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[Part 1 of this is here.  A third part is here.]

It was a cold night, one of the few cold nights we’ve had this winter, and the house needed to be very warm for the birth. I opened all the vents on the stove in the living room, threw some logs into it, and then started a fire down in the basement, similarly opening all the vents. You can’t really have a lot of clothes on during labor in general, and I knew Catherine would be wanting to take showers, and here in this house there is only one shower, down in the cold basement. And it’s a drafty old house in general, with no oil or gas burner, the only heat coming from the wood stoves. Once I got the fires roaring, I got out our “birth kit” and began the routines we had been reading about for months. The pulling of the uterine muscles causes lower back pain, and so I took time to either rub Catherine’s back or just put my hand on it, which sometimes was enough; and at other times I tidied up the house a bit in preparation for the arrival of the midwives, and probably a thousand other things that I can only barely remember now.

By six a.m. she was in the shower, sitting on a rubber exercise ball, and the contractions started taking on tremendous intensity, the beginning of one coming less than three minutes after the beginning of the last. I texted the midwife telling her so, and she said it sounded like maybe she should come. I texted back, “Yes,” and she said she was on her way.

She arrived about an hour later, which was a relief, because I was beginning to feel out of my depth. Pregnancy is one thing; it is about the abundance of life, growth, the future, etc. It produced a glow in Catherine’s face and, I think, in the people around her as well. But birth is something else. It’s much less civilized: it’s wild, and godlike, and unpredictable, containing as the wild and divine things do all its own opposites. Catherine was mostly concentrating on the contractions themselves, but as an observer I was immersed in the emotional mood of the house; and what I felt was that when labor really kicked in, death was present as well.

This is first and foremost because labor is dangerous, and fear is a major part of the experience. For experienced women who have gone through multiple childbirths, that fear may be less of a factor, and of course some people are just naturally less fearful than others, but it would have to be a rare woman who is not somewhat afraid of childbirth, and a rare man who would not be afraid of watching someone he loves go through it. The presence of death sometimes occasions a general unease – I’m sure some of my bustling about the house was just burning off excess energy created by the apprehension, and the technological show of control which hospitals project is also usually part of this immense human discomfort with mortality. The show of control is to obfuscate the fact that all our lives point in a direction we would not choose – death. For some reason birth clarifies the basic terms of our life, and makes them hard not to confront. A home birth might intensify this feeling, but probably it makes little difference: wherever your first child is born, it is likely that there will be aspects of it that are like a near-death experience. It is a walk between death and life.

But fear is not always the primary emotion you feel, even in the presence of death. Some of this is because death can come in limited ways: as sacrifice, as the ending of a possibility, as the giving up of some things for the sake of the thing chosen above all. The fact that labor is not easy is almost unfathomably strange to the thinking mind, and probably significant. You would think that all nature would conspire to make nothing so easy as birth: after all, isn’t reproduction what nature wants? Perhaps for some living things, reproduction is cheap and abundant; but for human beings it is not. The difficulties of labor indicate the preciousness of the child. Your body does not tell you, “Eh, don’t worry, you can always make another one.” Your body says: “These are impossibly difficult and dangerous to get to this world, so take care of them once you’ve got them.” After you’ve been through the ordeal, you don’t think of dumping this one you’ve got and getting a better one later. You think of sacrificing whatever you must for this one. Or perhaps – you think, “I’m not even up to the amount of sacrifice this new life demands of me”: the humbled realization of people who feel they must give their children up for adoption. But one way or another, you understand that in every direction, sacrifice is required: acceptance of limitation for the sake of a goal. There is no easy way. You know this beforehand, but when the moment really arrives you are aware that quite suddenly everything is at stake, just to bring one new life into the world.

Seeing the midwife approaching the house, looking calm and collected, carrying her little duffel-bag of perfectly organized implements, broke the intensity a little bit, but in a good way: now someone who actually knew something would be responsible. I told her I was happy to see her, gave her a brief on the situation, and showed her into the birthing room (our bedroom). I gave her the birthing kit – the basic things needed for delivery, which remained here just in case the delivery occurred before the midwife arrived – and indicated where anything else she might need was. She set up her things and once she was ready she diagnosed the situation. Catherine had an amazing 8 cm. of cervical dilation, which meant that the work of labor was mostly done (the cervix has to dilate to 10 cm. for the child’s head to pass through). Things had gone splendidly and easily.

But for whatever reason, here Catherine’s labor reached a kind of plateau, and she remained at 8 cm. for nearly the next 8 hours. This was difficult to watch, because she had not plateaued at at easy point: the labor remained overwhelmingly intense, but it went on and on.

Apparently this is relatively common, and our books had mentioned it: dilation progresses up until a certain point, and then stops. The books suggested that psychological factors were the single most important cause for this stoppage. The theory behind the books about birth which we read is more or less that a woman’s job at this time is merely to relax: you have to allow the uterus muscles to work inside your body, and not attempt to oppose them, despite the fact that they are pulling on all kinds of things inside of you and the sensations are stronger than anything you’ve ever experienced, while also being unlike anything you’ve ever experienced (I’ve heard several assever that the uterine muscles are the single strongest muscle group in the body – whether that’s true or not, they certainly are capable of exerting tremendous force, and that involuntarily, which is difficult to have to undergo). Ina May Gaskin’s book has a page about “sphincter law” and how relaxation is the basic thing you need to get a sphincter (like the cervix or vagina) to open. During pregnancy we had done various breathing and relaxation exercises in preparation.

And up until this point, Catherine had done an amazing job staying relaxed. But it’s a lot easier at the beginning. As the morning wore on, we seemed to be entering an area not really covered by the playbook. You can tell someone to endure something hard and painful, but in the end I’m really not sure how someone can relax into something hard and painful. I’ve had some bad experiences with dentists, and I got through them by tensing up so hard I stayed in position: in other words, by the opposite of relaxing. And I could see Catherine doing the same. She started pinching her hand so hard with her fingers, during contractions, that I thought she’d split her hand in two. And then what am I supposed to do? Do I tell her that tensing up is not good, and not acceptable according to the Bradley method? Or just shut up and let her do what her body tells her to do? Similarly there were times when she jumped out of bed and started shaking her entire body because it made her feel better. That didn’t look like “relaxing into a contraction” to me. Nor did almost ripping the headboard off the bed, or the bannister off the stairs, which she almost did. But I hardly felt qualified to tell her to lay back down and just take deep breaths, you know, like the ones we practiced. The truth is that we were off the script. And getting back onto it seemed utterly impossible.

This may be because of the fear, or because the sensations of labor are so unfamiliar, or simply because of the pain. Catherine kept saying, “It’s not pain… it’s just… so… weird…” But it certainly looked painful to me.

And some of it probably is the social aspect of labor. I don’t think it was completely coincidental that Catherine’s labor progressed well while it was only the two of us. Catherine was completely comfortable with me. But as soon as she had a relative stranger giving her cervical examinations, she herself was less comfortable (even though she liked the midwife). She told me afterward that she was worried that she was taking too much of the midwives’ time, and wondering if they had enough to eat and drink, or were comfortable in that chair, etc. She also had enough self-awareness to criticize herself, at the time, for even thinking something so silly. Nevertheless it was what she felt. Distractions and psychic discomfort are often considered one of the reasons women have trouble giving birth in hospitals: but it’s not like being at home is without distraction.

In the end, there are a million good reasons why relaxing through birth is difficult. There is the fear for the children’s lives: Catherine said she hated it when the midwife would monitor the children’s heartbeat, because, of course, it was terrifying: something could be wrong. There is the discomfort of having one’s vagina examined, and of exposing one’s body to other people. And during labor the mother’s body is not only exposed but also largely out of control. Catherine started groaning in a strange way, a low, continual moan, which was identifiably human, but not a sound that civilized, polite society would recognize. It was straight out of our animal nature.

In the meantime, a second midwife had arrived. This was the famous Freida Miller, the senior midwife in the community, who had assisted at more than three thousand births over her long career. She came because a second midwife, and particularly the most experienced and expert one available, was thought desirable for a twin birth. She was, like Jena, not talkative, and of course she hadn’t come to this birth to make small talk with me. I let her do her work. But I was very curious about her. All the families I met here in Scio knew her, and thought very highly of her. But (as I discovered later) she had also been in jail at least once, because, though not a doctor, she carried with her a prescription drug (pitocin) that could save a woman’s life in the case of serious hemorrhaging. In the case she went to prison for, she had used the drug, apparently correctly and in fact saving the life of the mother, and dutifully reported to the emergency medical staff that she had done so. Her imprisonment was, I am told, the occasion of large-scale protests here – one of Catherine’s sisters remembered going down to the prison to sing outside her window. There was no question of malpractice; the drug was used properly on the occasion, all were safe in the end, and her record of safe deliveries even in cases requiring sure judgement made her celebrated in her field. I know she has been flown all over the country to attend births, her skills and experience considered second to none. I think she could furnish the materials for a fine profile piece, but needless to say this was not the time to do an interview. I had other things on my mind at the time, but now with reflection I can see how amazing it is, the way our legal system will punish uncredentialed skill and good work, while meeting with impunity credentialed error and even murder. In the past years not only have several police officers shot and killed human beings, but while protected by a badge and “police protocol,” they did not even have to face trial; Freida, for saving the life of a woman, was not only put on trial but found guilty and imprisoned. Once she was out of prison (I believe her term was a year, though I don’t know if she had to serve all of it), she resumed her practice, where she was and is still valued as one of the best midwives in the country.

But she was older now, and really only there for her wise counsel in case of difficulty: it was really quite beautiful the way she let the young midwife handle everything, only occasionally answering the young one’s questions. It was necessary for the new midwives to have experience with twins themselves, and Freida sit back and let it happen. Some of it may be calculated bedside manner (I will note that in the link I used above she professed uncertainty about the law regarding prescription drugs, but I suspect she may have feigned ignorance or simply not cared about the law, because she was obviously a woman of tremendous presence and intelligence and orderliness), but Freida seemed entirely unperturbed by the proceedings. In fact, she took a chair in the birth room and did her accounts for the year, presumably in preparation for her tax filings. She radiated a sense of confidence and ease, that there was nothing here out of the ordinary or to be worried about. From time to time she took out a Bible, and read in that as well, seeming to believe she was using her time well, and again, there was a radiant sense of purpose and strength in her.

As I say, this may have been calculated to produce an impression, and to reassure us for whom all this was new and difficult. I can say that it was not at all like labor on television: there was no screaming, there was no coaching, no grabbing of hands and yelling, “Push! Push!” But that’s not to say there was anything pretty or easy about it. In fact, it was most like a television torture scene: like torture, labor comes in spurts, spurts where the pain is so intense Catherine could not speak or think or anything else; if she had eaten anything in between contractions, she would throw it up during them (eventually we gave up trying to feed her, and she just had some fresh-squeezed lemonade mixed with honey that I made); she might lose control of her bowels or bladder; and then there would be periods of repose afterwards, with a kind of distressed lucidity, of the sort that torturers employ as a window for asking questions. And then after a few minutes of rest Catherine could feel another contraction approach, and her face took on a terrible, imploring look, and I’m sure that if I had the power to stop the contraction she would have begged me to do so. But she knew there was nothing I could do, and all she could do was whimper and suffer before God or the universe or whatever it was that had brought this on the daughters of Eve.

The midwives took all this as being quite normal – and it is – and did very little about it, even to the point of me getting upset about the situation (though I kept my mouth shut). My thought, as a New Yorker and as a man, was, “Hey! She’s in pain! Fix it! That’s what you’re being paid for!” Occasionally I was afraid that because I was a man, they felt they couldn’t truly ply their trade unless I was out of the room, and so I was interfering. But I’m sure it wasn’t that. I left the room often, to keep the fires stoked, to get food and drinks for myself and others, to send updates to people, and to move my body to dispel some of the stress. They weren’t doing anything different when I was gone. Instead it was just a difference in outlook: they saw their work as catching the baby, not taking away the difficulty of labor. There were things they could do to ameliorate things (Catherine was getting continual backrubs, hydration, reassurance, and help with standing up or sitting down or whatever she wanted to do) but the basic pain and difficulty was going to be there regardless. But my first reaction to labor – whatever the predispositions that may have created this reaction – was that it was a problem that needed a solution, not a passage that had to be traversed. I wanted a cure for labor; what they offered was care for the woman in labor and for the arriving child.

And so I can say that I took from the experience a general understanding of any woman who would not want to go through labor, either by not having children, or by seeking some kind of medical amelioration of the natural process. The midwives, when the time came, showed that they had skill, but in general they had no magic wand that would wave away the things that made labor labor (a word which in Latin means not just work but “work that involves suffering”). Of course from the birth stories I’ve heard from elsewhere, it seems hospitals don’t really have a magic wand either. No matter how it’s done, it is, frequently, the single most physically demanding thing most people will ever see a human being do.

And this work was really Catherine’s to do. And it was difficult. The fact that it was a twin birth may have had something to do with this; the uterine contractions may not have moved the babies as much as they would have if there were only one child in the womb; there may have been more congestion at the birth canal. Or it may have been the psychological considerations I have enumerated. Or birth may simply just be like this. I have heard that the average labor for first-time mothers is twelve hours; Catherine was in labor for something over thirteen (I have also heard other numbers cited as average, but in general, it’s hard to get controlled data; one source says six and half hours is normal for first-time mothers now, but it also notes that two-thirds of American births are chemically induced, which changes the biological clock). Perhaps if it had been quick I would have reacted differently; it certainly was long enough to be transformative for me (I will return to this later, in part three of this series).

One of the most difficult things for those who watch labor is what the Bradley books call “the third emotional signpost” of labor: self-doubt. It is strange to me that this emotion should be so universal as to be included as a technical stage of labor, but it certainly arrived on time, though in Catherine’s case, she stayed in that stage for a long time. The Bradley book indicated that around 7 cm. of dilation women begin to doubt that they can go on with labor, and in fact that did appear to be the case with Catherine. She seemed to be continually disappointed that she had worked so hard and it wasn’t done yet; and uncertain that she could do it; and frustrated. I was glad I had been prepped for this stage, though as with almost everything with labor, the actual intensity of it was more than I thought it would be.

Sometime in the afternoon I brought Catherine downstairs for another shower, and I think that helped her, both because the warmth relaxed her, while the upright position brought gravity into the equation. When she came back upstairs she had even more intense contractions – these were truly impressive – and dilation was (as measurement later showed) resuming. Sometime around four o’clock the dilation was at 10 cm. – ready to push – and the Freida decided to take control of the situation. She asked the younger midwife if she had brought a birthing stool.

“No, we don’t typically–”

“–Use them for first time mothers. I know that.” A birthing stool, which again uses gravity to aid the delivery, sometimes causes more skin to tear because it makes babies come out quickly.

Freida turned to me: “Do you have a straight-backed chair?”

“Sure.” I went downstairs, grabbed one, and brought it up.

“Sit on it,” she said to me. Jena was moving pads onto the floor in front of me. She waved Catherine out of bed. “Now Catherine I’d like you to squat in front of your husband. John, put your arms through her armpits and hold her up. Good. There.”

And then Catherine, squatting in front of me, had a series of massive, incredible contractions, every muscle in her body straining, as I held her upright, every muscle in my own body similarly taut just to keep her steady. I have no idea how long this went on, but I’m sure it wasn’t long. “It’s burning!” she said.

“Yes, yes, that’s the stretching – the baby’s coming out!”

Catherine’s face was distorted with pain, and her entire body felt like a stone statue, it was so tense. And in just one or two pushes more, out came the baby.

Even if I couldn’t see over Catherine’s shoulder, I would have known it from the complete transformation in Catherine’s body. Her body instantly relaxed: every single part of her knew what had happened. The midwife – I don’t know which, I only saw the child – held the child, back to the ceiling, the little face contorted into noiseless crying, and forgive a father’s eyes, but the most beautiful newborn I’ve ever seen: baby-colored right out of the womb, not blue, clothed in very little blood, the blond hair on the head just a little wet, with long fine limbs – and then the air filled his lungs and he began crying, good, powerful cries, that showed he was here and had an opinion about this whole enterprise.

I cried – I just couldn’t believe, after all the uncertainty and pain, that a child so perfect could possibly have been the result. That he was healthy was immediately obvious. I helped Catherine back into the bed, while the midwives cleaned him, and by the time she was lying down again our son was in her arms. From here the sequence is hazy in my mind: I know the cord must have been clamped, and cut, and I know I was offered the honor but deferred, believing that the midwives have the traditional right to that task. What I remember was Catherine’s face, beaming, all the pain and distress of the past fourteen hours was entirely gone, calm and happy and radiant, able to converse easily, and seemingly entirely well. I couldn’t believe the transition. The midwives appeared to be correct: all I had seen was entirely normal, and entirely within her capacity. It didn’t feel that way to her at the time, but now just a minute after the birth, she seemed to just shrug the whole thing off as if it were nothing. She asked for food and water – but not like a person recovering from a serious illness – she just asked like someone who was hungry and thirsty. She didn’t even look or sound tired anymore. Of course there were endorphins involved, and in fact she would have recovery to do, but the experience of it was truly shocking. I’m sure there’s no other physical transition so shocking in our lives.

Our little boy was in the crook of her arm, looking up at her, his early cries early stilled. His face was active and alert and intelligent: he looked into the light and wondered. He had the most beautiful long fingers – not chubby like a baby’s fingers, but entirely like an adult hand in miniature, and the hand of a long-fingered pianist, at that. I was amazed at how calm he was: as soon as he was on his mother’s chest he was quiet, actively looking around. Catherine tried to get him to nurse, because nursing stimulates uterine contractions, but he was not interested.

The midwives checked the heartbeat of the second child, and it was around 135 beats per minute, healthy for an infant, though slower than the first baby’s (around 150). This was a consistent difference: one had consistently had a higher heart rate for all the prenatal visits.

“Girls often have slower heart rates,” Freida noted. “It may be a girl.” But as long as all was well, Catherine could relax before the second birth.

During this time something less than a half-hour passed, and then the next birth began. All of a sudden Catherine’s face changed from beaming to distressed just as suddenly as it had changed from distressed to beaming. The second twin was coming down into the birth canal. This time Catherine was laying on the bed, and I brought out a shaving mirror, since Catherine had wanted to see the actual birth. For the first twin she had been so preoccupied with the pain that it would have been impossible to focus on anything else. But this time I could tell things would be different. And after just a few contractions, the baby began to come out, not forcibly, but slowly, gently, causing less pain, although the burn of the first birth burned again. Catherine had been left lying down, which helped keep the birth slow and gentle, which ended up being good, as the child’s umbilical cord was wrapped around the neck, and the midwives carefully unwound it as the birth proceeded. This birth looked gorier: the head came covered in a strange blackish-red stuff, which had apparently been in the birth canal after the first birth, which contrasted with a very pale body. Again, back to the ceiling, the child was held up: we saw the wrinkled face, and then a series of weak cries. Our second child: safe and well, another big baby, with the same long limbs.

“It’s a girl,” said the midwife. She was washed, and laid in the crook of Catherine’s other arm: again, perfect, and beautiful, and so different. Her hair was darker, her head a different shape, her body had gone from pale to quite red, her face very different from her twin brother’s: she looked more like a newborn, eyes less open, wanting to put off the world a bit longer. Her crying was weaker than his, but she seemed less contented: she looked angry at the indignity of the whole thing. And a girl – we had a daughter as well as a son. I had wanted, once we knew we had twins, to have a boy and a girl – and God granted this wish. I wanted to name a daughter after my mother while she was yet in this world – and God granted this wish.

Two healthy, full-sized babies, John Sibelius 7 lbs. 7 oz., born at 4:15, and Mary Cecilia 7 lbs. 2 oz., born at 4:46. Little Mary took more of an interest in the breast, and after nursing some, contractions began once more, and the placenta passed through the birth canal; the expulsion was painful – that same burning – but not difficult. The midwives placed it in a bowl, and while we cried with joy and wonder looking at our children, they inspected the placenta with interest. Freida in particular took to interpreting it, explaining it to the younger midwife; how it was two placentas joined, how the connection to the uterus was larger in the case of twins. She took particular interest in the umbilical cords, which differed visibly: his was larger, thicker, almost braided, while hers was thinner and more simple in appearance. I wish now I had listened a bit more attentively to what they were saying, but I had other things on my mind.

There I was, watching my beloved wife holding our two babies – our son and daughter, not just an idea in our heads, but two people we could pick up and hold and look at and listen to, who had already been baptized in their mother’s blood and their father’s tears. Holding them up to the fading light at the window, it made no sense to me: we had known they were coming for months and months, and now that they were here, nothing could explain it: where did they come from? No answer seemed adequate to the mystery of it. We had not made them – we would not be equal to the task even of putting the folds of their ears in the right places – but somehow they were born of our desire, and now were in the hands of our love. It was one of those moments that contained all the earlier moments, that changed them all, that washed away so much of their sadness: all the empty nights, the profitless tasks I had engaged in, the dead-ends, the unhappiness, the loneliness, the failed attempts and uncertainties, decades of hope and longing, much of which had amounted to very little: I could feel all of it yielding to tears, that I had lived to see my children, flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. That the longing of the previous decades had pointed to this, and this wish had not merely passed from me, but I had a new joy in the fulfilment: and now, as it never had been before, seeing these lives made of my life, my heart was full.

[part three is here]