Mado

Ciel Lorei Hadley was born on Thanksgiving night. My family was all supposed to come over for dinner, so Cookie and I had been cooking and cleaning all day. I felt my first contractions at around 3pm, but wasn't sure if it was the 'real thing' or not. I thought they were coming too close together to be real, but actually timing them seemed like too much work. I didn’t want to tell anybody that I thought I might be in labor, just in case I was wrong. So I turned on some music and danced around to deal with the pain in between making bread and mashed potatoes. I had to go to the bathroom a lot. I guess my body was cleaning itself out. I started to feel a little scared that this really was labor and I told Cookie "I don't want to have the baby today, I don't want to ruin Thanksgiving". He reassured me that I wouldn't be ruining it. So we went on with our business and I wondered if perhaps I could deal with the contractions until after dinner.

Around 5, I was on the toilet and I had a particularly painful (for the time) contraction and I started to bleed a little. This freaked me out so I called Cookie who was in the car on his way home. He said "what are you doing on the phone with me? Call the Midwife!!!" So I paged Evan and she called me right back. Trying not to cry, I told her what was happening. She said she thought I was probably in labor and she was on her way over. My family arrived minutes later and I tearfully greeted them at the door with the announcement that Thanksgiving was cancelled because I was having a baby.

It was a madhouse. My Mom was making the bed with a plastic sheet, and the rest of my family were all concerned with taking some food to go since they hadn’t eaten all day in anticipation of dinner. They had brought a table over earlier so my dad and step-dad carried it back out as Evan arrived. Cookie was trying to time my contractions, fill up the birthing tub, carve the turkey to give some to my family, and tell Evan where all the birthing supplies were. By this time I was in a tizzy, wandering around and peeling off my clothes then putting them back on after realizing that my house was still filled with people. Evan took me into another room to examine me and pronounced that I was fully dilated and that the baby was coming any minute.

It seemed like an eternity before everyone left and I could focus on the task at hand. Cookie and my mom stayed and they were incredible support for me. One would be near my face, holding my hands and the other putting pressure on my sacrum. At the end, I was practically sitting in Cookie's lap, grabbing his shoulders and looking into his eyes during my contractions.

I had to deal with each contraction separately from the rest. I could only deal with one moment at a time. To try to cope with the whole experience was too overwhelming. In the break between contractions, I couldn’t think about the next contraction ahead. I was simply grateful to be in between them. Whenever I tried to resist one coming on, it would make it that much worse. So I learned to surrender to the moment. Each time, I used a different way to remind myself what I was doing and why.

In the rest between two contractions, I connected with the baby inside me. I put my hands over where she was in my belly and told her that we were going to do this together. I almost cried, I could feel her so strongly.

The walls of the bedroom were filled with birth art that cookie and I had made in our birthing classes. One image in particular, my drawing of a birth warrior, helped to give me strength through a contraction. Another time I was reminded of the fact that 300,000 other women were giving birth at that moment around the world and I tried to tap into that pool of strength. At one point I was pounding on the wall and a framed picture of Cookie and I white-water rafting fell and hit me in the head. Cookie told me later that he was glad it hit me and not him, and the funny thing is so was I! It felt good to have pain somewhere else in my body to distract from the pain in my uterus.

Ciel was born at 6:45pm 'in the caul'. That means that my bag of waters never broke, protecting her head on the way out. Evan said it is a rare occurrence and is supposed to mean that she will have a sixth sense or be lucky. Ciel let out a yell before she was even fully out of me, but it wasn't a cry of distress. It was as if she was saying "Here I am!" As soon as she was out I scooped her up into my arms and we wrapped her in a towel. Now looking back on the pictures, she wasn't totally pink right off the bat, but in my eyes at that moment she was pure perfection.

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