The Birth of a Rose
Rose - Week 1
On November 15th, 2023 a Rose was born, just as the rains came pouring down from the sky. My due date was November 14th. My son, who is now 3 years old, was born at home on a rainy night in December. He came 1 week early and surprised us by not only coming early, but with a relatively fast labor of 10 hours. His head crowned only 35 minutes after the midwives had arrived. So this time I was nervous having arrived at my due date with no sign of labor and wondered how long will I be pregnant? I asked my midwife if I should start encouraging labor with acupuncture and she said yes, please do!
I made an appointment with another acupuncturist in town and also gave myself a treatment to give my body more strength and to start to move labor along. I used the following acupuncture points: Stomach 36, Spleen 6, Large Intestine 4, Liver 3, Kidney 3, Pericardium 6 and Spleen 4. I also had been attending African dance classes sporadically and there was one scheduled the night of my due date. I went with 2 mama friends and asked if one would drive me home if I happened to go into labor during class! The teacher Susanna Arenas taught Afro-Cuban dance and we were dancing for Oshun the Goddess of Sweet Waters and Fertility. This seemed perfect. My mother said, “you have to follow the family tradition and dance that baby out.” She had done some furious dancing on her due date to encourage me to emerge. And indeed the next morning I had to call and cancel my acupuncture appointment because contractions began about 10 am.
My previous birth started precipitously and felt more like an arrow going through me. It started with contractions only about 10 minutes apart and then speeding up and included at least 2 hours of pushing. This time, though very painful during contractions, seemed very gentle in comparison. Each contraction lasted about 1 minute with 20 minutes between. This felt like a surprisingly luxurious moments of calm between fierce storms. Between contractions I set up my birth altar, lit candles and incense, paid the mortgage, ate a hearty lunch and made myself a Ba Zhen Tang formula in bone broth to boost Qi and Blood to drink later in labor.
At one point in early labor, I felt my pulses and they were both very deep. You need a lot of energy and power to give birth and this made me nervous that I wouldn’t have enough to last the whole labor, so I got out my needles and gave myself another treatment to help myself move through this birth well.
When my husband returned from dropping off our 3 year old at his nursery school, I asked him to set up the birth tub and call the midwife. He timed my contractions which were now 1 minute long and 15 minutes apart. As soon as I entered the water the contractions seemed much more bearable. I hadn’t gotten to have a birth tub last time, so I was delighted to be immersed in the water’s comforting, soothing embrace.
We felt so grateful that our friends run the nursery school our son attends and told us they could keep him at their house for the whole day if I had day labor. This was exactly what happened and so he was joyfully playing with his best friend as I labored at home. That is, until the very end. They brought him home 20 minutes before the baby was born! My husband took him to his crib and said - I’ll come back to read you stories. After some loud sounds emitting from the birth room, my husband did a totally normal bedtime with him and then brought him in to say good night to mama and to welcome his baby sister! It was quite a scene and a bit of a shock to him I believe.
One of the most incredible things about this birth to me was an insight into pain. I had used Hypnobirthing last time for my labor and had gotten to experience much reduced pain for a couple hours from following that system. This time I didn’t feel as drawn to that, but I noticed that it had impacted me at another level. One of the lessons from the Hypnobirthing training was to completely relax every muscle in your body as a contraction was starting. This I found to still be incredibly helpful. Each time I felt one begin, I would work on relaxing everything - especially my eyes and jaw. What would happen then is I would feel the pain, but I could approach it differently. With each contraction I would get better at connecting with the pain. I found that the sooner I could come as close to the feeling as possible without resisting or pushing it away, the easier it was. This didn’t exactly relieve the pain, but made it much more tolerable, even malleable.
The sooner I embraced the pain, the better I could sense how I might move my body or breath differently to relieve it. I felt like I was learning that pain is a result of being out of alignment with what is really happening. The more we can relax into the reality around us, the less suffering we experience. This was a lesson I could carry with me and recall in other challenging times in life. There were 2 contractions when I was pushing where I connected with the pain right away and it actually transformed so much that it became more like relief than pain. This was fascinating to me.
Once in the tub I set up my birthing playlist I had made myself full of traditional Irish Gaelic tunes, ceremonial songs from Lakota lineages, South American, Mexican and Yoruban medicinal songs. It filled the space with a sense of support, beauty and sacredness. In the last few months of the pregnancy whenever I thought about my baby I pictured a Rose. My husband and I had always said we loved the name Rose as a middle name and had it on our short list for our first baby. This time I felt I really wanted an ancestral name to connect her with her lineages and had been researching our family tree seeking beautiful names for her. We adore my grandmother’s name Hazel but in the end did not choose that for her but Rose which it turns out is also a name of one of our ancestors. I also felt as if I was surrounded by roses and very bright light during the birth. In Spanish the phrase for giving birth is dar la luz - or to give light and this seemed like a palpable part of the birth to me.
I labored and then pushed in the tub for a few hours. The midwife arrived about 5pm and showed my husband some massage on my hips that was greatly relieving during contractions. Once in the tub I asked him if he would hold Large Intestine 4 for me on both hands with strong pressure during the contractions. This helped relieve a lot of pain and felt very connective to have his love and support. The pushing stage only lasted 45 minutes and was also a very strangely calm experience between pushes. Each push felt excruciating as though I would be ripped in half by each one. However, I had rests of almost 5 minutes between them and I would feel so relaxed and peaceful like I could almost fall asleep. Then when the push came that felt like it would bring her out to the world I grabbed the side of the tub and stood straight up. I pushed and my midwife pushed on my perineum to help me not to tear. It was truly a searing ring of fire but she came out without any tearing at all. All 8lbs. and 9 oz. of her! And the rain which had been threatening all day was now pouring down. So she seemed to come down with the rain.
This birth, like every birth, is an incredible miracle and I felt so happy and grateful to have had such an overall peaceful experience. I held and beheld this bright beautiful girl with a full head of thick black locks and skin the color of a deep pink rose with complete astonishment and joy. She continues to be an incredible source of love, presence and wonderment. I wish every woman to have a birth like this - a birth that is empowering, a source of learning and the beginning of a profound connection with this new family member.
