How to Make a Nugget Part 4

This is part four of a series I'm writing about my pregnancy and my son's birth.

Here's Part 1.

Here's Part 2.

Here's Part 3.

Disclaimer 

If you’re in this for the fashion, look away.  If you find yourself repulsed by a woman’s inner need to rehash every gritty detail of bringing their young into this world, then this post is NAWT going to be to your liking. If you don’t like a lot of wordy words comin’ at you, catch you next week. My feelings won’t be hurt one iota, and I promise I still love you. Also, if you are pregnant with your first child, I will forbid you to read further.  I would never knowingly tell this story to a preggo on her maiden voyage to a birthing suite.

I’ve put off telling the story of Maxwell’s birth, because honestly, it was traumatic. It was not at all what I wanted or expected--- and I really had no idea what to expect.  I feel, now though, almost a year-and-a-half later, that it’s a story that should be recorded. As long as I’m recording it, why not let you all in on it? I let you in on lots of other embarrassing things that I do.  I would never call anything about childbirth unnatural or embarrassing. I’m just saying that there are moments in this tale that I would not describe as being my finest hour.  Hopefully, after all these months of physical and emotional healing I can laugh at this whole experience as I laugh at most everything in life because if you can’t laugh at yourself, God is going to be yukking it up without you.

I was the ginormous ball that drops on this New Year's Eve. Two days before D-Day.

Chapter 4. "D-Day" or "How I Emotionally Abused Mr. Newsfeed"

The waiting game was torture. Everybody you’ve ever met calls you and asks you if the baby has arrived every single, stinkin’ day. No one wants that casaba melon outta there as much as you do. You have the nursery ready, your bag packed, ankles the size of the ancient sequoias.  You are ready for the preggo experience to END and to get a hold of your Nugget. Little did I know that each day was a stay of execution against the agony that I would eventually endure. You should know I almost added “happily” there in the last sentence as an adverb to modify “endure”, and then I got really honest with myself.

My water finally broke on a Sunday morning. By that point, I had been hollering “this is it” for two weeks.  My “Braxton-Hix” or “practice” contractions had been so uncomfortable that it was not an unusual practice for me to grab onto something and squat down to breathe deeply in the grocery store, the shopping mall, church, or wherever this out-of-place behavior would be the most embarrassing to Mr. Newsfeed. Because of the Christmas holiday, he’d been home for weeks bothering me all day and watching me like a ticking time bomb because that’s what I had become. I will never again believe a movie scene in which a woman’s water breaks, she’s rushed to the hospital, and starts pushing. It’s hooey. Got me? Hooey. That would have been a cake walk.

It was in the wee, small hours when I climbed into bed with Anthony to tell him that we’d be meeting our baby that day.  I had to knock him around to wake him up so that I could inflict this special moment upon him. He was sleeping in the guest room because I was such a beached whale at that point that I needed 37 pillows to get comfortable enough to get an even an hour or two of sleep. There was not any room for husbands. He was upset that I was waking him and was reluctant to believe me that “today was the day.” He’d heard it too many times before. I retreated to my room to endure more contractions with my ipod meditations and pillows. In the days leading up to “the big one” I had been skate/snowshoeing/waddling over to the fitness center to walk the day away and the baby OUT on the treadmill.  After my water broke, however, I was NOT interested and had to make myself walk around every now and then.

Mid morning, Anthony finally dared to come seek me out in my momma bear lair. He asked if I needed anything. I very specifically described what I wanted to eat (a food that I’ve never craved before or since) and the kind of water I wanted in a very serious way. I think he finally believed me because I’m very seldom very serious. When he returned with them, I asked that he sit them on the bed and go away. I should mention here that for a good 48 hours or so, I was not anyone with whom you’d want to be having a baby. I’ve been trying to make it up to him ever since.  Whatever.  The day of Max’s birth wasn’t exactly his shining moment, either.

All of our weeks of training and practice was not comforting us in those panic-filled hours. The day wore on and I stared at a window in our bedroom trying to prepare myself for each contraction. I was yelling to Anthony “now!” and “NOW” to indicate the start and end of contractions so that he could time them. They kept getting worse but never really achieved any sort of constant interval that would indicate that Max’s big debut was imminent. I was determined to stay at home for as long as humanly possible. I didn’t want to futz around at the stupid hospital for days waiting to have the baby. In the back of my mind, though, I knew that we had been snowed in for days and the roads had been recently  cleared so it would be great if we could go to the hospital before it snowed again.  I held out until the last possible minute. 

Then, around one o’ clock in the morning, almost 24hrs after this all this had begun,  Anthony skated me out to the car on a thin sheet of ice and away we went. I have some sort of idea about how annoying I had to have been on that car ride. I just knew birth was imminent. I expected to feel the baby start sliding down the baby shoot at any moment on that car ride. I had one foot up on the dash in a sort of crazed squat and was doing and yelling things that were absolutely not part of our Bradley training. I was breathing deeply but that was about it. All bets are off when your body has been squeezing your insides like a giant tube of toothpaste for two solid weeks and you know that cap is about to burst free... also that you are going to be responsible for making sure the toothpaste gets into a good college.

(to be continued)

Conclusion  Tuesday!


If you want it sooner, you can publicly follow the Electric Elmo Newsfeed on your Google reader or Bloglovin' and shoot me an email letting me know you can't wait for the conclusion and you might get an exclusive sneak peak.

Part 1 is here
Part 2 is here
Part 3 is here
Part 4 is here
Part 5 is here
Part 6 is here