Birth Stories

I was incredible moved when I read this blog post written by the very talented Libby Emmons. (click here to read)  It wasn't about her playwriting - it was her birth story and her struggles  with her expectations of herself as a mother and the reality of being a mother.

I have organized a semi-weekly meetup in Fort Tryon park for new parents and their babies.  It's great for the children to interact and I think it's even greater that the new moms and dads get to talk with other people that are going through the same thing.  I have heard a lot of birth stories - some wonderful, some harrowing, some with a bit of both - but all of them share the fear of the unknown and how quickly we have to learn to adapt to these new, tiny lives we have been trusted with.

I think it's incredibly important to share your birth story and your experiences as a parent.  There are too many voices that scream: "If you don't do THIS you are a terrible parent." Instead, I like the women and men who say: "This is what happened to me - maybe something I did will work for you." Maybe it will.  

I went into labor at 11 am on.  Gerald and I were staying with his parents in their one bedroom apartment because the closing on our new apartment had been delayed until the week prior.  Gerald was getting ready to go into work.  We ate a nice breakfast and I said: Hmmm.  My back is really sore."  10 minutes later my back was really sore again.

Our slightly ridiculous but pretty much informative birthing class had told us to expect laboring at home for most of the day before going to the hospital.  They also said the contractions would start gently and be about an hour apart.  Mine quickly left the "uncomfortable" stage and progressed to the pretty intensely painful stage.  They were ten minutes apart for about 40 minutes.  Then they were six minutes apart.

At this point Gerald had called out of work and we decided to call our OB/GYN.  I talked to her and explained that the contractions seemed to be very intense and six minutes apart.  She thought we were probably wrong but should go to the hospital if we felt strongly about it.  The worst that would happen would be that the hospital would send us home.

Gerald started zooming around the apartment looking for what to bring but it was all already packed in a suitcase so he was just zooming around to blow off some steam.  I wasn't sure about leaving for the hospital - I didn't want to make the trip to be sent home again.  Contractions were 5 minutes apart.  A friend called to offer me free tickets to a performance of Nice Work If You Can Get It on Broadway that night.  I said: "Well, I don't think I can go.  I'm pretty sure I'm in labor."  Another friend called to catch up - and I finally ended the conversation with: "I think I need to go to the hospital now - I'm in labor."

I waddled to a cab with Gerald, hissing in pain.  In the cab ride over my contractions started getting extremely painful and were now 4 minutes apart.

We got to the hospital and went to Triage.  They whisked me inside and when Gerald tried to come with me they told him he had to wait outside for a few minutes.  They got me into a curtained section and I promptly threw up into a sink and all over the floor.  Gerald came in a few minutes later and they checked my cervix - 6 centimeters dilated.  I was taken up to labor and delivery.

At this point it had been about 2 hours.  For the next 4 hours my contractions were incredibly intense and 2 minutes apart.  I couldn't get comfortable and the pain was becoming unbearable.  I was naked except for that ridiculous hospital robe - all my sweaty lady parts flapping in the wind.  I was embarrassed for about  thirty seconds and then just gave up.  I was exhausted.  I was so sure I didn't want an epidural.  But the Doctor thought I would labor through the night.  If it was going to be this hard for that long I knew I couldn't do it.  

I sat still for the epidural for a half an hour.  The intern or resident mis-threaded it and someone senior had to come in and do it.  Blessed, blessed relief.  

A few minutes later the OB/GYN came in.  She told me my labor had slowed (it hadn't, the belly monitor had fallen off unbeknownst to both of us), and though she thought I would labor for another 10 or 12 hours she was going to check me out.

She looked inside and said:  Forget what I just said.  You're going to give birth in the next fifteen minutes.  Would you like to know what color her hair is?"  

10 sets of pushes, an episiotomy, and a slight poop accident later, Clara was born - lying on my chest while we waited for the placenta to stop pulsating before cutting the cord.  I wish I had known I was that close to giving birth, or that they had checked me out before giving me the epidural.  I would not have gotten it had I known I was that close. 

It took five days for my milk to come in.  Angry night nurses yelled at me that I was doing it wrong as I tried to breast feed every two hours.  When we took Clara home when she was three days old she spent the entire night crying.  Nothing was coming out of my breasts.

At our first doctor's visit the next day Gerald and I were jittery with fatigue and worry.  The pediatrician said: "She's hungry.  Why don't we give her a bottle? "  And we did and our little girl stopped crying and promptly fell asleep.  We gave her formula until my milk came it two days later and then I was in full on breastfeeding mode.

All those feelings they describe in books of your breasts feeling full enough to burst never happened to me.  Those pads you put in our bra to sop up milk leaks collected dust in the linen closet.  I seemed to be making enough for Clara but that was it.  I couldn't ever pump enough out for a bottle.  When I went back to work part time when she was three months old I couldn't pump more than a couple of ounces at work.  We had to supplement.  I met a lot of mom's who were exclusively breastfeeding and not using bottles.  They crowed: "My child has never even seen a bottle" or urged me to only breast feed with vague fears: "breast milk is the only way to go or their development will lag." They were very critical and it worried me.  What choice did I have?  What was the point in making me feel bad?

I had the intention of breastfeeding Clara for a year.  But one day, at nine and a half months - Clara walked away from my boobs. Well...she crawled.  She refused to breastfeed.  She was done.   It didn't matter that I wanted to breastfeed for another two months.  She was good to go.  "Bottle, please, Mama."

Every child is different and we all have become experts in our own children.  I have used quite a few tips proffered by other parents.  Some have worked: (a bowl of pacifiers by the bed so you don't have to hunt for the one that ended up under the bed in the middle of the night) and some haven't.  (Endless recommendations for sippy cups have all been rejected by Clara who would prefer to drink from a grown up cup at all of 13 months."

We need to do more of this for each other.  I want to hear your story.

Stand Up.

My entire life I have ridden NYC Public transportation.  When I was a kid and teenager mostly the bus because the subways were still kinda dangerous, and since then the subway. I don't remember being taught to offer my seat to the elderly, the pregnant, and moms with young infants but it is an ingrained trait of mine.  I also stop to help women struggling to carry strollers up and down the subway stairs. Gerald independently of me, has the same feeling.  Coming off a train, we once both reached down  and offered a woman help with her stroller at the same instant which made all three of us laugh. As I was 6 weeks pregnant at the time, Gerald won the brief struggle to help the mom up the stairs.

Until a year and a half ago, I had no personal experience being pregnant or being a new mom.  Now I do - and what I have found out is that the people living in New York City seem to have forgotten how to take a moment to help someone.

Being pregnant gets tiring very quickly.  There are a lot of wonderful things happening to your body.  My  hair and nails grew really fast, and I had that "pregnancy glow" people talk about and I totally dodged the morning sickness thing.  But after about month 4, the whole standing and walking around thing started to get really tiring.  I made a joke to a co-worker during this time:  That the answer to the question: "So you want to sit down?" was always going to be yes.

At the time I was living in Jersey City with Gerald and commuting five days a week to my job in Midtown.  This involved a twenty minute ride on the PATH train which is sparkling clean and puts the NYC MTA to shame, (and ironically, costs less to ride), a brief walk, and then the B or D uptown to Rockefeller Center.

I naively assumed that because I always offered my seat to pregnant women that I would be offered one on every ride. Some sort of karmic payback.  Now I understand that there is a window of time in a pregnancy where people aren't sure you are pregnant and don't want to offend you but from month five to delivery I looked really, really pregnant.

Riding the 2 trains for the four months I was visibly pregnant, on 20 train rides per week, I can count on both hands and feet the number of times I was offered a seat.  That, my friends is appalling.  Now there were plenty of times where a seat was available.  But there were many more times on crowded trains where I stood for the duration.

The people who  offered me a seat those times were most often Latino women, then Latino men and  once and male Irish tourist who actually said something to the train car at large when no one would stand up and offer me a seat.

I was uncomfortable asking for a seat but after a while with my swollen feet barking up at me I would try to catch someone's eye.  The one's who most quickly averted their gaze were the well-heeled men and women  in power suits reading the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times on their way to their banking or finance jobs.

One time I rode a car that wasn't that crowded but had no seats available.  I was standing next to a man that had to be a 100 years old.  We were the two standing and no one stood up for either one of us.

I want to know when New Yorkers stopped looking each other in the eye.  When I was a kid here I knew all the store owners and all my neighbors.  Now it seems like no one is here to stay and they would rather step on you than hold out a hand. Everybody is so busy trying to "make it" here they don't have time to talk or even look at anyone else.

One positive is that now when I ride the train with my impossibly cute gurgling baby, her smile seems to crack the composure of even the most hardened subway rider.  I have had some great conversations with strangers on the train thanks to my little Clara.

Stranger on the Bus.

One day after I moved uptown to Washington Heights I decided to try taking the bus downtown.  I have a lot of fond memories of riding the bus around with the various kids I babysat in New York City from the time I was 13 until I was about 23.  

I had Clara in a carseat fitted into a stroller contraption.  It was a hot day in early August.  The bus pulled up to my stop and the doors hissed open and I prepared to board.  The bus driver held out his hand, stopping me. 

"Miss, you gotta fold up that stroller or you can't board."

What?  Fold up the stroller carrying my one month old and do what with it? It took my new-mom muddled brain a minute to process these new bits of information.

Turns out that stroller policies have changed on New York City buses since I last babysat in the mid-nineties.  You now have to take your child out of the stroller and close it up.  In my case involved taking the car seat out of the stroller, holding the baby/carseat while trying to fold up the stroller part.  A nice gentleman standing on line helped me out with all these machinations while the patrons already on the bus glared in fury at the delay. 

After that ordeal I got a seat on the bus, with car seat Clara in my lap.  I realxed a little - enjoying the air conditioning and the view as the bus meandered down Broadway. 

A few stops later a middle aged woman gets on and sits next to me.  Without preamble, and without acknowledging my presence, she starts talking to Clara in a baby voice:  

"Hewooo wittle one…what is your Mommy doing taking you out on a hot day like this? Is she cawazy?  She should  be inside with such a wittle baby on a hot day. It's too hot for wittle babies.”

Another round of unasked for advice - this time directed at my baby daughter who hadn't even learned to focus her eyes yet.

I turned to the woman and said: "She’s on her way to visit her grandmother.  And she’s fine.”

The woman said: “I guess New Yorkers do things differently.”

I said: “Yeah – they do.”

The conversation ended there.

Drive by Advice on a Subway Platform

When my baby was 2 weeks old, my partner and I had to take her to the 2 week pediatric checkup.  We were living with his parents because we had only closed on our apartment the week before I gave birth.  Our trip entailed taking the subway from Murray Hill to Washington Heights…where we would have been already living if our co-op board hadn’t taken 4 months to schedule our Board approval meeting. 

Standing on the platform a pleasant looking woman in her late twenties smiled down at our little baby girl in her car seat stroller said: "I have a six month old…how old is yours?"  When I answered "2 weeks" the woman's smile disappeared into a  gasp of horror.  She half-shrieked: “OHMYGOD you can’t have such a little one on the subway it’s so dangerous all the germs and their tiny immune systems I wouldn’t let MY nanny out with her until after three months an then I got the germ net for the stoller. It’s a meshnet that keeps out the germs from the baby. You shouldn’t be on the train with her yet or ever! You could take cabs or a car service.That’s what my nanny does.”

Needless to state my heart started pounding.  Was Clara in danger from subway germs?  Though I immediately questioned the efficacy of mesh netting in keeping microscopic airborne germs off my baby…did this woman have a point?  Why hadn’t my What to Expect Book detailed the dangers of public transportation? I certainly didn’t have a nanny or a car service or even own a car, so my options were limited.  Mentally shaken, I smiled and thanked this apparently well-meaning stranger while silently vowing to ask a doctor for advice. 

Frazzled and already sleep-deprived, Gerald and I rode the train uptown.  I eyeballed the subway atmosphere looking for free-floating germs that might attach themselves to Clara's tiny face. 

When we finally made it to the pediatrician, I unloaded my worries onto her is a garbled stream that ended with: "Is she allowed to ride the subway?!"  The doctor’s advice was simple: “As long as Clara isn’t holding onto the handrail in the subway she should be fine.”

Did I ask for your advice?

Have you ever wanted strangers to come up to you, unannounced, on the streets of New York City and strike up a conversation? Would that change your stereotypical view that “New Yorkers are Assholes?”  As a native New Yorker I have to admit that apart from the occasional exchange about delayed trains with another passenger or being asked for directions, total strangers didn’t often come over to talk to me. 

That all changed after I got pregnant and then had a baby.

Turns out, pregnant bellies and babies attract strangers like bees to honey, in all the good ways (honey), and in all the bad ways (BEES!).

Some of the attention is positive. Faces softening into a smile as they asked: "When are you due?," or “How old is she?”or “What’s her name?” reinforced my faith in humanity and the everlasting cuteness of babies.  

But a lot of the attention was and is negative.  While I was pregnant I heard a lot of unsolicited scary pregnancy and birth stories that my forgetful "pregnancy" brain was very unaccommodating about deleting from my mind.  And these days, pushing a baby stroller around apparently gives people the impression that they can walk up to you and just say anything. When was the last time someone walked up to you on the sidewalk and judged you?  It's incredible and I plan to share some of these experiences.