My Heart Is Full, My Vagina Feels Like It Just Lost a Fight

Giving birth ain't pretty, but it's kind of beautiful

On Saturday around noon, I gave birth to a little girl we named Juniper. I am home "recovering." My vagina feels like it just returned home from fighting in a war.

Juniper is delightful and I love her and I can't wait to get to discover what kind of fun little person she will grow into, but thanks to her, everything from my neck to the knees feels like a bombed out Dresden in 1945. My pelvis is the nuclear test site from Twin Peaks: The Return. My vagina is The Overlook Hotel at the very end of Stephen King's novel The Shining (for those who have seen the movie but haven't read the book: the hotel explodes). My bathroom is the front row of a Gwar concert.

I will share that now I can report from personal experience that the rumors are true: childbirth is metal.

I went into the birth determined to attempt to deliver without the aid of pain medication, and especially without an epidural. (This makes me no better or worse than any person who has other preferences for how they want to give birth; it was just my preference for my own circumstances.) Advocates for unmedicated labor point out that pain is an important messenger during childbirth and pain-dulling medications may prolong labor and recovery. Research seems to back this up: statistically, women who endure birth without an epidural have a shorter recovery time and less tearing. This sounded good to me, and so it became my plan. I'd rather pay up front in labor pain than draw out recovery.

What's supposed to happen during labor is that a series of uterine contractions that escalate in intensity and duration push the baby down as the the cervix softens and dilates from less than 1 centimeter to 10 centimeters. At the 10 centimeter mark, that's where the pelvic floor and abdominal muscles join in and the pushing starts. Pushing is the part of labor most often depicted in movies, with the blood and screaming and the stirrups. In real life, it can last minutes or hours.

What happened during my labor is that my contractions built in intensity much more quickly than my cervix opened, and by morning, after more than 12 hours of constant space-bending contractions with very little progress, I was in hellish pain and only a few centimeters dilated. I literally shrieked for an epidural. I'm glad that I tried to labor unmedicated and would never discourage anybody from wanting the same for themselves, but I'm also glad that I didn't put too much pressure on myself to give birth unmedicated at all costs. I wanted a drug-free labor; my body did not cooperate. C'est la vie.

The epidural was a game-changer, both for me and for my poor husband and doula who had spent the night by my side as I screamed like I was being devoured by piranhas from within. After I stopped being able to feel anything from the waist down, labor was easy. I went from "barely dilated" to "ready to give birth" in a couple of hours.

It had taken two tries for them to get an epidural to work, but the second epidural worked almost upsettingly well. I could feel nothing--not even pressure-- below the waist. My legs did not feel like my legs; to me they looked like mannequin legs soldered on to a human torso.

As I prepared to push, a nurse held up one of my dead legs and Josh held up the other and reported from the business end of things how everything was going. I had no idea how hard I was pushing; I could only guess. Josh later told me that he could not believe how much baby there was to our baby. "There were so many body parts just pouring out of you," he later said, a little bit in awe. "They just kept coming."

I heard her cry before I saw her. I remember thinking "Good cry, not too loud, but not so quiet that I won't be able to hear it from the next room." They handed her to me and somewhere in the chaos either Josh or one of the nurses announced that it was a girl, which surprised me; I was convinced I was having a boy. The next thing I remember, my husband had teleported to the other side of the room and was crying tears of happiness and my minutes-old baby daughter was taking a huge shit on my chest. I was too stunned by how easy this part was to take it all in.

As the nurses took her to a warming station and cleaned my naked, baby shit-covered torso off, I looked down and noticed that my obstetrician was forearm-deep in my body, really digging around in there. She apologized for how much pain she was causing me. She was after my placenta; it had not become detached from my uterus on its own, and the good doctor was pulling it out to prevent me from such unpleasant postpartum consequences as hemorrhaging uncontrollably and possibly dying.

I could see that she was practically climbing into my body via the same route I'd just pushed a baby out, but I couldn't feel anything.

I thought, That's weird.

"This is a good epidural," the doctor said, finally pulling out what is best described as an enormous veiny human giblet. The placenta. Veiny mother organ of life. Dinner plate made of ugly meat.

Juniper had to go to the NICU for observation after the birth because she was having a little trouble breathing. As I waited for her to return to me, a lactation consultant with a vibe much more perky than mine came into my room and gave me a long lecture on breastfeeding while grabbing and manipulating my breasts as though they were a smart home accessory and she was the Sears rep sent by to install and demo them. I was too tired and overwhelmed by the overall strangeness of the past 24 hours to even be annoyed by this smiling stranger honking my boobs for an hour. All I wanted to do was sleep and this woman would not shut up about colostrum.

Eventually, the lactation consultant left me alone, and they wheeled my daughter back in. She looked like a doll, sleeping peacefully, nothing like the purple shrieking rage goblin that had taken a dump on my chest hours before. I sat and watched her through the clear sides of her hospital crib, unable to stand because I still couldn't feel my legs, and thought: "I'm a mom now. I'm a mom. I'm her mom. I'm her mother. This is my daughter. I am the mother of a daughter. Haha, what."

Here's how fucked up and manipulative hormones are: The second Juniper was born, I started to forget exactly how the labor--the worst pain in the world-- had felt. I remember the fact that I was in pain, unimaginable, seeing-stars pain, but I could not describe the pain. Like hot ripping? Like a lethal charlie horse? Like being turned inside out? Like my body pulling itself apart? I couldn't tell you, my brain had roofied itself. I would have written it down, but I'm told that all I did for about 8 hours was scream and cry, which would have made it difficult to write descriptively.

I started forgetting big chunks of time from the night before I had Juniper. Hours of a sober all-nighter have disappeared. Josh has told me about things I said or did. I have no memory of doing them, or saying them.

As my labor memories dissolved, feeling below the waist returned, slowly, and I started to feel the effects of the thing that had just happened to me. I hadn't given birth as much as been taken by it, in a direction I could not control, only react to.

But that's what's so cool about it.

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