me and said "We're going to have a baby today!" But I was in a contraction, so I think I replied with something like, "Uuuuuuguuuuuggggggh." And then the contraction was over, and I started to cry really, really hard. Hearing Dutch say out loud that the baby was coming made everything seem real and terrifying and unbearable.

I spent the next couple of hours at home with contractions about 5 minutes apart and lasting for 30 seconds. Everything I'd read about labor and childbirth had convinced me that I needed to stay at home as long as I could possibly bear it. All of those stories in Ina May's book about hippies walking around her farm and going about their normal business while in labor had convinced me that I could do that same. And so, when really faced with labor and contractions, I was determined to stick to that part of my plan. I wanted to watch TV! How can you think about pain when there is TV! So I had Dutch put in the Wizard of Oz. The movie was my choice, an old familiar drug to take my mind away from the pain. I wasn't going to sit through one of his Kurosawa films. Not this time. I sat a few feet in front of the set and forced myself to watch. But in between contractions all I could think about was how soon the next one was coming and whether or not I was going to throw up. Not even munchkins riding in teeny-tiny carriages pulled by teeny-tiny horses could take my mind away.

I threw up a lot. I guess it was the pain of the contractions; it seemed like every other contraction sent me running to the toilet. It was eventually the force of puking that broke my water, sending fluids spraying and gushing all over the bathroom. Unfortunately, through, the broken water just gushed into my oversized sweat pants, which, I have to admit, was kind of a bummer. I had always pictured water breaking by splashing down and puddling on the floor, and it had never dawned on me that if you were wearing pants that didn't happen. Instead it was just like I wet my fat pants.

By this time it was noon and it seemed like time to go to the hospital. With herculean effort I managed to shower, put on clothes, and get to the car, where I finally called my best friend so that she could start calling the other friends who'd said that they absolutely needed to know when I went into labor. It went something like this:

"Hi, just wanted you to know we're on our way to the hospital."
"OH MY GOD! NO WAY! YOU ARE! WHAT'S IT LIKE? ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Um, hold on, a contraction just started. . . "
"REALLY! NO WAY! OH MY GOD! WHAT'S IT LIKE? ARE YOU OKAY?"
"Uh. . . "

At least my friends had a phone tree set up so I only had to have one of those conversations.

When we got the hospital I was already patting myself on the back. I imagined the nurse congratulating me on laboring at home for 9 hours and waiting to come to the hospital until after my water broke. I was sure that by the time she checked my dilation I'd be at least 3, 4, or maybe 5 cm dilated. I have to admit, I was feeling pretty damn proud of myself.

Instead, when checking my dilation, the nurse said this: "Oh, honey, you're not even one centimeter. Not even an itty-bitty fingertip. You're going to need to go home -- I can give you some morphine. This baby isn't going to be born today."

After hearing this news, I puked all over the examining table and floor, simultaneously forcing out some more amniotic fluid all over the clean towels I was sitting on. The nurse examined the towels and found some nasty black and green baby poop (or mecononium for those in the know). This caused her to change her mind. Instead of going home, my not-really-dilated-at-all cervix and I were sent up to a labor room to maybe, if we were lucky, give birth early the next morning.

Devastated, I went through contractions for the next hour or so in a semi-catatonic state, drifting in and out of consciousness while connected to all of the things I hadn't wanted: a fetal monitor, a uterine contraction monitor, an oxygen mask, and an IV.

Dutch: An incompetant nurse kept losing the baby's heartbeat on the fetal monitor, confusing Wood's for the baby's. I watched as she tried over and over to get the heartbeat right. She claimed that when Wood sat up or moved at all, the baby's heart rate dropped dramatically, which meant the baby couldn't get enough oxygen. So Wood remained motionless and on her back. The nurse encouraged her to breathe only through the oxygen mask. It was exactly where she hadn't wanted to end up, horizontal in the bed weighed down by a sea of wires and tubes. The doctor had ordered pitocin and the nurse failed to put any in the IV stream, which was fine with us. Wood's birth plan had been to do this without any drugs. No drugs at all. Pitocin would increase the intensity of the contractions and make the pain worse. We didn't want it.

At some point we almost lost hope. We were left alone in the room for such long stretches, just sitting there watching the contractions on the seismometer thing, waiting for each peak to recede. It was just the two of us. Having scared off a potential doula months earlier, I had taken it upon myself to be as knowledgeable as I could be. I'd read a half dozen books on the birth process, from The Birth Partner to the same Ina May book on smokey mountain hippie childbirthin' that Wood had read. I had been giving Wood perineal massages for months. I had prepared a kit of relaxing music on a portrable mp3 player and some aromatherapy bottles. I knew what questions to ask the doctors when they recommended pain relief. I had read about dozens of ways to help her through the pain. I looked at my wife and realized that it was taking all the strength of her mighty will to get through these moments, and that this imposed posture was gradually wearing down that will. I went over to her at the end of the next contraction and told her we needed to get up. I dragged away the oxygen mask and the baby monitor (which wasn't even picking anything up). I led Wood and her IV into the bathroom and had her sit on the toilet. We practiced big breaths. I asked her to breathe like a horse does, and her cheeks and lips vibrated with exhaled breath. I saw the yoga ball in the tub and asked Wood if she wanted to get on it. She told me she did. We pulled it back into the delivery room, and sat on it and started bouncing. I was grateful for the ease by which I could hold her in this position when the contractions came, and Wood seemed to like squeezing the crap out of me when they came. It was a long time before the nurse came back and scolded us for leaving the bed and taking off the fetal monitor, but soon the doctor came in and scolded the nurse for not putting the pitocin in the IV. We just faded into the background while she really let the nurse have it.

I hadn't eaten since dinner the previous evening, and at about 2:00 or so I began to think it would be a good idea to go grab something to tide me over the coming hours. The doctor had said in her last examination that the baby would be born late that night after all, and not the next day. So with the doctor there I left Wood's side for the first time in eleven hours or so, and rushed out of the elevator to the closest cafe to grab a sandwich and bring it back up to the room.

And when I got back, everything had changed.

[to be continued soon]

Click here for part 2 of the Birth Story

Dutch didn't really make it clear that we were FIRED by our doula. I mean, pretty much. Here's what happened:

Like Dutch said, I met with the doula first. From the beginning he wasn't really into it, but hey, I was the one with a baby in my belly that had to come out somehow, and that meant that I got to call the shots.

I talked to the doula on the phone a couple of times, and then I had her come over one night when Dutch was conveniently working late. And she was great. Really, really great. We had an awesome conversation and she listened to me talk about my pregnancy in the way that I wanted my OB to listen, but had yet to realize just does not happen with OBs (yes, I should have hired a midwife. next time). She asked questions, she offered advice, and she gave me book suggestions. And, to this day, despite the falling out that was to come, I still owe her big time for the book suggestions. She nudged me towards Ina May Gaskin, and for that alone, she rocks.

She showed me her bag of tricks. Her adorable hipster-thrift-store-purchased bag of tricks (oh how I coveted that slightly faded, just garish enough print, and those well-worn leathery handles). Her bag of tricks did include aromatherapy and tennis ball socks, and I was SO INTO IT. Right on, sister, I thought. I sniffed her little bottles, I felt her home-made massage tools, I examined her sticks of honey, and I nodded my head and made approving noises. I concluded that she was exactly what I needed and I told her so. I also warned her that Dutch wasn't completely on board yet, but that I was working on it, and that he just needed time. She understood, she told me to call her.

About a month later my belly had finally grown big enough that Dutch was forced to recognize that I was the shot-caller, and he started to tow the party line on the doula. He said he understood, he said he wanted to be supportive, and he was ready to meet with her. He said he was still afraid that I was trying to replace him, and I assured him that he was ridiculous but encouraged him to talk with her about his feelings. He said he would. And even though Dutch can be a pretty standoff-ish guy, he was pretty cool about the doula at this point. More than cool -- he was open. And as you might have guessed, openness is a rare state for Dutch.

The doula came over, and it was like Dutch said it was. AWKWARD. It was horrible -- an unbelievable, staggering sort of awkward, where you assume that the next thing out of your mouth will finally break the ice, but it never does, and it just gets worse. I was waiting for the doula to sort of take over; I mean, this is what she does, she works with couples, so I guess I expected her to have questions or thoughts or at least lead the discussion. But she stonewalled, and instead we had strange conversations where she was sort of suggesting that we start all over (leave my OB, get a midwife; leave the hospital, go to the birthing center) and we were like, Hell-ooooo? This baby is due in 2 months, and if we got a midwife and went to a birthing center, why would we need you?

But the worst was when Dutch said: "I mean, I just don't think a birth center in the mission is for us." And while he was just being honest, the way he said "mission" conveyed some of the disdain he holds for the mission that he explained in his post. And the doula just sat there in silence and made no response. I don't know if she picked up on his anti-mission-ness and was personally insulted, or if she was just annoyed that we didn't want to do what she thought we should, but either way, I could tell she just wasn't that into us.

She called the next day to break it off. She asked me if I wanted her to suggest another doula, but I told her it was okay. We only had two months to go, so I gave up on my dream of having a doula.

And, having elbowed the doula out of the way, Dutch stepped up to the task and read "The Birth Partner" cover to cover. He prepared his own bag of tricks (including some aromatherapy and tennis balls), and he repeatedly told everyone how he was going to be the best doula ever. Once I tried to explain to him that he was the father and that was way better, but then I gave up because it was just so damn cute to hear him say it.

So the Bug's due date came, my contractions started, and we were all ready. Dutch was an amazing partner -- far better than I would have ever thought my husband, the guy who comforted me during my morning sickness by reminding me that I was the one who wanted to be pregnant, could be. It was because of him that I finally took off the stupid oxygen mask and moved around the room even though I didn't think I could do it. It was because he kept telling me how "fucking tough" I was that I didn't cave in the 17th time the nurse asked me if I was sure that I didn't want an epidural? how about narcotics? a little morphine? And it was because of him that the whole thing went so damn smoothly -- without a hitch, stitch, or regret. I wouldn't have changed a thing. I did have the best doula ever.