The hard labor

what I learned from giving birth (naturally) to our second son

BE AWARE: this post contains details about the real birth of a real baby, which are a bit personal, so fair warning.

I started writing this post the day after giving birth to our son Abraham, exactly one year ago. Over the first year of his earth-side experience, there’s been a lot to process about the experience and I’ve been very excited to share about it with you. And kind of nervous, because this kind of vulnerability is rare for me in this space. I hope reading of it encourages you.

Let me just start by saying: I hate being in pain. So much so that I willingly faced my intense fear of needles in order to get epidurals* during labor with my first two babies. With our son Abraham, born on September 13, 2023, I chose natural childbirth, and the fact that I chose to forgo intervention with my third baby would be shocking to my childhood self—who always wanted children but who greatly feared the pain of giving birth.

Why would I choose to do this? Plenty of people (my old OBGYN, a great doctor, included) think it’s crazy to endure natural childbirth when pain management is widely available and encouraged. 

This time I had two big influences in my life encouraging me to labor naturally: my sister and my midwife. My sister Julia gave birth to her son naturally two years ago, and I’ll be honest, since then I’ve always felt a little competitive urge to do it myself. This would not have been enough on its own to convince me to labor naturally, though. The main factor was that Julia was so convinced it had been so much better of an experience, and she insisted that it was better for the baby as well. So I started seeing a midwife, a wonderfully firm and encouraging woman, as soon as I found out about my third pregnancy.

Jenda did not pressure me into natural childbirth, but she talked to me plainly about my past experiences and the statistics associated with labor and childbirth in the United States. She lent me a documentary to watch, The Business of Being Born, and it sat on a shelf in my house for a month, because I know myself. I am exactly the sort of person to be gradually swayed by facts, and I wasn’t particularly sure I wanted to have my mind changed on having an epidural with Abraham.

Eventually my curiosity got the better of me, and I watched it. The statistics surprised me: it’s actually safer, in general, for both mother and baby, for her to give birth naturally (I am not a doctor, but these are real statistics and can be found easily in a simple google search).

In the movie I saw a few women give birth, something I’ve never seen before because I get squeamish. But I was surprised how fascinating I found it, and how encouraging it was to see—these women were laboring at home with a midwife, without medication, and they made it look almost easy! 

So in the end I decided to commit to natural childbirth. I knew that as a low-risk patient, it was the safest way for me to give birth, and frankly I was feeling tired of trying to control things about my pregnancy and birth experience. With my first two births, I stressed and fretted a lot more over the timing, the epidural, whether to induce, etc. I wanted to avoid the anxiety this time. I wanted to give myself a chance to just let it go and trust God with the whole process, start to finish. 

I really think this mindset totally changed my experience with the last trimester of pregnancy. With my first two babies, I made it to 40 weeks kicking and screaming, wishing I could just get it over with. With Abraham, I felt peaceful and unhurried (perhaps partly because I knew natural birth would be a difficult experience). I knew–had been affirming to myself for 9 months–that God was going to take care of it, not me. So at 40 weeks I was cool as a cucumber–at least by my standard. And on the 3rd morning of the 40th week, I went into labor.

The first stages of labor were easy. Contractions woke me up at 5:30am. I timed them for an hour before deciding to wake up my husband and get ready to bring the toddlers to their aunt’s house. We got there at 7:30 and my sister commented on how chill I  seemed, as I squatted through my contractions–almost like I knew what I was doing. She made me feel like I really did have it in me.

Up to a certain point in labor, the contractions were no worse than menstrual cramps I’ve had in the past. It was almost a piece of cake until my water finally broke at around 11am and they started coming on stronger. Then it became more of a mind effort. I had to focus hard on my breathing, remembering all the reasons I’d chosen to do this and praying that God would continue to help me. As long as I could keep moving I felt like my sanity was intact.

But Abraham, that little go with the flow guy, had turned himself around in my belly at some point. Now he was face-up, and it’s possible to deliver a face-up baby totally safely, but it can also be a lot more intense. Jenda tried to turn him manually (yes, with her hand), which on its own was a… harrowing experience. He was stubborn, though. So for the last hour of my labor, during transition, up to the point where I was ready to push, I had to lie on my side, almost totally immobile, trying to coax Abe to rotate. It was awful lying there, shaking myself with each contraction to try and stay loose. All I could do was breathe and squeeze my husband’s hand. My prayers comprised a single word: “Jesus.” I felt like death could take me and I (almost) wouldn’t even be mad. 

Then all of a sudden there was a change. I can’t describe how I knew it was time. It was like an electrical signal had been shot through my blood (actually, that’s probably not too far off from how that works physiologically). Jenda, and the fantastic nurse whose name I’ve now forgotten, coached me onto my hands and knees, the optimal birth position for a face-up baby. I wouldn’t get to squat through the birth like I’d hoped. Abe had never decided to turn over, the little stinker. 

My helpers told me it was time to push. I didn’t need them to tell me that. All I knew was that this baby needed to come out and I had to somehow do the work to help him get there. 

In those moments, I stopped existing. I became pain. Looking back now, the only thing I can see is the insides of my eyelids. 

I recall faintly thinking to myself that I shouldn’t scream, because screaming can exacerbate physical stress and lead to muscle tearing. I also recall not caring, because thinking was too hard and how the hell was I supposed to not scream at a time like this? 

I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever attempted to learn how to scream without hurting their vocal cords, like for a metal album. But I have, because my husband is a rock singer and we are adventurous like that. At any rate, I must have internalized something of the screamo energy from those YouTube video tutorials, because the sounds coming out of me were not high pitched damsel in distress screams, they were guttural and crunchy, and dare I say well-supported, metal-screaming screams. After giving birth, my vocal cords showed no signs of stress—so somehow my subconscious had chosen this moment to test my fledgling skills, and it mostly worked. 

Zac stood next to the bed, holding my hands and (he later told me) trying not to show on his face that he felt sorry for me. He did a pretty good job. Jenda and the nurse were at my sides, rubbing my back, telling me I was tough and strong and reminding me to be gentle. And I thought, there is nothing gentle about this. This was what dying feels like.

Before the final push, they told me to hold for one contraction. Jenda had informed me weeks before, they do it this way so that the baby’s head can stretch things out more gradually before emerging in one smooth motion on the last push. I knew that, in the now-tiny, rational part of my brain, but it seemed impossible in the moment. All that seemed to matter was the animal desire for the baby to get out of me, and I didn’t care at all what happened to my body in order to make it so.

All told, I only pushed for six minutes. And little Abe did come out quite smoothly, for somehow (through an act of God and Jenda’s deft gate-keeping) I did manage to wait for the final push. Right away, there was an enormous sense of relief. The immediate sense of visceral fear was gone. I thought it couldn’t possibly have worked that quickly. I spent the next couple hours in a haze of adrenaline, like I had just emerged from a battle and barely escaped with my life.

I’ve never done something so hard. I never truly understood what it was to experience deep, intense, acute suffering until this experience. And I also never understood what it could be like on the other side—that mingled with the relief could come anxiety, even fear. That overcoming that fear wouldn’t just be a thing of the moment, but of the days that followed. That I would find myself wondering if fear made me a bad mother, if the primal instinct to avoid such pain in the future meant that I valued my own comfort over my children.

Very shortly after the birth, as I lay there trying to relax my adrenaline-filled body, snuggling the tiny boy that had just come out of me, Zac asked me if I would want to do this again, with our next baby. My answer in that moment was “don’t talk to me about next time.” I never wanted to do this again, with or without pain medication. And I certainly didn’t want to think about it so soon.

I would eventually be able to consider the prospect of doing it again without completely retreating back into that fear–and miraculously, it only took a week for me to change my mind. In fact, looking back at it now, a year later, I find it hard to remember the pain, which is why I forced myself to write my impressions of the experience before I began to heal from it—in order to process it later in a genuine way. Now, I know in my mind that the pain was real, but the present moment, in which I am whole and happy and my baby is mine, has overshadowed it and redeemed it.

Abe’s birth, and the recovery from it, truly went about as well as I could have hoped–but even so, giving birth this way was traumatic for me. Despite that trauma, though, I do feel it was profoundly empowering.

Not because I found some wild woman within me, some primal creature composed of my own true essence who had lain dormant and awakened at my time of need. There was no moment of transcendent clarity where I realized I was strong enough, or tough enough, or powerful enough to do what needed to be done.

No, the empowerment came from knowing that my self was not in control. Indeed I felt like a wild woman, like some kind of animal. But there was no sense in that, only the intense desperation of having no choice but to experience all that pain so fully. Having spent some time (almost a year now) considering that experience, I know that whatever strength my mind and body possessed in those moments came from something outside myself. Or rather, something within and yet beyond myself. It came from the Holy Spirit. In giving birth to Abraham, I didn’t find my inner strength. I found my limits, and there I met the God of unlimited resources. 

He spoke to my body and made it do what it needed to—I was utterly powerless to control it. He spoke to my heart with the reassurance that before going into labor, I had believed He would help me do it. The remembrance of that belief was the essence of my faith in the hardest part of labor. I didn’t feel I could do it. I couldn’t reason myself into hoping that the pain wouldn’t just go on forever and ever. But I could recall a time of hope, and peace, and clarity, and from that memory came resolve. Despair couldn’t overwhelm me because the God of truth was with me. 

God was—is—with me. I’ve seen evidence of this before. But I know now what it is to reach my uttermost limit and not just survive that, but be brought through it into joy and peace, and rightness, and happiness. God was with me. And so it was that childbirth empowered me, by forcing me to wholly rely on His power, his might, his wise design for life.

Many people would expect me to be proud of my accomplishment, and I guess in some ways I am amazed that I could actually, physically endure something like that. I look back now and think it was kind of fun, actually—or if not fun then at least gratifying, for a challenge-oriented person like me. But if personal achievement were the only reason I’d chosen to give birth naturally, the reward would feel pretty hollow (as any pursuit made purely for pride’s sake ultimately will). Because in truth, I was not in control of my situation in labor. No aspect of it was within my grasp—not the strength of the contractions nor their timing, not the baby’s position within my body. Nothing except my breathing pattern was up to me, and even that felt like almost too much. 

But I can see how everything came together, before and in and after those moments, and I know it was the best thing for me. It was the best thing for this baby. And somehow we did it, and what felt like a mortal wound in one dreadful moment ended as only a passing recollection, no more harmful to me than something I read in a book. And I’m so grateful to have experienced that kind of deliverance, the kind that reflects God’s promise of redemption in the most visceral way. Because that promise is the foundation of all my hope today. The Gospel promise that no matter what the pain along the way, the end of the story is peace, and joy, and healing, and a love so complete it very nearly erases all memory of the struggle it took to get there. 

Happy first birthday, sweet boy ❤️

*I do not regret my epidurals. They both worked well and helped me relax, and my first two children are happy and healthy. After experiencing natural childbirth though, I can confidently say I think it was a better overall process for me and baby, and I’m really glad I chose to do it this time.