When I was pregnant, Papà A bought me a book by American midwifery expert Ina May Gaskin, who specialises in natural childbirth. It was full of stories from women who’d given birth at home on Ina May’s farm commune in Tennessee with no medical intervention, and from what I could make out, practically no pain.
I hate hospitals. It’s partly the smell, reminiscent of hateful school biology lessons, partly the temperature, which brings me out in a sweat, but mostly it’s because I’m a control freak. I can’t bear the thought of being trapped, subject to an external timetable, with no end in sight, the only choice available to me the daily dinner menu. And this whole baby thing had been so medicalised, from even before the moment of conception, from the ritual humiliation of speculum examinations, to inseminations, to nightly injections in my belly, to a week’s stay in the hospital when I overreacted to the drugs, and worst of all, the horror of the delightfully named ERPC or Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception, when they scraped out what was left after a miscarriage while I was still conscious, biting down on A’s arm to numb the pain.
So we decided on a home birth. We would be control of music, lighting and drug use - a little private party for me, Papà A, and DJ S, with a couple of midwives to help us through it. I had visions of giving birth in front of the fire, then me looking exhausted but earthily glamorous, holding our baby in a cashmere blanket with Papà A and DJ S misty-eyed in the background.
Reactions were mixed. My mother, British as ever, kept a stiff upper lip but went passive-aggressively silent. The Italians were outraged and said so, whether they were asked for their opinions or not. The other members of our National Childbirth Trust group, all about to give birth around the same time, just stared at us as if we were crazy hippies. But the midwives we spoke to were enthusiastic, telling us that, statistically, home births were safer, meant less intervention, and that we could always go to the hospital if we really needed to.
What really made my mind up was when one of them looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘you know, one of the best ways to relax at the beginning of labour is to have a gin and tonic. If you want one, go for it. You can do that at home, but you can’t in hospital.’
I love gin and tonic. Giving up those delicious little glasses of joy was one of the hardest parts of being pregnant. I’d been dying for one for about a year. The midwife giving me permission to have one – or indeed, practically ordering me to have one, meant there was no choice. We were having a home birth, and that was that.
Papà A and I settled down to one of our favourite activities – making lists.
I hate hospitals. It’s partly the smell, reminiscent of hateful school biology lessons, partly the temperature, which brings me out in a sweat, but mostly it’s because I’m a control freak. I can’t bear the thought of being trapped, subject to an external timetable, with no end in sight, the only choice available to me the daily dinner menu. And this whole baby thing had been so medicalised, from even before the moment of conception, from the ritual humiliation of speculum examinations, to inseminations, to nightly injections in my belly, to a week’s stay in the hospital when I overreacted to the drugs, and worst of all, the horror of the delightfully named ERPC or Evacuation of Retained Products of Conception, when they scraped out what was left after a miscarriage while I was still conscious, biting down on A’s arm to numb the pain.
So we decided on a home birth. We would be control of music, lighting and drug use - a little private party for me, Papà A, and DJ S, with a couple of midwives to help us through it. I had visions of giving birth in front of the fire, then me looking exhausted but earthily glamorous, holding our baby in a cashmere blanket with Papà A and DJ S misty-eyed in the background.
Reactions were mixed. My mother, British as ever, kept a stiff upper lip but went passive-aggressively silent. The Italians were outraged and said so, whether they were asked for their opinions or not. The other members of our National Childbirth Trust group, all about to give birth around the same time, just stared at us as if we were crazy hippies. But the midwives we spoke to were enthusiastic, telling us that, statistically, home births were safer, meant less intervention, and that we could always go to the hospital if we really needed to.
What really made my mind up was when one of them looked at me thoughtfully and said, ‘you know, one of the best ways to relax at the beginning of labour is to have a gin and tonic. If you want one, go for it. You can do that at home, but you can’t in hospital.’
I love gin and tonic. Giving up those delicious little glasses of joy was one of the hardest parts of being pregnant. I’d been dying for one for about a year. The midwife giving me permission to have one – or indeed, practically ordering me to have one, meant there was no choice. We were having a home birth, and that was that.
Papà A and I settled down to one of our favourite activities – making lists.
- Birth pool: Having found one on Freecycle, we went to pick it up from a rather wild-eyed woman wearing a dressing gown and clutching a 2-year-old child. ‘I wanted to have a water birth,’ she said. ‘But there were complications.’ We backed away without asking what they were.
- Waterproof sheeting: The midwife had told us to buy some shower curtains from Ikea to cover the sofa. Our lovely friend Monty stepped in to provide some black rubber sheets from an erotic emporium in Old Street, helpfully explaining that they were fully machine washable and so could be used again as required.
- TENS machine: This marvellous little gadget works on the principle of displacing pain, the theory being if you have a series of electric shocks going up your spine, you might be distracted enough not to notice contractions. This should have served as a warning.
- The English Patient DVD: Absolutely vital. As I explained to Papà A, not only is this one of our all time favourite films, the sight of Kristen Scott Thomas wrapped in a parachute and dying in a cave would surely be enough to put my own pain in perspective.
- Heroin: Well, a derivative. Diamorphine, to be precise. Took as much effort to get hold of as it did to conceive the baby, with various cloak and dagger procedures involving lengthy telephone calls between doctors and pharmacists, registering at the chemists, feeling the need to explain ‘I’m having a baby,’ just to make clear that I wasn’t an addict, and promising faithfully to bring it back if I didn’t use it during labour.
Fully prepared, like the good little Boy Scouts we are, when the contractions began, at 3pm on 2nd March we danced about the room, singing ‘we’re going to have a baaa-by.’ We’d spent the morning in our favourite posh supermarket with my waters breaking and me telling Papà A not to make me laugh because it made them gush. The midwife came over at 5 and confirmed that yes, I was in labour, and we went for a walk with DJ S and T around the next door square, me breaking off every ten minutes or so to hold onto railings and try to breathe through the contractions.
I’d tried to find out what a contraction felt like, but no-one seemed to be able to tell me. ‘You’ll just know,’ they all said. They were right, you do. They hurt. They really, really hurt. When you’re in the middle of one you can’t think about anything else, apart from hoping for the moment when it’ll end. It’s pure, unadulterated pain. When they’re coming every 10 minutes they’re just about bearable. When it’s every 3, you start to go a bit crazy. I couldn’t even face the gin and tonic. Luckily, just as it was getting too much to handle, the midwives arrived with my pregnancy drug of choice – gas and air. I don’t really know what it is, but soon as the pain begins you start inhaling as hard as you can, and although it doesn’t take the pain away, you start to feel so stoned that you don’t care.
‘You’ve taken to it really well,’ said the midwife.
‘She’s done this sort of thing before,’ said Papà A, smirking.
Labour reached a new level. Before the drugs we’d been watching The English Patient, nibbling on little pieces of cake from the deli on the corner, breaking only for me to kneel behind the sofa and pant like a dog with each contraction. Now, I was completely off my head, going off into my own little fantasies. I started laughing and telling DJ S and Papà A that it was like being in Glastonbury. They looked at me as my grandmother might have done if I tried to explain what being at a festival is like.
‘I knew you’d be the perfect birth partner,’ I told Papà A, lovingly. ‘You were so good at looking after me when I was tripping during Shirley Bassey.’
DJ S giggled, and rubbed my back.
Before labour, I’d been worried about Papà A seeing me naked during birth. I’d had words with him about staying away from the business end of things and ignoring my stretch marks. DJ S had been told equally firmly that she should try to minimise the trauma and do what seemed right at the time. But at least she’d seen me naked before.
‘But you’re always running around topless in Italy,’ Papà A said.
‘This is a different situation,’ I said, sternly.
People had told me that once in labour I wouldn’t care and they were right. Throwing caution to the wind, I stripped off and got into the birth pool, which DJ S and Papà A had finally managed to fill with kettles after our dodgy hot water system had given up on us. Here, in our candle-lit garden room, in the warm water, drugs to hand, I finally felt as if we would have the home birth we’d been waiting for. Papà A put on some Bach and I burst into tears.
‘That’s so beautiful,’ I howled. ‘That’s why I’m having a baby with you.’
‘God, it is like being at Glastonbury,’ he said, and went off upstairs for a sandwich.
Ten hours later, after two more trips to the hospital by the midwife to replace said gas and air, which I had started to guzzle like a Louisiana crack whore, things were getting bad. I began to alternate between hanging from the kitchen door frame, trying to shake the baby out, to lying curled up on the bed, moaning in agony. The midwives told me I was dilated only to 7cms and stuck there, with the baby turned round the wrong way. I didn’t take the news well. Back in the birth pool, I started to cry again, and uttered the words I never thought would pass my lips.
‘I want an epidural.’
Having an epidural is supposed to make it all better, to make you dead from the waist down. What they don’t tell you is that first you have to wait for the ambulance to arrive, then you get to the labour ward and then you wait for the anaesthetist to arrive. Then it takes half an hour to set up. And then of course, it didn’t really work. I was still attached to the gas and air when they stuck the needle into my back, when they attached the catheter to my bladder, when they strapped the foetal heart monitor around my belly. If I’d had any strength left, I would have been furious at having ended up exactly where I hadn’t wanted, flat on my back in the labour ward, but by that point I didn’t care about anything. I just lay there for six hours waiting to be told to push.
In the end it never happened.
‘You’ve got a lip on your cervix that’s making it hard for the baby to get out,’ the obstetrician said, plunging a hand inside me. Drawing out his hand he frowned. ‘The baby’s pooed inside you,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to do an emergency caesarean.’
And so it was that 40 minutes later, I found myself lying on an operating table surrounded by people in green scrubs but not really seeing any of them because Papà A was holding up our son to my face so I could kiss him. I was shaking with shock, and in awe, and not really believing any of it, and not knowing quite what had happened but just that it had, and that here, at last, after 4 years of trying, was the Boy Child.
