Julia Maria, *19.12.2004

The story of Julia´s birth must be told from conception.  It all happened because Findlay got scolded in the kitchen in Baku a week after his first birthday.  Findlay surprised us all and started walking on the eve of becoming one year old, just like he started crawling on Christmas Day.  At one week and one day he could really only take a few steps still but he was highly adept at pulling himself up on furniture and traversing from one hold to the next.  It is this that Samira, his nanny, forgot when she put him down next to the water machine in order to help Tamara, the housekeeper, change the water bottle.  In one moment Findlay pulled up, reached for the hot water leaver and pushed it back releasing a flow of 85 degree water onto his hand and down his arm.  He got a second-degree burn that blistered and was bandaged from the fingertips to the upper arm for two weeks. 

Samira was very upset of course and in fact was so distraught that she insisted on staying the night at our house in order to care for Findlay should he awake in the night.  Since Findlay had not been sleeping that well recently we didn’t hesitate long before accepting this plan and relishing the thought of being able to close our bedroom door and have a lie-in.  We took full advantage of the opportunity and that’s when Julia was made.

From conception to birth was a long haul.  I felt my pelvis move before I had even got a positive pregnancy test.  We were on holiday in Calgary and I knew I was pregnant even though the urine test was negative:  I had felt that loose pelvis feeling before.  This became the theme of the pregnancy.  By 14 weeks I had pain in the sacroiliac joint, by 20 weeks and our holiday in Wales I couldn’t carry anything or walk for more than one hour.  By 35 I had to give up lifting Findlay, changing his nappy and pushing the pushchair.  By 41 weeks I could just about manage to stagger from the bedroom to the bathroom to the kitchen to the sofa.  I showered sitting on a plastic box in the bath and turning over in bed was a major feat. 

Apart from the physical changes of the growing belly and decreasing mobility we had a long way to go to get to our birth environment.  We moved to Baku, Azerbaijan when Findlay was just 28 days old and we expect to be there another year yet.  If you lucky enough to have a choice Baku is no place to have a baby.  We considered it, really, we could hire a midwife to travel to Baku and stay with us until the baby arrived.  As with Findlay, the only place I wanted to be to have a baby was at home, but in the end how could we take a chance on something so important.  If the baby was born perfectly and both me and the baby are fine it would be fantastic, but if any care at all was needed beyond what a general practitioner could provide we would have to fly out of Baku to get it.  The only option therefore was to go and live somewhere else to have the baby.  It would need to be a stay of a minimum two months, as you have to fly at least 4 weeks before the due date and can only fly back with the baby is 4 weeks old.  But where, oh where in the world would we go? 

We considered the UK, no accommodation, no homebirth option.  We considered Dubai, again probably no homebirth option.  Somewhere exotic maybe, or somewhere warm, why not, when you have to go for three months?  We went round and round the options but we always came back to the obvious option: back to Hamburg.  It went well with Findlay, so why not do like that again?  It would be expensive, but we knew it would offer us all the facilities we would need in terms of pre-natal care, a midwife we know and activities for Findlay.  It would offer convenience too in terms of being able to get out and about without a car, and we even have some friends in Hamburg.  Only problems would be where to stay, and how to get help with Findlay now that I was getting so utterly disabled by the pregnancy, and what help would we need after the baby is born and how soon would I be able to recover? 

In September I travelled to Hamburg alone to find an apartment.  I stayed in a friends apartment and spent every day calling agencies, pouring over the city map, trawling the internet, and worrying about finding the right place, well about finding a place at all, to have our baby.  We wanted to have the baby at home and you need a place you at least feel at home in to be able to do this.  Along with our requirement to have a second bedroom for Findlay and Samira, and a lift, and a location in Eppendorf it was a tall order.  In the end a very lovely apartment came up, very close to where we had lived before in Eppendorf and I agreed to take it on the first viewing the deal was done. 

Next task to accomplish was to bring our Azeri nanny, Samira, to Germany.  Her family didn´t want her to go, she being the sole member of the family capable of caring for her two girls aged 9 and 10, cooking, cleaning the apartment and washing clothes, which she does by hand.  After months of negotiations we bought the family a washing machine, installed a permanent water supply to their apartment, deployed our housekeeper to work in their home for the time Samira would be away, and offered a double salary, paid in advance.  We still had to equip Samira with shoes, trousers, warm clothes, a suitcase, medical insurance, an airline ticket and of course a visa for Germany.  The latter was the most troublesome, the Visa application process designed specifically to deter applicants at every stage from finding out the telephone number of the embassy, to paying the exact money in the correct currency.  We did it all though and we arrived all together, me, Kevin, Findlay and Samira, in Hamburg on the 3rd November 2004.

It was a relief to land in Hamburg and still be pregnant.  From about 20 weeks onwards I had felt like the baby could arrive at any moment.  It felt so big and so low and the movements were so strong.  I really wondered how it could grow for so many weeks more and my body not explode from this thing growing inside me.  Having landed in Hamburg at 35 weeks now it didn´t matter what happened with the pregnancy, there was a good chance me and the baby would be ok.  Now at last I could relax and really think about birthing this baby. 

We had a hectic few weeks to begin with.  Kevin left after a few days and then I began the task of finding activities for Findlay and showing Samira around.  After two weeks we had a full programme for Findlay, acquired the baby bed, the car seat, moved the furniture, blown up the pool and laid everything out.  Now the baby could come.  But it didn´t.  On a visit to the hospital to make a registration the doctor told me the cervix was open a little and the baby very low.  “Yippee” I thought and called Kevin and insisted he come earlier than he had planned.  He arrived around 38 weeks and even after a little time, some massages, a visit to the sauna, hot curry, sex, cleaning windows, witchcraft tea, Watsu and even after taking a tumble head over heels across the road and spraining my ankle nothing happened.  I had really felt that this was a different pregnancy to the last and with a little encouragement things would start to happen, but nothing shifted it.  As Kevin´s time to return to Baku drew closer and my afterbirth period of help from Samira became shorter the tension started to rise and my confidence in being able to do this in the way that I wanted started to weaken.  At first nobody said anything, except, “Oh, I think the baby will come today”, until I snapped at anybody who dared to mention the baby but finally we were forced to reconsider our plans for Kevin´s travel and help for the period after birth.  Kevin rescheduled his flight home and we found a friend who could come and stay after Samira left on the 30th December.  We were still trying to make the travel arrangements when Julia decided at long last to make her entrance.

I was lying down in the afternoon of the 19th December, a Sunday and Julia was already 12 days late.  Around 4pm I felt some movements and kept glancing over my book at the clock to see if these were really contractions or just movements and wishing them, as I had been doing for over a month, to come again and get stronger.  Gradually it become clearer that they were contractions and were indeed getting more distinct, and little by little stronger.  My sense of excitement grew and around 6pm I called Gabriele, our midwife.  I sat down for dinner with Kevin, Findlay and Samira, had to get up once or twice for a contraction, and Gabriele arrived a little after 7pm, just as we got Findlay to bed.  By this time I really was having contractions and was very happy and excited.  I went into the bath and Gabriele poured water over me and held my foot to help through the contractions while Kevin kept leaving the bathroom door open and asking what I wanted to buy on ebay and whether I could speak to my friend who called on the telephone. 

Soon we went to the bedroom where I lay down for a bit and then stood over the radiator to get through some of the contractions.  Apparently I was opening fine and I really felt that every contraction was making progress and was getting us a little further on.  This was a big contrast to the last labour where I seemed to spend hours contracting and getting nowhere.  Soon Kevin had got the pool filled and I got in.  Our room was lovely with soft light from a tall lamp with an orange shade, and the pool on a piece of carpet I had purchased for this purpose.  The water felt wonderful and Kevin put hot flannels on my lower back during the contractions.  I think it was around 9.30pm by the time I got into the water, or even a little later.  I couldn’t help thinking back to the last birth and wondering how long I would in the water and what struggle would ensue, but I just kept telling myself it was supposed to be easier this time, I knew what to do this time, and it would all be OK.

I got through the contractions leaning forward over the edge of the pool or on my hands and knees.  Gabriele instructed me to push down against her as she put pressure with her hands on my seat bones.  This really helped resist the urge to roll the pelvis down and tighten it.  I started to feel like I was really opening up.  The image I had is one of those old fashioned wooden clothes pegs.  I felt like a peg being pulled apart by its two legs, resulting it in splitting apart: it felt like being split open not only to the top of the legs but all the way up to the waist at first and then up to the chest.  It felt like the only thing holding my body together was my shoulder girdle. 

As the contractions continued and got stronger my fear heightened but my resolve to do this right strengthened.  In the weeks before I had spent a lot of time thinking about Findlay´s birth and how hard it had been for him and how he will carry the story of his birth in his spine, his body his whole life.  I didn’t want this to be so for this baby, I wanted to do it in a way that would give her the best possible start, the best opportunity possible to grow away from me from this point onwards without any burden.  I had to be brave to do this, I had to just face it and get through it.  Two thoughts kept me going.  One was that the pain of childbirth is mostly caused by fear, that fear makes the pain.  I was terrified, who can’t be in the face of a task so weighted by the possibility of consequences that can last a lifetime.  But I had to control this fear, pretend it wasn’t there, keep it back.  My second thought was that the path of least resistance isn’t always the most obvious.  The best way in the end for us both could actually be the way that feels the hardest at that moment.  It could be possible that least pain will be had by all by not turning from pain at this moment.  This meant to push through, to not recoil from every place of pain, that one of the doors that was labelled pain was actually the right way.  It’s instinctive to recoil from pain, it’s one of our body’s self defence mechanisms, but here and now in this moment I felt that I had to rise above this and that the long term path of least resistance meant facing the fear head-on.

I tried to maintain this positive thinking as the birth process progressed.   Contractions were really hard now and I was starting to struggle to get through each one, looking for a way out, wondering where I would get the power to get through the next one and the next and the next, or a hundred more as it had happened with Findlay when he came long after I was totally spent and exhausted.  Gabriele suggested feeling inside and I was surprised to feel a round bulge.  At first I thought it was the head, but after a few minutes I felt again and it was too soft and squishy to be the head – unless of course the baby had a big lump on the head already.  There hadn’t been that much downward pressure yet and so I didn’t think this possible.  The Waters still hadn’t broken and I realised the squishy bulge was the water sac pushing down through the cervix.  The next contraction popped the sac and I felt an easing, a release that felt wonderful.  I guess the baby was still above the cervix and the bag breaking had released the pressure in the cervix.  With each contraction I felt huge waves ripple through my uterus and my transverse muscle contract.  This surprised me because I was expecting to go through transition first before getting to the pushing phase.  I guess the transition must have been quick because I missed it, I only realised suddenly at some point that the contractions were different in nature.  I had also determined before that I would really hold back from “pushing” until it really felt right because I think I tried to do this too early last time.  Now my uterus and transverse were really doing it by themselves.  During each contraction I tried to help by tightening my transverse when I breathed out, just like the exercises I had been doing.  After just a few more contractions I began to start looking for a different way, the contractions were strong, my transverse contractions strong but the baby was still there and the pain becoming intolerable in the position I was in.  Gabriele had been trying to get me to turn around and take up a sitting position rather than a kneeling one but I had been ignoring her for several minutes.  Now I was ready to try something different and as I manoeuvred around a contraction came and the baby’s head came out, all the way from behind the cervix to outside in one push.  I felt panicked now, stuck with a baby’s head poking out of me in the water and the tissues around the opening burning and Icalled out for somebody to pull it out of me.

I felt the head and wanted to pull it out myself but I felt it stuck fast and realised no pulling could get it out.  I tried to push but I wasn’t really having a contraction and nothing happened.  Then the next contraction came and the baby shot out across the pool like a little astronaut on an umbilical and somebody scooped her up and she was in my arms before I could open my eyes and realise we had done it.  I sat back against the wall of the pool and looked at our new baby as she took her first breaths and cried out a little as the air rushed in.  I had meant this moment to be calm and peaceful and wonderful but I was far too excited and shaky and emotional.  What a journey, we had made it.

Lorraine B.