How does a woman begin to write about the day she and her child were born? I must begin to try or I will lose the details that make this story ours. But do I start with the contractions that began squeezing a month before, or with the waters the squeezing sent trickling warm from me? Or did this birth begin, crying in my lover's arms 42 weeks ago on autumn equinox, when I said yes to creating a new pattern in my life; when I sobbed in a basement apartment, thinking of how long it had taken me to walk outside alone after my first child was born, without her in my arms, to look at the stars? (I had leaned my head back as far as I could, and there they were, and had been, for the past three months. And there I was, standing on a county road, looking up. Where had I been?) Four years, afraid of losing myself again to another child. Realization in a basement: I am a different person in a different situation, with a different partner; there is not a predetermined path I must follow; I can integrate my needs with my family’s; I can live differently than before.

Does this story begin in a hospital as I argued with a man in white who told me I would crush my baby's head if I didn't let him cut my perineum? Did it begin with the same man walking into the comfortably pink room (as though pink is enough), after I delivered the child he thinks he delivered, soberly informing me that had I carried Sage to full term, she wouldn't have been able to pass through my small, unusually shaped pelvis? Overwhelmed, I thanked him for this information, even though he took my daughter from my womb before she was ready; even though he came in to "examine" me during my supposedly intense (the nurses pointed to the monitors in disbelief) but painless contractions with a long hook hidden along his wrist; even though he reached inside me and burst my waters without telling me. I thanked him? I took his fear arrow and carried it in my gut for four years. Where do births begin?

I suppose Grey's birth begins at each of these points in my body and more: nurses telling me not to use my voice; to push, to hold my breath until my lips and arms were cold; writing, sobbing about feeling robbed, raped, impotent; walking in the woods, imagining my pelvis the entire horizon, the valley holding the sky and everything I could and couldn't see… matrices that radiate outward at every direction like dazzled light off wet eyelashes. I cannot see them all at once and must squint to write even some of them down. The lines of light play on the pine needles, the fluttering aspen leaves, the purply juniper berries around this little house whose wooden bones we raised and smoothed with our hands.

There. I will begin with this house, with the huge bed my mate, George, built to hold our small family just a month ago. When he first started thinking of the project, I wasn't sure he'd finish it in time for the birth. He had a few weeks to go before finishing his first year of teaching seventh grade language arts in a small not-so-nearby town. Every Friday night we were still driving over two hours to our house on the small mountain, and then back to our dim basement apartment on Sundays. I began feeling the need to stop the traveling, to be somewhere, to be where I would birth the baby, settled. George, of course, understood and told me to go to the mountains and settle in. I did.

These couple of days alone, I began wondering how I would feel about laboring and birthing alone. This was a possibility since both George and the midwife were two hours away from the cabin. Sitting on Sage's bed, remembering the stories I'd read recently of women who birthed their babies alone in bathtubs and on toilets or in bed with no assistance, I knew – I felt in my skin – that I could do it. In fact, I began to wonder if I should call anyone at all if I began labor. The contractions I'd been having were just as strong as the ones I'd had the day Sage was born  (or, I should say, induced) six weeks early. With this second pregnancy, the contractions were there every day for a month, and still no baby. Grey was finishing himself, and my womb was embracing him, preparing him, everyday.

 

On the Thursday and Friday before Grey’s birth, Sage and I hung out at the cabin together. We lay nude in the sun on the box spring we had thrown out after George had finished the new bed. “It's a beautiful day to be naked,” she said. She photographed me in jeans and the crazy orange bikini top my funky friend Maile (pronounced My-lee) gave me, baby about to burst out of my skin, and I photographed her bouncing like a star on the box spring. That day I wept… she would no longer be my only child. After asking why I was crying, and I tried to explain, she said, “But mom, I'll still be here, and Baby Grey, and Pablo [our cat], too.” This made me smile; she didn't understand that I was mourning the end of an era of my life. Instead I told her I was crying because I love her so much, which is also true.

George made it back to the cabin Friday and we took Sage to her dad's for the weekend, as this is the new schedule. We bathed in the washtub, made love and ate pasta with melted cheese and asparagus, in that order. My contractions began coming five minutes apart, and I could feel my cervix opening. I could still talk through contractions, though. We called Lisa, our midwife, and told her they were coming five minutes apart. She decided to come with her assistant, Trisha, just in case. As the two hours before they arrived went by, I knew this was another practice session, not the real thing, because the contractions didn't get stronger. Lisa and Trisha were happy to come anyway, and went out to look at the stars with our telescope as we tried to sleep. When they came back into the dark cabin and went to bed, they giggled and giggled like girls at a slumber party. I smiled in the dark, listening to them. In the morning we hiked into the valley. Both Lisa and Trisha paid so much attention: evening primrose, lichen, moss, shooting stars that taste like cucumber. “If you want to have more false labor,” they said cheerily as they left, “that's fine with us!”

George's last day at work was Monday. I went back with him so I could work on packing up for the summer, hoping not to have the baby in the basement. I cleaned the bathtub, just in case, and sat in it next to a burning red candle, singing to Grey an English lullaby whose words I had changed.

Come through me my baby, open up your eyes.

Loved ones waiting for you, welcoming you darling to our lives.

Great big moon is shining, high up in the sky.

Time to come through me, my little one. Come to me.

My belly was huge in the water, an island.

Finally George's day at work was over. I was so tired and uncomfortable. I wanted someone to just mother me. So I called my mom. I told her about my false labor on Saturday night. Her first words? “Oh no, maybe the baby is too big!” This made me snap. “Mom! Quit trying to scare me! I'm so tired of people trying to make me afraid!” She apologized, and I know she meant well, but I felt sad. So many doctors (not to mention the media) have made our mothers and sisters afraid of their own power. When my mother was in labor with me, her doctor told her I was too big to pass through her pelvis. I was born through a caesarean incision and have been told this story my entire life. I hung up the phone with my mom, who at least sympathized with my discomfort and tried her best to be brave for me.

I felt so heavy. I sat on the couch and drank an ale, as I've heard sometimes beer can get things going and we were about to leave for the cabin soon anyway. This didn't make me feel any brighter. George was gentle and understanding, but I was still so low. All the way to the mountains and after picking up Sage from her dad's, I was quiet, thinking of my women friends. I felt this aching to be nurtured by them, sung to, held, touched, hair brushed. I wanted their hands on my belly, to dance with them. But our lives are so separate; overlap is rare since I am always far away on the plains or in the mountains. It is something I'm learning to live with. So, I sat looking out the passenger window at the glowing orange-pink clouds, thinking of the women I love, trying not to turn my face to George while tears ran, trying not to give away the new moon of my pregnancy, my melancholy. I knew this would not last. By the time we got to the cabin, it was dark. George carried Sage to her bed, and we unloaded the boxes of clothes, food, birthing supplies and clean laundry from the car. We were tired and decided to unpack the boxes in the morning.

In bed, I got some worries out of my fisted stomach to George. He held me and I loved him for listening to me when I wasn't sure if I was being overly sensitive or, as pregnant women are so often dismissed, hormonal. Talking to him made me a lot lighter. We were finally home for the summer, ready for our child to enter our world. We had been making love often in the last few weeks to get labor started, and it was hard not to laugh sometimes in the throes because I was so immobile, beached. So much for all those tips to start labor. They only work when the baby is ready to come. Perhaps those tips are only coincidental with life's little events. Gee, I ate spicy food, drank a beer and had sex and my baby was born! Let's publish this finding! No amount of hiking up rocks, jostling myself up our crazy road, eating Taco Bell or being given amazing oral sex could bring this baby out. But perhaps, opening my clenched stomach, sleeping at last in our huge homemade bed on the first night of summer was enough. It wouldn't work for anyone else, I'm sure. Instead of eating spicy food or making love, that night we fell asleep.

I woke up thinking I had to have what our family affectionately calls a growl (aka, a bowel movement). Or at least pee. And of course, the contractions were there, squeezing, as usual. I crawled out of bed, noticed the waning crescent moon in the cracked-by-last-winter window at the southeast side of the bed. Clear night blue-black. I shuffled across the floor, bones popping, trying not to lose my leg-hip connection, found the toilet paper in the dark and made it down the porch steps to our portable chemical toilet, whose battery operated flush function had given out three days before (we have no plumbing). I sat and tried to push out. Nothing. Back to bed. Two or three more contractions. I glanced at our unreliable digital clock, thinking maybe I would time them if I could stay awake. It was 3:46. Each contraction felt like the urge to growl. I turned to the moon in the window, a white fingernail clipping like the ones I had washed down the sink so I could reach into myself without scratching or irritating my cervix or the baby's head. Days before, I had decided to forget the glamour, the nail polish, the same way I had removed the ring in my right nipple a month ago when the contractions began. I had been having night dreams of nursing, so I figured I needed to lose the ring. This gesture was my invitation. Perhaps my cells would send a message to Grey's cells: I'm ready. And now the moon was ready: a crescent, a bowl of water. I turned back to face George and closed my eyes.