In Your Own Words
Kristen Sicuro
Must-have product: Earth Mama Spray
@outerborobroad and @krisoliveri
I woke up on New Year's Eve after having a dream that told me: “This is the beginning of your birthing time.” Those words were similar to the hypnosis tracks I had been practicing with Hypnobabies since I was 32 weeks pregnant. While I could have dismissed this as my subconscious reminding me that my due date was a day away, I also had light cramping. Deep down, I knew this could be the beginning signs of early, early labor.
I told my husband Phil that I thought I was in early labor so we took showers, I blew out my hair and had a hearty breakfast, all the things that my birthing community (IE: my doula, my friends at Poppy Tribe and everything I read from Ina May Gaskin) suggest that you do in early labor to relax and ready yourself for what’s to come.
We were planning to have New Year’s Eve dinner with my parents at a local Italian restaurant, Norma, a few blocks from our apartment. I told Phil that we should play dinner by ear and if I didn’t feel up to it, we could pick up dinner instead and stay at home. We called my parents to let them know I’d started feeling cramping and they were on board with the plan.
We took a walk in our garden and that’s when I started experiencing intermittent contractions. We ordered in Shake Shack for lunch. By the time my parents came in the evening, we decided to stay home and order in food. At this point, Phil was continuously monitoring my contractions with his birthing app.
I had been playing my hypnosis tracks throughout the day to stay calm and to try to maintain a sense of peace. I made sure I was eating and staying super hydrated.
After a Sicilian dinner from Norma at home, my folks packed up to head home and we hoped I would get some rest for the evening before labor picked up. We called our doula Bonnie to let her know I had lost my mucus plug and that my contractions were becoming stronger, but still not consistent.
The ball dropped at midnight while I was on my hands and knees having a contraction. My doula made it to my apartment by 1am. I was having bad back pain and wasn’t able to get any sleep. Bonnie dimmed the lights in our bedroom and put on some aromatherapy to create a calming atmosphere at home while I labored.
Phil and I had decided that, if possible, we wanted an unmedicated, low intervention birth. Given that I was low risk with minor complications throughout pregnancy, we hoped we could achieve this, even though we wanted to deliver in a hospital setting. I read a great book called Natural Hospital Birth and spoke at length with Bonnie about how best to achieve this. We ultimately decided we needed to labor at home as much as possible before heading to the hospital (a mere block away from our apartment) so that this could be achieved.
I continued to labor until around 7 am or so at home. By then, my contractions were coming hard and fast and I told my husband and my doula that it was time to go to the hospital. We got ready and Phil and Bonnie decided to call an Uber to get me to NYU even though it was down the block from our apartment. I had passed the point of walking down the block and I knew that delivery was imminent.
It was hard even getting into the elevator and I had two contractions in the lobby of our building before we got into the Uber to take us around the corner. (Two of our doormen thought I was having our baby in the lobby. They now feel very connected to Giuliana!) By the time we got to the hospital, Phil ran to get me a wheelchair and I was wailing on the way up through contractions.
We came in hot, as I like to say, something straight out of a movie where the woman is writhing in pain and screaming in a wheelchair as she arrives at the front desk. We were greeted by a slew of nurses (apparently it was a slow day) and were escorted into triage where there was no time to waste.
A midwife quickly checked me and we were all delighted to hear that I was 8 centimeters dilated and at 0 station completely effaced. They got me into a delivery room immediately, read through my birth plan and my OB showed up moments later.
I wound up pushing pretty quickly on my side at first and then on my back with a push/pull thing happening with my legs, each being supported by Phil and Bonnie respectively. Between contractions I was cracking jokes and saying nonsensical things that had my birthing team laughing at me. I still can’t really remember what I was saying and Phil can only remember that I was “hysterical” but not sure of what I said.
I did have an anesthesiologist show up at my bedside asking me to sign a form in the event I needed drugs and also asking me if I wanted an epidural. I was literally seconds away from pushing and remember being so aggravated when I said multiple times I didn’t want the drugs. I had gotten this far and, clearly, they weren’t going to make a difference anyway.
I started to bear down when I felt the baby coming.
I pushed for about another 10 minutes before Giuliana was born. We didn’t find out the sex of the baby beforehand so I was looking around afterwards until Phil shouted, “It’s a girl!” They cleaned her and put her on me, but we had to wait a few seconds until the umbilical cord stopped pulsing so Phil could cut it. I did wind up having marginal cord insertion in my pregnancy so my cord was shorter than usual. Once it was cut, she was placed on my chest where I cried and was able to hold my beautiful baby girl for the first time.
Phil stood by my side for the entire labor and delivery and even witnessed Giuliana being born as it was happening. Honestly I was quite shocked he wanted to watch it, but he was fascinated by this beautiful event and was able to see everything. He was a true pillar of strength and support for me, as was Bonnie, during one of the most challenging moments of my life.
Giuliana came out sunny side up---what a way to come into the world!
I later found out a few things about baby’s who are sunny side up. One is that it only happens in 1% of vaginal births and two, that’s what was causing the immense back labor and arguably more intense contractions.
Shortly thereafter, I birthed the placenta and was stitched up for two natural second degree tears. I had experienced a natural, medication-free, hospital birth thanks to my birthing team and my will to do what I needed to do for my body, spirit and child.
Wendy Heilbut
Must-have product: Blendtec blender
Instagram: @wheilbut; LinkedIn: @wendyheilbut
I was heart set on a natural birth with my first one - I'd hired a very well-respected doula, took my husband through birthing classes and even watched videos about "orgasmic birthing" (apparently it REALLY is a thing??). Turns out the little guy was breech and had the cord around his neck and I underwent a scheduled c-section. My OB knew my desires and tremendous disappointment and promised me she would try for the next time. Sure enough, a few years later she induced me so that we wouldn't go past full term (and add pressure to the C-Section incision) and I got that natural birth I'd dreamed of. I even got to pull out my own baby; I was like a celebrity at the L&D department for a few days.
Alexandra Dickinson
Must-have product: AirPods
One night, a few weeks after my daughter was born, I dreamt that we had all died in a fire, our apartment engulfed in violent orange flames. I knew I was not in a good place, mentally.
A month into my “fourth trimester,” I was coming apart at the seams. I didn’t recognize my own thoughts. I had lost my ability to make decisions or use my judgement. I cried all the time. I thought I might need help, but just what kind of help, I couldn’t say.
The changes I feared—that I would become one of those slovenly, unkempt moms surrounded by discarded diapers and trapped under a mountain of sticky baby paraphernalia—never came to pass.
The changes I couldn’t have expected were more subtle, and therefore far more unsettling.
“Please stop crying!” I pleaded with my infant daughter. “I am doing the best that I can, and you screaming in my face is not helping me!”
I regarded the baby with a mixture of terror and exasperated resentment. I thought about how, just a few weeks earlier, my little dog Margaret curled up with me on my bed as I moaned weakly during contractions. How scared she looked when we left her at home and made our way to the hospital in the middle of the night. Why did I feel so intimately connected to my dog, when I felt nothing for the squalling creature I was now trying unsuccessfully to breastfeed?
***
A few years ago, I was sitting with my friend Lauren at Cafe Lalo on the Upper West Side. I told her that growing up, I felt that my parents viewed me and their own families as a burden and an obligation. I feared I would inadvertently repeat their behavior if I had my own children.
Lauren said, “Do you think your marriage is like your parents’ marriage?”
“What? No, of course not. Not at all.”
“Then why do you think you would raise your children the exact same way your parents raised you?”
I had never considered that before.
For as long as I can remember—since I was a teenager, at least—I didn’t want to have kids. “I’m not interested in pets or children,” I told people. I fancied myself above such sentimentalities. I was going to be a self sufficient woman. Having such obligations seemed to me a waste of time that could be spent doing, well, what exactly I wasn’t sure, but it would be whatever I wanted. Children seemed like blank vessels who weren’t worth much until they matured. Like wine, I guessed. I wouldn’t be tied down with such domestic concerns.
One day, just as my senior year of college began, I was overcome with an intense desire for a dog. Specifically, a Shiba Inu that I had seen in Washington Square Park—a Japanese dog that looks a bit like a fox, with a cute, curling tail. I would call her Mabel.
The dorm I lived in didn’t allow pets, so I smuggled in a betta fish, who I named Charlie, instead.
One evening some years later, I was standing with my friend Sarah in her kitchen. Her two year old son came in. She asked him a question, I’ve forgotten now what it was. Maybe what shape of pasta he wanted for dinner. But I remember that he definitely had a preference.
“Does he really know the difference?” I asked. He seemed to me a sort of semi-sentient blob who couldn’t possibly prefer one thing over another. He was only two—what did he know?
She looked at me. “Yes, he knows the difference, and he most definitely has a preference.”
Later, I told my husband about that interaction, and my disbelief that such a small person could possibly know anything about, well, anything. It was starting to dawn on me that children could be—were actually—individuals. And quite possibly that they were from birth.
If children were individuals who had value, that meant when I was a child, I had been valuable, too. Slowly, I began to realize that perhaps I could make different choices about the way I might build my own family.
I thought about my life, and the future I imagined for myself and my husband. “I have so much love to give,” I told him. “If I could love our child even half as much as I love our dog, then maybe we should change our plans.”
I realized I wanted to see my husband become a father. And in my most quiet, private thoughts, I wondered what kind of mother I might be.
***
After the fire dream, I reached out to my therapist, who I had been seeing off and on for a dozen years or more. She thought I was at a point where I needed antidepressants. This was something I had never considered before.
I saw my OB for a routine check up. We talked about how I was feeling, what I was anxious about. She, too, thought that Zoloft was the answer.
I took my daughter to see her pediatrician. While we were there, we met with the lactation consultant. They exchanged worried glances as I described my fears to them.
Medicine. That was the answer. All the professionals agreed.
I knew I wasn’t in my right mind, but I didn’t want to start something that I feared would make me fundamentally question my sense of self. I spent so many years in therapy learning to unpack my thoughts. I was told I would need to take antidepressants for a year or more. Would I ever be able to find my true self again? Would I still be able to trust my own thoughts? If I was already struggling to understand myself, wouldn’t drugs just give me a different version of the same problem?
I texted with a friend who had her baby within a few weeks of me.
“I am medicated,” she told me. “I feel fine about it! So much better, actually. But yea, I guess I don’t know if that’s me or the Zoloft talking! Lol.”
I had gone so far as to get a prescription and take the first dose, but I decided I didn’t want to go any further. I threw the pills away.
Two months after my daughter was born, it was the fourth of July, and that night we watched the fireworks on TV. She was so awake and alert, looking right at me. She was in her rocker, and I realized suddenly that I wanted to snuggle with her.
Although I spent plenty of time holding the baby, I didn’t often want to. Partly I was afraid of “spoiling” her—I had heard that babies who don’t learn to sleep on their own from the start will only ever nap on their mom’s body, which was a situation I didn’t want to find myself in. Mostly, though, I felt like it was something I had to do—a burden, and an obligation.
I picked her up out of her rocker for a snuggle. She was very sweet. We had a little chat, and it was a nice feeling to have. I felt relieved. Was this the maternal instinct I had been waiting to reveal itself?
A month later, we took a family trip to the UK to visit my daughter’s great grandparents. One day, my mother in law and I took her to a shopping center. Maybe she hadn’t napped, or she was overstimulated by all the activity around her, but one moment she had started to whimper, and the next she was hysterical, inconsolable, purple in the face. I ducked into a baby changing room. Sweating from heat and stress, I struggled to unhook my nursing bra to try and feed her. Her wails were ear splitting, magnified by the walls, and I started to cry weakly. I was all alone and I had no idea what to do.
My husband found me and took the baby, and she calmed down after a minute or two. I felt terrible that I wasn’t able to help her. That most fundamental truism—that you want your mother to make you feel better when you are upset—didn’t seem to apply to me. That magical ability to soothe came, I guessed, from putting in the hard work of sleepless nights and repeated comforting.
But I hadn’t yet earned that privilege, which I mistakenly assumed came automatically at birth. My husband was the one who stayed up nights with her while I struggled through a long and grueling recovery from my C-section. In just a few short weeks I would be returning to work, and my daughter would start going to daycare. Would I ever be able to soothe her once I wasn’t with her all the time?
The adrenaline from that afternoon took a long time to wear off. I felt helpless when faced with her and she was hysterical. Shouldn’t I know what to do?
At the end of that chaotic day, when it was just the three of us, I nursed my daughter before putting her to bed. Breastfeeding, which I had been so skeptical of and struggled so much with, turned out to be the most reliable way I knew to connect with her. It was one thing that, without a doubt, made me feel like a mom, and I clung to it. I knew that calm, sweet time nursing my baby wouldn’t last forever. I realized then that I would do whatever it took to be able to keep going once I went back to work.
I took a bath that night, and scrubbed at the inside of my belly button. The last bits of adhesive from the hospital finally came loose. I felt a small part of myself return to normal, or something like it, and I knew the rest would come, in time.
Anonymous
Must-have product: Lip balm
Biggest lesson learned from my first birth that I made sure to follow with my second: EAT FOOD before you get admitted. You better believe that I was contracting at a 7 and I still made my husband stop for an egg and cheese sandwich. My second was born not even two hours after that. Worth it.
Angella H.
Must-have product: Chapstick/Vaseline
Instagram: @angella.hernandez
I didn’t push. I wanted to, I was expecting to, but an unplanned c-section thwarted my birth plan. I love my baby and all that was important in that moment was having a safe delivery and that’s just what happened. This quarantine month I’m celebrating my first Mother’s Day and his first birthday. I couldn’t be happier!
Sara Gutowski
In loving memory of Cynthia Hassen Gutowski
She wasn’t just a mom, she was a cool mom. She loved being a mom, too...to everyone. I hate being sad, she did too...and she always knew how to make everything at least a little better. This one is a little trickier though, because usually I would call or we would go out for the afternoon and it would feed my soul...so I will have to wait and see what sort of happiness she still brings to me while she is looking over me, because I know she will.
She always gave into my craziness—taking silly photos, going on adventures, convincing her to just let loose. She did everything for everyone else - everything. That includes taking care of her sister who was ill, right up until April 5 when Aunt Pat passed away. They were the best of friends and I know how that broke her. And then this virus came...and she was already so tired. She needed rest as it was. And she missed her best friend. Yesterday, April 20, was Aunt Pat’s birthday and my mom always knew what day it was no matter what...and I know how that must have weighed on her. In true mom form, I believe she needed to go see her sister because she couldn’t let her sister have even one single birthday without a cake from Cindi. Giving and giving...always...until the end and beyond.
Whenever I would give her a hard time about something she would giggle and say, “you know...you’re gonna miss me when I’m gone” and eventually I found a song that had that as a lyric so I would always try and quickly play that before she could say it, or I would quickly tell her just the same. She was right...I miss you, Momma.