Sometime after lunch I’m checked again, and finally, finally I am told I’m in active labour. This means I’ve only just made it to six centimetres but after the intense concentration of the time on the toilet I imagine I must be close to fully dilated. Karen beetles out to help finish filling the pool and getting it to the right temperature. This has taken all morning.
I’m annoyed that now I’m back in the room having left the haven of the bathroom. My rhythms are all out again. I feel stranded, undone. I feel my boundedness coming apart. I bend over the pillows, try to walk the wire of firm looseness. It is so like meditation, labour. You use every ounce of your concentration to relax into being, drop into the ground of your body, letting everything arise without reacting, without trying to make it different. I feel myself getting further and further away in this, going down and down, getting lost.
Then, while Bianca is squeezing my hips during a contraction, something new smashes through me. It feels like the fist your stomach makes when you throw up, and as unstoppable. It shudders down my body and I arch.
“What was that?” Bianca asks. “Did you just feel the urge to push?”
“I don’t know. It just happened,” I say. “And yes, it felt like a bearing down.”
“Okay,” she says quietly and slips off to notify Karen.
“You can’t push, hey,” Karen says.
But I can’t help it, and it comes again, a freight train running through me. A noise comes out of me, guttural and choking. It – this thing running through me – pushes, hard. My eyes begin to water.
“You have a premature urge to push. You need to do your ha-shew breathing, Robyn, okay? It’s very important.”
I had read about a premature urge to push, and had mostly neglected to practise the necessary breathing technique should it happen. Basically you have to pant in and out fast four times and then let out a longer breath so you don’t hyperventilate. You do this because you can’t pant and push at the same time. I also knew that pushing against an unopened cervix was very dangerous.
Haltingly, I try the breathing. The urge comes again and I clench against it, but this makes the contraction swell to a crescendo of pain and I whimper and limp to the end of it. I need help, someone to breathe with me, to show my breath what to do. I need a metronome, a piano and a funny man in a bowler hat to play me through this, so I can somehow follow, follow. I have been breathing one way for hours and now must breathe another. I must change the locus of myself from limp and calm, loose and willing, to wilful and in charge, a chugging train, a flute being played, a dancer whose feet are the only sound in the auditorium, pounding out something Irish, something gaelic in scuffed black ballet shoes.
“Ha-shew, ha-shew, ha-shew, foooo,” I try. “Ha-shew, ha-shew, ha-shew foooo.”
When I step into the birth pool, I burst into tears of sheer relief. The water is so blessedly warm, so buoyant and inviting. The nature of the pain changes in the water, becoming more hazy, but the urge to push is still as intense.
“The baby’s head is skew. She’s pushing on nerves which have made your body think you’re further along than you are,” Karen says.
She shows me, dropping her head to her shoulder.
“I think she might have a hand up by her cheek too.”
So this is why it’s all been happening so fast and strange. My cervix is on one timeline, my uterus another.
“We need to do exercises to move the baby.”
I nod and start doing cat and cow in the water, trying to keep moving through a contraction and the ha-shew breathing. I falter, begin, falter, feeling pain and pressure and the push tearing at my body. I do the dolphin. I do all manner of animal moves in the water. Karen checks and still she is skew, still I am not yet fully dilated and still I feel the urge to push. I’m getting exhausted.
“Ricky, put on your trunks,” Karen says, “you’re getting in.”
Ricky told me he didn’t want to be in the pool with me, that it wasn’t his scene. But he obeys without a word. I lean against him and he props me up. Now I don’t need to use my strength to keep my head above water. I am glad someone else is responsible for a part of this. I am using everything I have, every last resource to weather this, to breathe. I have nothing left to give anyone or anything else, so I cannot be grateful to or connect with my husband, as I feel his body behind me. Rather, I feel how he tenses when the urge to push moves through me. It is so violent. My whole body is racked with it. My fingers curl into claws. I grunt and shudder and threaten to slide under. I can sense how terrifying it must be to witness this. But he needs to get under control; if his body hitches, mine will want to follow, and I cannot afford it.
“Breathe properly,” I manage.
Ricky laughs.
It is a small laugh, almost immediately taken back. I’m shocked. Later Ricky tells me the midwife had been making exaggerated fingers-to-lips gestures when I told him or them to shut up. In the moment I am catapulted even further away.
While all this is happening, the water is constantly being pumped out the window and topped up from the urns. (Later I will find out the weight of the urns or the heat or both cracked in half the newly installed granite slab on our kitchen island.) I lie on my back, each side, my stomach – for the next week I finger a painful bruise on my forehead from pressing my head against the side of the pool. My cervix is moving very slowly and Karen keeps asking if I’ll take a buscopan injection to relax the muscle. But I am so confused. I can’t understand what it is. And I can’t talk. It’s easier to refuse and get back to my concentration, because that is what I need to do. Concentrate. Every inch of me is an arrow flying towards the increasing now, the moment unfolding and unfolding. I am the quiver, the quick. I am air being sliced through. So I keep refusing. She gives me homoeopathic medication instead, tiny white balls that must go under the tongue. It is almost impossible to open my mouth and lift my tongue while belly down in the water. The balls spill onto my cheek. I beg for water, but the balls must first dissolve.
“Just wait five minutes,” Karen says when I croak, “Water, water.” Waiting is absurd to me. And thirst is added to the sensations in which I am drowning.
Finally Karen says she’s giving me the injection and I demur. When she checks me again she pushes her fingers against the last rim of cervix and that’s it, I’m fully dilated. I fall back into the water.
“Okay,” Karen says. “Now push.”
I begin to scream.
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