Negotiating the canal

We’re not people who’ll eat a placenta but we will place a couple on ice in a chest freezer. One for us, and one for a friend whose freezer is too small to accommodate both meat and out-of-use human organs.

My wife Vic and I might be considered “alternative” by some standards – if the word is simply taken to mean outside current convention. We elected for our daughter to be born at home in Paekākāriki, for example, rather than heading to the hospital 45 minutes down the road. We drink milk from the farm unpasteurised, like farmers. We have a Himalayan rock salt crystal lamp for its rose-pink ambience, not because we believe it emanates special powers. But Vic and I both knew, without any need for discussion, that while we would keep the placenta of our second baby, we wouldn’t make a stir fry out of it. Placentophagy is a line we share.

It’s all pretty relative anyway. We might not even be considered particularly alternative within Paekākāriki, a sleepy beach village with no sewerage infrastructure. It’s likely lots of folks have placentas in their freezer, or planted under an ailing lemon tree trying to survive the salty breeze. There might even be the odd Paekākāriki placenta retained lotus style: left attached to the baby to dry, wither and detach on its own, seasoned with salt or rosemary to help with the smell.

Compared to me, Vic is far less fussed by the opinions of others. She doesn’t fret for the comfort of doing things the way everyone else does. If it weren’t for her, I’d forever stand next to the boundary line of convention, wondering what lies beyond, or at best with one foot on either side of the line, unable to decide where to plant both feet.

When we started to creep towards the two-week overdue mark for our second child’s birth, Vic remained steadfast while I started to quail. Protocol held that at this point a medical professional should invoke the word induction. Vic was keen to avoid the word, so we stopped consulting medical professionals, save for our midwife, who was fairly relaxed about the whole affair. Midwifery favours calmer souls.

We’d heard all the tales of what an enterprising couple might do to bring on labour, and although they were fanciful and blindly optimistic, some of them sounded like fun. So after some morning sex and and a walk up and down some outdoor stairs, we went to the Spice Lounge, an Indian restaurant in Paraparamu Beach.

“What’s the hottest you go?” Vic asked the waiter.

“Er… Indian hot?” said the waiter.

“Yes, Indian hot please,” said Vic. “With some extra chillies on the side.”

“And you, sir?”

“Um, do you do Kiwi ultra mild?” I said.

Vic’s waters broke the following afternoon. We called our midwife Tash, who brought along another midwife, Lynley. Vic sat on a rainbow patchwork bedspread knitted by her mother, drinking water out of a brown glass bottle, trying to position her beach-ball belly in a way that might be comfortable if only for a few minutes. Tash measured Vic’s blood pressure and wrote in her notebook. I hovered, halfway between the bed and the doorway, wondering what I should be doing. Our Siamese cat Kwazii sat on the windowsill soaking up the last of the spring warmth, eyes closed, physically inside but spiritually outside of the moment. It’s easy to be zen isn’t it Kwazii, I thought, when your every need is catered for, your very existence is revered, and your biggest decision is which spot gets the best sun.

As dusk darkened the Paekākāriki streets, our friends Lenka and Gay arrived to help with the home birth. Gay made a round of hot drinks, and Lenka went out the back to set up the apparatus for boiling a large vat of water. I was the only man at the birth: a strong hint as to my usefulness. Lenka had given birth to four children, and Gay two. I had been tangentially involved in the birth of our first child Neko, four years earlier. I’d sat on one side of a green hospital curtain while Neko was extracted via caesarean section on the other. Our midwife at the time had instructed me that under no circumstances was I to peek beyond the curtain, for someone like me couldn’t handle what I’d see. Vic told me later it felt like someone doing the dishes in her abdomen. I never peeked, and never regretted not peeking.

Vic’s contractions were regular but still relatively far apart. While Vic chatted with her birthing circle, I put Neko to bed then went out to the conservatory attached to our kitchen to inflate the pool. Through the glass ceiling I admired milky star clusters against the ink-black night sky. After a few minutes my bare feet started to go numb on the stone tiles. I considered getting a jacket. Maybe even slippers. The idea that Vic would be naked in this icy box felt absurd, but the pool was part of Vic’s Birth Plan, a contractual wish list which at this point was not up for debate.

Vic had originally suggested having the pool in my office, which was clad more substantially than the thin glass and aluminium of the conservatory. But – selfishly – I considered the office my sanctum. The office is where I feel important, tapping on a keyboard, shuffling papers, and scratching down notes. “Pool” and “office” just aren’t reconcilable concepts for me. I want my office to stay normal.

So now I felt very responsible for the awkwardness of the birth venue. The least I could do was to help make the pool cosy warm. Once I’d inflated the pool, I piped in cold water via a garden hose from the kitchen sink. Just outside the conservatory door on a bed of crunchy stones, Lenka tended a stainless steel cauldron the size of a washing machine. With the steam swirling around Lenka in the dark, it looked like she was engaged in some pagan ritual to summon the gynaecological gods. Lenka’s partner Steve usually used this cauldron for brewing beer. I wondered how hygienic it was for birth pool water to contain traces of hops.

It took Lenka and I several trips lugging masses of boiling water across uneven, stony ground and up the conservatory stairs to get the pool to the right temperature. We put a survival blanket over the top of it, a crinkly, gold sheet the thickness of a tissue, which seemed a pathetic gesture towards keeping the water warm enough to summon a baby. But Lenka said that this is the way you do birth pools. Who am I to challenge the way things are done?

Lenka went back inside, but I stayed for a moment in the conservatory. I started to shiver. I’d wanted to be coy about the pool with Vic, but in reality I’d casually dropped “Are you sure we really need the pool?” into conversations hundreds of times over the last month. The pool rolled all my fears into a tottery plastic inflatable. I could only just handle that this was a VBAC (that’s Vaginal Birth After Caesarean) at home, 45 minutes from the hospital. Vic’s steely conviction eventually cancelled out my uncertainty. But the pool put me back over the edge. Having the baby essentially in a puddle. In a pool that had been used before. It had been sterilised and came with a single-use liner, but could never be clean enough for me.

Back inside the lounge I saw that Vic had braced herself against the wooden mantelpiece as the contractions started to roll in more heavily. It looked like she was trying to push over the wall. Tash brought her a muesli bar, which Vic nibbled at before tossing it aside and leaning back into the pain.

Vic and I had prepared the right equipment and invited the best people to help, but now the time was here, Vic was the only one with the resolve to follow through with the plan. It was my job to “help” but only now was it dawning on me that we hadn’t defined what that should mean. I felt useless, but I kept it to myself. The only way I could be less helpful would be to voice the desperate, macabre thoughts running through my head. Or to let on that in my head I was making all this about me.

“Labour” is an apt word. It sure looked like damn hard work. I’d known Vic for over a decade, but the sounds she was making were brand new. These were deep bass notes, resonating from the earth’s core, channeled through Vic. The sound of an incoming earthquake. Part roar, part groan.

“Rich, my hands,” Vic said to me, quietly.

“My hands,” she repeated, when I took too long to get across the room to her.

Vic had said very little for a couple of hours. Earlier that day a Paekākāriki acupuncturist had stuck a small dot sticker on the muscle between the thumb and forefinger of each of Vic’s hands. The idea was that applying pressure on these points during a contraction would help Vic ride out the pain. At midnight I received my first formal job: PRESS HERE.

Even high drama, if repeated without variation, can inevitably soften to tedium. After an hour at the mantelpiece pressing Vic’s hands I began to get tired. But I could hardly say to the group, “Look, I’m knackered. Mind if I turn in for a bit? It looks like you’ve all got this covered.”

In between contractions, which were several few minutes apart, I started sitting on the sofa for a few dozen seconds at a time. It was 1:30am. I wasn’t just fatigued, but completely overcharged. The baby still didn’t seem to be coming, and I’d been teetering on the brink of hysterical terror – and working not to let it show – for hours.

“Hands!” Vic snapped.

I opened my eyes. I’d fallen asleep for a good 100 seconds. I felt a hot flush of shame.

Vic slammed her hands onto the mantelpiece as the contraction bedded in. The wood shuddered; the house cracked.

“HANDS!” she bellowed, lightning flashing across her face. One eye was shaded by a sweat-drenched clump of hair; the other was a dark wellspring of murder.

After the contraction, Vic’s features softened. She looked exhausted.

“When are we going to the pool?” Vic implored, slowly looking around the room at each of us.

No one answered. The heat pump in the lounge was maintaining a nice, even temperature, and although the pool was still warm, the conservatory was bleak.

Tired of our evasiveness, Vic waddled away from the dry land of the lounge, through the kitchen into the conservatory and half-stepped, half-rolled rolled into the water, submerging most of her body. It was like reverse evolution, where the mammal returns to the water on its way to becoming something more primordial.

“Thank FUCK,” Vic said.

We knelt around the pool like acolytes. Tash used her Doppler foetal monitor to check on the baby. Lenka and I fetched a couple of oil heaters, although we knew these pathetic wafers of hot steel stood little chance of countering the chill.

“Will you be joining Vic in the pool?” Tash asked me. Gay, Lenka and Lynley looked to me, but could see the answer on my face. I’d watched some water birth videos with Vic, which were intended to inure me to the idea of the pool, this warm, sacred font of life. But all I was left with was an image of the water afterwards. Like lumpy tomato soup.

Vic couldn’t get the same purchase that she’d at the mantelpiece. She was just pushing on air. During a contraction she’d lean forward on her knees and rest her forearms on the inflatable pool edge. I’d brace myself in a squat position and apply pressure to her hands whilst pulling her towards me. Lenka would lean over the water and apply pressure to either side of Vic’s tailbone. It was an endless loop of hauling Vic out of the water only to have her slip back in again. Sometimes Vic would lean too hard, the side would sag, and water would wash across the floor. Everyone was very, very wet.

After each contraction I’d peer over the crest of Vic’s spine, hoping to the baby’s head. Lenka would catch my eye and shake her head.

Whenever Tash pressed the monitor against the tight skin of Vic’s belly to reconfirm signs of life, I’d hold my breath for a second. Sometimes she’d have to check twice and I’d forget to breathe altogether. I fixated on the VBAC risk of the caesarean scar rupturing internally. It was a diminishingly small risk, but in my head it was a likelihood. People often tell me not to worry, assuming I’m summoning the worry on purpose. But sometimes worry just manifests itself.

In the birth book pictures, onlookers generally sit in a relaxed posture, dressed in earthy pastel tones. The focus is soft. A circuit of serenity flows between onlookers and the birthing mother, who sits on her knees in the centre. Behold: The magic of birth. The soothing aurae.

Vic belongs in those pictures, along with all these women. But I probably belong more in the margins of a medical textbook, perhaps next to a table cataloguing the hard mathematics of various risks. I did not share the natural optimism of these women who’d given birth before and knew that the body can get the job done itself. (It’s the mind that can get in the way.) Vic tells me I worry too much, and that life is not a field of mines through which we must all be led by the hand. I seem unable to stop myself saying over and over that Vic doesn’t worry enough, even though I know I’m wrong.

There is such a thing as being too relaxed, however. In between contractions, the Birth Team (sans Vic, who had closed her eyes in the pool) had a quick consultation in the kitchen. Tash explained that the baby was indeed negotiating the canal, but progress had slowed since entering the pool. We needed to deport Vic back to the mantelpiece.

Vic came, but with the same enthusiasm you’d imagine of any aquatic mammal forced to leave the sea.

It was around 4am when the baby’s head started to crown. I’d heard that a baby’s skull can contort and reform, and that babies don’t need to breathe in the conventional sense until they’re out of the birth canal. But now I found the theories hard to believe. Dark hair bonded by womb goo had congealed into a single, glistening curl on top of this misshapen piece of head. It seemed impossible that this could be attached to a viable human being. I was scared to look and unable to look away.

“Should the head look like that?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level.

Making no eye contact, Tash and Lynley assured me that yes, this is how it goes. Reassurance from experts has never reassured me less. If I was in the baby’s position right now, squeezed tight inside someone’s hips – my mouth and eyes still inside – the claustrophobia would be so intolerable I’d dissolve into a formless mass, at last free from the angst of consciousness. In my head, this whole affair was in free fall.

At 5am, Tash and Lynley decided it was business time. Tash ushered Vic to a mattress on the lounge floor and had me hold one of her legs up, resting against my shoulder. I got a new job: HOLD UP LEG. It felt like a promotion.

Tash instructed Vic to push with each contraction. Vic was nearly spent. After each push, the muscle tension in her legs would quickly fall away to nothing. Tash asked Gay go make Vic a sweet cup of tea, but we’d run out of milk and didn’t stock sugar. I don’t know what Gay put in that drink, but Vic took one sip and refused any more.

At 6:15am the entire household seemed to understand that there would be no more waiting. Kwazii curled up against Vic’s neck, either deeply concerned for Vic or drawn to her novel body heat. Neko woke up, padded down the hallway, and sat down on his knees beside the mattress. He rubbed his eyes and spotted his pink harmonica under the sofa. When he blew hard on the harmonica, it sounded like someone falling down the stairs.

“NO,” Vic said. Neko accepted this quietly and put the harmonica into his pyjama pocket.

As daylight slipped into the lounge through the curtain gaps, our daughter pushed out to meet it. First came an arm, then the shoulders, and then out she slid all at once, into Tash’s hands.

“AAAARGH, FUCK,” Vic screamed.

After the baby came a saucepan worth of blood, which burst over a towel on the mattress.

“It’s a girl,” said Tash.

“Her name’s Ida,” said Vic.

Tash put Ida on Vic’s chest. Ida squinted at the morning light. She had dark eyes, a thick head of hair, and was covered with afterbirth. Vic beamed, suddenly re-energised.

I was utterly exhausted. The death fear had sustained me thus far. Now it was gone – and I could see that Ida was well – but in its place I felt like the bottom had dropped out of me.

But the work wasn’t over.

Tash unsheathed a pair of scissors with tinted blue blades from a fresh plastic pocket. She put them in my hand and motioned towards the cord. I hesitated. Vic’s body had grown a whole organ to sustain a new human being. It felt abrupt just to snip into the closest thing to magic I was likely to encounter. But also, everyone was watching.

I wanted to make it quick but the cord was rubbery, so everyone had to wait patiently as I hacked away at it. I half-expected Ida or Vic to cry out as though I was slicing off a finger. After the cord was cut, blood started leaking out of it. Tash tied the cord off with some harakeke that Lenka had picked from the garden, woven, and boiled earlier. I worried whether this was medical-grade harakeke.

I took my shirt off and Tash put Ida against my bare chest while I sat on a soft chair. Ida was a few ounces shy of ten pounds so I thought she’d have some heft, but she was so limp and slippery I found it hard to hold onto her. I pulled my shoulders forward and nestled her close, forming a nest of wiry limbs and joints. Her head rested in the hollow where my ribs meet. I pulled a blanket around her.

I could see some gunk in Ida’s mouth.

“Is it normal to have so much of this?” I asked. “Shouldn’t we be sucking it out?”

“No, she’s fine.” Lynley said.

Across the room, Vic knelt naked on the floor, the cord trailing out of her like a snapped rope on an abandoned pier.

“You still have to birth the placenta.” Tash said.

“Do I really have to?” said Vic, her voice small.

“Yes, you really have to.”

Neko and I ate some breakfast while Gay put some tiny woollens on Ida and gave her a cuddle. I helped Neko get ready for kindy, which felt blissfully typical.

I went to the toilet but stopped dead. There was blood on the walls. There was blood running down the inside and outside of the bowl, pooling on the floor. There was blood smeared on the toilet seat, as though an animal had been violently killed then dragged over the seat and down the pipes. Inside the toilet was a square, two-litre ice cream container, wedged just above the water. Inside the container was the placenta: once so mystical but now, separated from its host and visible to all who dared to look, just an obscene slab of meat.

While I tied Neko’s shoelaces at the front door, Tash took the placenta and spread it out on the floor to divine. She had to shoo Kwazii away to stop him nibbling at it.

“I thought there was meant to be a massive rush of hormones when the baby was born that meant you didn’t feel the pain anymore,” Vic said.

“I’ve read that too,” said Tash, “but I don’t know who writes that shit.”

I went to the kitchen to flex all my culinary muscle and reheat a frozen meal. Earlier in the day, as condensation fumbled down the inside of the window, and in the distance commuters doggedly shunted their cars along the highway to Wellington, I’d selected RED LENTIL CURRY from the chest freezer to thaw. The uppercase words were scrawled in Sharpie over a yellowed picture of vanilla ice cream.

Since the birth ten days prior, I’d gradually drifted down from my stratospheric panic. I still felt guilty I hadn’t entirely held it together at the time, but Vic’s strength of will had been enough for both of us. We are the yin and the yang, Vic and me: She the calm, and I the worry. She the adventurous, and I the cautionary. Vic ensures that we forever journey into uncharted territory, and no two days are the same; I ensure we get to stuff on time and don’t lose the keys. Vic would just jump out of the plane; I would spend the week prior obsessively checking the parachutes, and perhaps still refuse to jump. We hold the line together, gently pushing and pulling.

I put a pot on the stove and flipped open the lid of the ice cream container. The metallic smell of raw meat enwreathed my face, and it took a moment before I realised what I’d done. The writing said RED LENTIL CURRY, but this wasn’t red lentil curry. This was the ice cream container from the toilet bowl. This was Vic’s placenta, and it had been thawing in the sun all day.

I swore. I slammed the lid back on. It doesn’t matter where the line is, I thought bitterly, because you’ll just stumble across it anyway. I got a cloth, doused it in an entire cup of detergent and started scrubbing the bench. All of it came washing back over me, the desperation of ten days ago. The outside of this container is definitely not clean enough for the bench! I scrubbed and wiped in widening circles. Suds started to spill over the edge of the bench. And what will we have for dinner now?! I stamped my feet and wiped and wiped.

“What are you going on about?” Vic asked, wandering over.

“It said ‘Red lentil curry’... but it wasn’t...” I huffed.

Vic laughed and once I’d become so red in the face I couldn’t get any redder, I started to laugh too.