Yossi since October

(I started this post on Thursday night but stopped when Yossi woke. I nursed him and by the time I got him back to sleep I was too exhausted to finish. Now it's Sunday night and I feel compelled to get his birth story down before the details become any more shrouded in the hazy past...)

 Little Yossi Shalom will be 5 months old tomorrow.  Last night he swallowed his first spoonfuls of rice cereal, just before his brother and sister had complete, jealousy-fueled meltdowns. Tonight Lilit said plainly, truly, "I want to be a baby again." And Avi later chimed in, "You get so much attention when you are a baby." So true, so true, my wise children. It's good to be a baby.  It's good to be Yossi Shalom.

 Five months ago at this time, I was lazing through hour 3 of a pitocin drip.  Leeor and I splayed out on the lumpy hospital bed and watched Lost. Were we still on season one? I can't remember.  He drank the green smoothie I'd requested because I'd been told not to eat anything other than cranberry juice and ice. I tried not to mind.  The induction had been my choice this time.  Not like when my OB insisted upon it when Lilit was 9 days over her due date. This time, I knew when I had to return to work, knew I wanted my baby to be at least 12 weeks old. He was 6 days beyond his due date. And there we were, lounging in a labor room, our sweet nurse checking in periodically.  Funnily, her name was Ashley, which was the same name of the OB nurse who helped us through Lilit's birth over 3 years earlier at a different hospital across the bay.

 "You just relax!" she said soothingly when I confessed I felt badly for not "working harder" at this labor. Her eyes were wide, pure and honest as she continued,"you have two other ones at home. Plenty of work ahead of you. Go ahead and relax." It was another sign that this birth would not be like our last one, even though they were both inductions.  Also not like Avi's birth, by now a distant memory. The hospital experience has become so familiar to me. I work with OB patients, OB residents, nurses, attending physicians, midwives, lactation consultants. And here I was, the good patient, dutifully tolerating my IV, the bag of liquid to augment my labor steadily dripping into my body.  Contracts came and went.  No big deal. We started to realize this wouldn't be the lightning fast experience we'd had when Lilit was born. We adjusted our expectations. Called our family. Made arrangements for Avi and Lilit. My mom had just run a half marathon, the Nike Women's, in San Francisco, and was asleep on our couch.  Leeor's mom was at the ready, our kids asleep after an afternoon with our neighbors.  They'd said goodbye to me cheerily in OB triage hours earlier. We all felt ready for the baby to arrive. Friends and family expressed confusion about the induction. Why? Was something wrong? What was the rush? He needed to be a Libra, I joked. We were about to miss the deadline.

After 6 hours of pitocin, the attending OB doctor came in to check on us, all business. I'd met her once during my pregnancy and liked her. No nonsense. Kind. Experienced.  Tonight was no exception. We could keep going on the pitocin or she could break my water and we could see how things progressed. I was only dilated 4-5 cm at that time. Somehow I knew things would speed up once that bag of water ruptured.  So on we went, me starting to shiver from the adrenaline, my body and mind remembering this journey, even though the details differed each time. It was midnight.

I started to feel legitimate pain. Ashley checked on me and I told her unmedicated labor was over rated. Let's talk epidural, I suggested, why not?  Again with the pure, honest face. True words, "you've had two unmedicated births. How about we give you a dose of fentanyl through the IV and see how it goes?" It was 1AM. And then I was reeling from the drug, high, slightly euphoric.  Texting a couple of girlfriends. Feeling the transition but yet still sort of skeptical I was actually giving birth.  It was such a different birth from Lilit's and Avi's births.

Wheeling my IV stand into the bathroom, I felt tremendous pressure, the heaviness too much to bear inside anymore. Time to push. The certainty settled over me and I panicked a little.  Remember my mindfulness practice, I advised myself, this glimmer of wisdom shimmering beyond the pain of the moment.  The pain, intense and relentless.  The chipped tile in the bathroom and ugly interior of the birth room.  I just needed to breathe. I relied on Leeor's encouragement. He'd seen me do this twice before and reminded me I could surely do it this time, too. Ashley again, helping me onto the bed.  Asking me to wait so she could get the doctor because indeed, I was fully dilated.  Helpless against the force of his arrival, the pressure.  The searing pain. It's honestly hard to recall the enormity of it but some part of me remembers. Leeor's hands and voice soothing and supportive. So many more nurses in the room. So many voices offering encouragement, repeating phrases like they were reading them from cue cards, "Big big push!" "Bear down!" "Hold that breath in!" "Tuck your chin!" I wasn't feeling ungrateful but I sort of wanted to tell them to shut up. That it didn't make sense to me to hold my breath.  That I knew how to push out a baby.  Even in the midst of such primal pain and vulnerability, I remained my pleasing self and said nothing.  Thanked them all. But Ashley was cool and I didn't mind whatever she said.  I liked her constant presence. Whether it was true or not, I imagined she believed in me. And Leeor just knew it would all be okay.

Then the final push, maybe only 3 or 4 total, and our boy was out with such a gush of pain. I learned during the aftermath that his sweet hand cupped his cheek on his way out, which they call a complicated presentation. Indeed. It's during the "recovery" time after delivery when an epidural seems to make so much sense.  A shot of lidocain and a dose of motrin just didn't give me any relief from the OB reaching around my uterus to make sure "everything was out" after I'd "birthed" the placenta. To my surprise, Leeor wanted to keep it, even though it meant he had to drive it home in a bio bag because we weren't allowed to keep it with us in the recovery room overnight in the hospital.  Funny details (it remains in our freezer, waiting to be brought out and perhaps planted in the yard).

I could tell Yos wanted to nurse right away.  He seemed kind of pissed he'd been forced out before he was quite ready to come on his own.  I apologized and put him to my breast; one of the nurses (not Ashley, of course), suggested I wait to nurse him. I asked why, my pleaser facade slipping while I winced from the stitches going in. She felt he needed to "acclimate" to the world first, or something that again, like holding my breath during pushes, made no sense to me. I tried anyway and also gave him my finger to suckle. He had an amazing latch from the beginning. I continued to feel some disbelief at his actual presence--finally, finally! he was here.  A blur of washing, wrapping, weighing, questions, and general cleaning up.  Hours of this. Then we were ready to move to another floor, move into our postpartum room. It was still dark and quiet, the wheelchair silent on the cold floor.  Ashley pushed while I proudly held swaddled Yos in my arms. When we arrived and she handed me off to the next team of nurses, we hugged. I felt such gratitude for her steady presence.  Leeor was setting up his lumpy bed, eager to rest before he had to rise in just a couple of hours to pick up our "big kids" and take them to school.

I was eager to rest, as well, and placed Yossi carefully in the bassinet next to my bed. A nurse came in before I could drift off and determined Yos was "a little cold." She helped me sit up a bit and facilitated a bit of skin-to-skin time to warm him up. I honestly felt annoyed; she seemed so invasive to me and he seemed fine.  It occurred to me then that I would not be sleeping, probably not for awhile. I snuggled into my baby, his soft skin nestled next to mine, blankets wrapped around us. I tried nursing him again and it seemed we'd been nursing for years.

There always feels like so much more to say about it all. The way the day unfolded, the grandmothers arriving, Avi and Lilit's first visit with their baby brother, girlfriends bringing food and flowers and high-fives. The cascade of text messages, Instagram and Facebook congratulations. My first birth with an iphone handy. The shower in the hospital bathroom.  Gratitude for my Target slippers, purchased just for this occasion. Back and forth from bed to bathroom, eating, drinking my weight in water, holding Yos. Nursing. Remembering about newborns. It is such a blur now, and I long for those first days sometimes.

***

I packed up the bassinet today. Now our bedroom at home is ours again, except Yossi still wakes at night and I hustle to the crib in Lilit's room, though she never wakes. He has been sleeping there for nearly a month. I miss his proximity to my bed but I also like having a little more space again. The side of the bed feels luxuriously big; it's the perfect spot for my yoga mat, my runes, tarot cards, books and meditation space. I cleaned it thoroughly today.

Yossi is 5 months old and we are settling in a bit more.  There will always be more room to adjust. But I think our family of five status is smoothing itself out, our routines steady but also flexible. It feels just right.

For me, having a third baby has made me relax about many aspects of parenting, and capturing the birth story is one small piece of that process. I felt so much more attached to the way that Avi and Lilit were born, so proud of my "practically a home birth" story with Avi, so upset about my induction with Lilit (until I was actually in labor and then I was more accepting).  With Yossi, I feel like he just needed to be born. It was time. And it didn't seem to matter so much how he got here. I laughed to myself when my OB, whom I'd seen throughout the pregnancy, stopped by to see me later in the morning of Yossi's birth. I was gasping to her about how painful it was and she said matter-of-factly, "Well, it's over now."  Yes, he was born and we were both well and that was that. And even though it was also so much more, there was truth in her words. The pain was over. The memory of it would continue to fade. And yet I'm compelled to capture as many details as I can, to pore over the experience like a biographer wanting to get the facts just right. There's so much more to say. But I'm so present in our current reality that remaining in the birth story feels like gratuitous lingering. Yossi arrived at the perfect time. And we keep moving forward into the story of every day.