#//i would love to translate but i have fifteen deadlines looming over my head and ive missed three of them bc im very tired but this scene

[m0e-ru]

i am thinking about the funniest scene in all of visualive evolution

[wiym]

MY BIRTH STORY

Trigger warning/s: Birth trauma and postnatal mood disorders

Less than a quarter of healthy, low risk, first time parents will have a normal birth in an Australian hospital. With the recent release of Birth Time: the documentary in Australia and New Zealand, I felt that revisiting my birth story was timely.

It’s a clichéd adage but it’s true: for me, the birth plan went well and truly out the window. In fact, it was never let into the building.

EST. READING TIME: 5 minutes

In my early twenties, I used to avoid making eye contact with the family planning section at the chemist. These days I have an emergency stash of tests in my bedside drawer. I’m not even late - my period tracker says it’s due today - but I have a nagging feeling that won’t go away.

I pee on the stick, and there’s only one line. Oh well. I shrug, insouciant, throw out the test and go about my day.

Until four in the afternoon, when I sit bolt upright on the couch and realise that I, generally a rule follower, hadn’t waited for that result. In fact, the box tells you to wait five minutes. So much for sitting on the couch with an egg timer.

 I dig through the bin and in my shaking hands is a positive pregnancy test (note: those trying to conceive affectionately refer to this as a BFP). I test again, and again. I can’t wait, I race in my car to Victoria Park where my boyfriend of two years is working, with three BFPs sitting in the cup holder.

And so begins the uncontrollable for the Type A control freak.

In a pandemic, there are already things I can’t control. I’m redeployed to a different unit at my work and can no longer take potential COVID patients.

I’m anxious, exhausted and most of all - experiencing morning sickness that will turn into hyperemesis. Then, I have to take extended time off work.

As I do with most things, I jump straight into the deep end of pregnancy world and obsessively research. I avoid the foods you’re meant to avoid, and I buy all of the pre-baby accoutrements. Birthing ball, new yoga mat (and maternity yoga pants to boot), and the books. Oh my god, the books.

I do the hypnobirthing classes and listen to birthing stories while hiking with my dogs.

Being pregnant is simultaneously my new persona and hobby. I honestly still wouldn’t change a thing now, in spite of what I know, because even through vomiting for 7, nearly 8, months; I love being pregnant with all my heart.

I neatly type up a birth plan, beautifully formatted and fonted. Natural, natural, natural. No episiotomy. No pain relief. Don’t even offer it to me - I’ll ask. No interventions unless necessary. Delayed cord clamping. Immediate skin to skin. Quiet, low lighting, music. To me, this was a covenant between myself and the computer. Absolute, resolute and set in stone.

By the third trimester my partner and I have the hospital bag meticulously packed, nursery ready, and the big waiting game to do. Eager for our little family to be complete.

At my 38 week appointment, our obstetrician informs us that baby isn’t showing any signs of coming any time soon. I take that as a challenge and research a litany of labour-inducing old wives’ tales.

PSA: none of these actually work. If you are healthy with no complications, your baby will come when ready. Don’t rush. Even when you feel as if you can’t possibly be pregnant for single millisecond more. Your baby isn’t term until 40 weeks.

But here’s the kicker; the impending threat of an induction and/or caesarean looms overhead. I’m told I am a small girl. He appears to be a big baby. His head isn’t engaged at all. And that the clock is ticking.

Now I wonder what might have happened had that idea never been put into my head. If I had been given the space to accept my birth as it would come. Real birth. Normalised.

The pitfalls don’t just lie with mainstream media. You are being sold something. The expensive classes will tell you that having a natural birth without medication is possible, if you buy our book. The private obstetrician will tell you that you need an induction, an epidural, a caesarean; pay us.

At 39 weeks, the Friday before Christmas, my baby is showing signs of coming. What follows is 9 days of latent, or prodromal, or pre, or (my least favourite term) false labour.

On the Monday we go into hospital. With contractions 3 minutes apart, we are told my cervix and uterus aren’t agreeing. Simply put: head isn’t engaging, cervix isn’t dilating. And that I’ll know it when I’m in real labour.

During the week that follows I try exercises from Spinning Babies to get some relief from the round the clock contractions, Jack gives me massages and on one night I even give a glass of red wine and a bubble bath a go.

Websites that want to sell me something tell me that it’s because I’m too stressed for the labour to progress. Try our tea. 

Why are we capitalising on something so sacred as birth?

 I walk with one foot on the curb and one foot on the path - and I do this for kilometres. Through King’s Park in 30-degree heat. Along the coast. Around the neighbourhood.

On Christmas Eve, I can’t sleep, speak or move through the contractions and we wait as long as possible. We camp on the fold out bed in the living room (those without air conditioning throughout improvise), the birthing playlist quietly crooning and candles burning. I do my breathing and mantras; relax, relax, relaaaaax. And the contractions stop as abruptly as they started, 20 hours later.

I cry. Low keening, animalistic sobbing. I don’t understand what is happening to me. I don’t feel confident in making the choice whether or not to go to the hospital anymore.

They tell you the hospital is the safest place to birth and in the same breath tell you to avoid the hospital unless you’re damn near crowning.

I’m new to this. It’s my first time. I feel scared, unsupported and alone. I’m in so much pain.

I just want to meet my baby.

 Barely two days later, I shake Jack awake. I’ve got a Miss Clavel feeling. Something is not right. Instinctively I know that after nine days of exhausting labour that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, I will be too tired to push.

I call the hospital and ask if I can come in.

Have you just had enough? A voice asks on the other end.

So I don’t take the Panadol or the shower or the bath. We roll into the birthing unit and I’m put on the monitor. Like the High Striker at a fairground, I get the sense that the rolling peaks on the screen need to reach acceptable heights before I’m taken seriously.

The midwife is watching for decelerations, which don’t happen, but also doesn’t see any accelerations. My baby is tired, and I don’t blame him.

And then I am asked the question.

What do you want to get out of being in hospital today? Do you want to have your baby?

I nod, because yes. So comes the new plan. Break my waters and start the syntocin drip tomorrow. Temazepam and Panadeine Forte tonight. So quickly everything I imagined for my birth is going out the window, but I’m desperate.

The next morning we waddle into the birthing suites to start my induction bright and early. I feel robbed of the moment my waters break as it is cracked with something that looks like a crochet hook on a glove. With a gush and then a steady trickle, all the amniotic fluid keeping my baby safe and sound floods out. My obstetrician tells me it’s meconium stained, the paediatric RN in me fleetingly panics. But it is all systems go. I race from active labour to transition. I can only focus on the contractions.

I want my mum.

I’m offered the epidural I’d refused the day prior again but I shake my head. Not in the birth plan. Gas and air only, please. I end up screaming into the Entonox mouthpiece every 2 minutes and throw up all over myself before I allow myself the grace of an epidural. Which only works for about fifteen minutes before I’m once again writhing and screaming, one leg ice numb but the rest of me on fire. Intense pressure between my legs, the urge to push. But it’s only been a couple hours.

My mum arrives in the hospital. On the birth plan, she was meant to be waiting outside. She stands near me now, in the birthing suite.

I’m making noises I am not proud of and inform my midwife of my need to push. Oh, it’s too soon? Pardon me. Before the midwife’s assessment I steel myself to be told I am nowhere near, after a week of disappointment and being nowhere near.

Oh. You’re having a baby.

I ask if we need to wait for the doctor when she tells me she’s calling my obstetrician.

No, she laughs. You don’t have to wait.

With my knees to my chest, I’m told to stop pushing and so I stop. Afterwards, my partner tells me that our son was getting distressed despite my best efforts to get him out and the obstetrician was pulling back on the cord that was tight around his neck. And my poor tired baby’s heart rate drops dangerously. I’m given a deadline to push him out, but I can’t and I’m given the episiotomy I had expressly verboten on my birth plan. He is vacuum assisted out. He is safe.

I’m handed a small, beanlike baby covered in blood and vernix. I kiss him and end up with blood on my face. He doesn’t cry.

He’s taken off my chest and it feels like the longest pause before he lets out the best scream I’ve ever heard.

My mum looks at me. He’s beautiful, she mouths. Is he okay? He’s okay.

My partner cuts the cord. No delayed cord clamping, breathing is more important. Oliver is soon enough placed back onto my chest.

And he is beautiful.

What starts days later as the baby blues progresses into postnatal depression and anxiety. It took me a long time to accept what happened was birth trauma. That my birth story is ridiculously common, even amongst my group of friends, and that’s not due to our failure as the birthing parent. I can’t tell you how long I felt I only had myself to blame for having false expectations. And how much value I put into my ability to birth the “right” way as a direct translation of my ability to mother. How I felt that my son’s birth complications were my fault (it wasn’t). Too many Australian birthing parents are made to feel this way.

So I write this birth story once more, and I let go of what happened for my own sake. I didn’t fail. My son is beautiful, and worth every second of the agony it took to get him here.

A previous version of this post was published on my friend’s blog Mummy Neutral as ‘Type A and the Uncontrollable Pre-Labour’ in January 2021.

Please check her blog out as she posts some really raw and beautiful insights into pregnancy, birth and motherhood.

If you’re feeling distressed about anything discussed or about your own birth experience, please click the life ring symbol at the top of my blog for some helpful links. Call Lifeline on 13 11 14 if you need immediate assistance.

Birth Time: the documentary is showing in select cinemas now. You can visit the website to find out more and if you have birthed in Australia in the last 5 years, you can complete a survey about your experience.

[mexican-texican]

In the Strangest of Places

Roxanne/Megamind K+ rating Writers block sucks. Especially when the story came out of nowhere and the deadline is in less than a week. But what better thing for Roxanne to do than go out for a breather, maybe get some ideas. Or meet someone along the way that could help with the push. (Slightly OOC, two quiet strangers out for a walk) updated, with FF.net and AO3 links now available! please let me in

She has a problem all of its own. Staring at the little line on her word document blink in mockery of her brain's refusal to cooperate for the segment she has been tacked with in a last minute decision to have something up for Thanksgiving day.

She doesn't know how it will come about, only that it has to (if you want to make ratings you have to give them what they want she can hear him say in her ear, the feeling of his breath like a snail being dragged across the curve of the cartilage)

(she shivers at the reliving of that feeling)

And yet the line keeps blinking, her mind dragging in that slow way the snail moves, this time across the windowsill where she keeps the outdoor plants near the fire escape. She realizes she's been staring at that damn thing move for thirty-two minutes now, her mind jumping from wondering how it managed to climb fifteen flights of stairs to I should probably put a can of beer out there and she chides herself for not being able to focus on the problem at hand.

She's stuck.

And it's not the same kind of stuck she usually gets when she's on a roll and comes to a wall on how to move forward with her work.

It's the stuck were the gears refuse to move, oil and grease dumping over the metal relentlessly and no amount of torque and lubrication can make them budge from the iron grip. Regardless of how often she leaves the laptop, or reads on other segments and stories (fact or fictional), or even decides to distract herself with a mindless task (at least that half knitted scarf she started in middle school has been done. Half assed and sad but done).

She grunts at the laptop as the clock on the top right joins in the mockery. 9:38. Thirty-eight minutes now and not a letter closer to having the file done in time for the deadline.

Shifting in her seat on the couch, the dog yawns as it translates the mood of the room through body language, having climbed up alongside her lap after she finally ignored his licking noises and hasn't bothered to tell him to get down.

why did she take in the dog on a holiday? why did Karen have to leave for a whole week for thanksgiving? She's never met anyone to enjoy the company of their own family THAT much. Regardless, she took in the angry little fur-ball and hasn't really taken the time to know him. Closing the laptop on the blank file, she proceeds to rummage her closet for immense layers of clothing for the weather (barely twenty-seven outside but you can never be too warm), grabs a hold of the miniature parka Karen brought for the dog (that's what FUR is for Roxanne had told her, to which Karen held up the hairless chihuahua) and started the routine act of getting them both bundled up for a walk.

Halfway down the elevator and she's already regretting the idea of walking the dog. He keeps growling and lunging towards every person coming in and out throughout the ride.

"Why does she love you?" she groans, completely absentminded of the fact there was still a person behind her on the ride down. This one the dog fails to intimidate, for they have interesting smells surrounding their feet.

Once they have reached the lobby she has another pang of regret, the cold unforgivingly cutting through the warm shield of her clothing. Even the dog seems to hesitate with his walking towards the front door as he breaks into a violent shiver.

She stops as the person behind her clears their way to the lobby doors, a brief moment of recalculation as she slowly waves out a finger towards the buttons and commands the elevator to drop down into the parking garage.

She knows she's just prolonging the inevitable cold but that's okay in her mind, so long as she rides without the heater on.

They drive aimlessly down the city, bright lights giving way to darkened neighborhoods, until she reaches a somewhat familiar part of town she's not sure she's ever been in before. Pulling over to a curb, she eyes the vacant streets and is relieved for the lack of other restless walkers, considering the fact that Karen specifically mentioned Gorton not liking the company of other dogs.

(you named him after Ramsay? She asked. No, I named him after the fish-sticks Karen clarified)

Turning the car off and getting the leash back on, she walks with no direction in mind. Since the buildings in the area aren't as densely packed as they would be within the downtown area, there aren't any sudden wind tunnels or drastic changing in temperature from walking by heating ducts, and the best part is no other random strangers in the dark.

With Gorton strolling ahead of her, she pays no mind to where they're heading, and even gains confidence in letting him lead with his leash unhooked. Hey, she feels like bending a few rules tonight, it's not like there's anyone around to see.

Her eyes slowly adjust to the growing darkness, a few stray floodlights lighting the way blinding her of their current path. He takes a couple of trotting steps, stops at a spot of interest to take in a few lingering smells, and continues with his nose leading the way.

It isn't until she hears the soft voiced murmuring of a person nearby and the familiar ringing of another dog's collar that she panics and tries to call out for Gorton to come back, but it's useless, the dog has as much attachment to her as a fish to a hook.

"It's okay," the voice calls out. "She's friendly."

"Yeah, but he's not."

Her ribcage suddenly hurts with worry that the dog would get injured around the other, much bigger one, its looming white figure making it look very much like a-

"Ghost, will you cut that? He's not a plaything," the man's voice calls out to the silent dog, the bouncing creature giddy with excitement, knocking over Gorton with one silent swoop of her body.

Gorton stares at the sky after having been flipped on his back, not sure what the hell just happened.

"I do apologize, she doesn't get to interact very much with other dogs, not since she lost use of her voice-box."

"Oh you poor thing," she sympathizes, wanting to kneel to give the white dog a good rubbing, but she seems to be preoccupied with, Gorton remaining on his back- is, he submitting?

"Quitter," she calls out playfully, straightening herself out and securing her hands back in the shield of her coat pockets.

"If I may ask, what, brings you around this area, at this time of night? We hardly get any visitors in our neighborhood," the man calls out. She's still having trouble making out his figure, and it's hard to tell with all the layered clothing and multiple headwear he seems to be sporting.

"Actually, I'm, stuck on a current story of mine," she replies shyly, diverting her eyes to the iced rainwater drain they stood alongside to avoid eye contact.

(Not like they could see each other's faces in the dark anyway, the way both of them remain in the shadows)

"Writer," he states more than asks, she nods in confirmation.

"Fictional, or?-"

"Journalism."

"Ah," he words out with an upwards nod of his head. "So you walking around at this time of night, and getting stuck on your story relates-?"

She runs her free hand over the arm holding the leash. "It helps clear my mind. When I get stuck in a rut."

He goes quiet, in agreement or contemplation she's not sure of, but she keeps the silence and watches the dogs do their playful dance.

"It's frustrating, you know, getting stuck on something you can clearly see in your head," she says through the quiet.

"Sometimes I'll be working on something for so long, then another story comes through, disrupting my plans. I actually had a story set aside that I had been working on for a few months now and planned on releasing it earlier this month. And I pushed the release a week. Then another. Until I got stuck, and it didn't help that my boss tossed me a non-descriptive story with a Thanksgiving deadline this Sunday. Told me to just "wing it". Could be over anything as long as it was holiday themed."

She huffs and gives a kick towards a stray pebble, never looking up towards the stranger.

"I know how that feels like."

She looks up from her downturned gaze with curious surprise, letting him go on his own.

"Sometimes I get an idea, a plo-plan. And I end up trailing another one before the first is finished. By the end of it I end up leaving a trail of notes strung together, and some-how they still make sense. Barely."

"You know sometimes taking a break does help, I've gotten my fair share of "block's" broken through a nap, eating a snack," he continues as he lifts his fingers to his mouth and letting out a whistle, calling out his dog to stand by his side with barely held in excitement.

"Sometimes it takes you doing something unexpected, taking a different route people expect from you. If anything, I'm willing to bet you could get back on that thing this very moment and tear that wall down, because sometimes you find inspiration in the strangest of places. From my experience at least."

She buries herself in the comforting warmth of her coat, a delicate smile teasing over her fingers grasping the plaid scarf around her neck.

"Hey, you know what, thanks. I'll-, I'm gonna hit the keyboard, I think, I got myself straightened out."

"No problem," the desolate voice calls out towards her shadowed figure, already turned away and heading back into the darkness that leads to her car, the small dog panting and jumping excitedly around her feet.

She doesn't see that he stands there a moment too long, watching her walk away. Doesn't notice the weak shifting of his feet, the white dog waging in place with her silent smile and floating through the air to hover by her master's elbow as he turns to head back home.

"Come on Ghost, I think I finally figured out how to fix that voice box of yours."