Only 11 years 11 months late. Phew. Imagine if I'd left it another month. How embarrassing.
First, let's back up the bus. (Figuratively -- while I felt as though I were the size of one, I'm just giving a little of the backstory here. I'm banking on the fact that I don't need to explain the entire history of the pregnancy because it was pretty much: we had sex, I got pregnant. I was very lucky. The dad, on the other hand, felt a tiny bit ripped off, since I think he was counting on at least a couple of months of jiggy jiggy -- excuse the technical term). Anyway, the dad was (still is) a doctor who had lots of experience with the whole go to woah of pregnancy and childbirth. This was pretty handy, most of the time. Think about all the times during pregnancy when you've got no fucking idea whether what you're about to do (eat, drink, smoke, snort, inject,) will have a deleterious effect on the baby. So, you either abstain and wait until your next doctor's appointment, or you don't abstain and then you spend the days until your next appointment googling listeria poisoning, mercury poisoning, or foetal alcohol syndrome. Anyway, no such worries for me, since the doctor was already in da house.
The downside did not become apparent until approximately 3 a.m. on January 13 1997 when I went into labour. Mr Experienced decided I had hours, nay days, of contractions to endure before I needed to go to the hospital. I think his exact words, when I woke him with the news of my regular and frequent contractions, was "wake me up when you want to go to the hospital."
I haven't worked out why our relationship ended.
Anyway, due to his laissez faire approach, I thought I must have hours of labour up my sleeve, and that I had better just grunt up to it. And I did. I grunted my way around the house, standing in the doorway each time a contraction hit, pressing my hands against the frame, and whispering the most blasphemous phrases to myself over and over. I'm not sure if I read somewhere that the doorframe thing was a good idea, or whether I was confusing labour with earthquakes.
At about 5 a.m. the pain was getting worse, but was it bad enough to go to the hospital? I didn't know. It's pretty hard to judge when it's your first labour. I woke the dad. By this stage, I couldn't get myself down the stairs to the garage so he brought the car up to the front doorstep. The front garden was never the same after that.
At this point I thanked my lucky stars for two things. Firstly, that the hospital was only two minutes away, and secondly that I am not tall. I was at the stage of labour called "cannot bend" and couldn't manage to sit in the car. I had to brace myself upright, and at a 45 degree angle between the footwell and the roof. But then I started to panic (being completely rational and all) that we would get pulled over because I wasn't wearing a seatbelt. All this time the dad was saying really helpful things like "breathe" and "you're not breathing", "breathe properly" and I was giving entirely reasonable responses like "I've been breathing for 30 years without your help sonny jim".
Still not wholly understanding why we broke up.
We did not get pulled over for my seatbelt infraction, but we did run a red light. Well, we didn't actually run it. More like, hey, we've been sitting here for about two minutes. There are no other cars around. Okay, we'll wait another minute. Still no cars around. Not one. Let's just wait a bit....omg, contraction! Hit it, m*fucka!
The next bit is a bit blurry (did I not mention it was almost 12 years ago?) We were obviously admitted to the delivery suite and the next thing I can recall was the midwife telling me to get up onto the bed but ignoring her because of an almost overwhelming...ummm...urge. I whispered to the dad "I need to go to the loo". "You probably need to push", Mr Know-it-All said. "No" I insisted. "I need to...go to the loo." "Let the midwife just check you first", he said. I, just about crying at this point said "No..I really need to...poo".
But he was right. (I. hate. that.) I was 10 cm dilated, and ready to go. But while my cervix was primed, my brain wasn't. I kept saying, "no...I've only just got here. Shouldn't I be wandering around panting for a bit first. No? Really?" I was convinced that I was supposed to be in labour for like 72 hours or something.
As it turned out, it still took me two hours to push her out. Two excruciating hours, during which my friend Jan (unbeknownst to me) scalded her fingers by holding boiling towels on my back. I couldn't feel anything apart from this baby taking her own sweet time to move down the old canal and taking all my internal organs with her. Or so it seemed. It transpired that she was facing towards my spine which causes an awful amount of back pain and apparently a lot of bad language. So I started sucking on the gas like there was no tomorrow, but it made me feel sick, so I told them to take it away. And then the pain got worse so I told them to bring it back again. And I don't know, because I thought I was being quite polite and restrained, but it is entirely possible that I might have told them to take it away and bring it back a few more times. Let's face it, it's about the only time we're allowed to get away with such bad behaviour. No one's gonna argue with the woman who's got a baby stuck in her fanny.
After about one hour fifty-five minutes it all started to come to a head. Ha ha! So funny. But really not funny at the time because hello? My vagina? Not so stretchy, as it turned out. And my doctor is all, "I can see her head, do you want to see, shall I get a mirror?" and I'm all "Nooooo. Just get it out. Get. it. out." and then the bastard cut me open and she was out. And I was all, "oh, that feels better." And it was all good, and she was beautiful and then the doctor says, "oh, you're bleeding" and the next thing I know they're calling for help and the dad is trying to stick a needle in my arm so they can put a drip in and I'm batting him off and saying "wtf are you doing? Give me my baby" and then I start to not feel so good, but by then the cavalry has arrived (with bystanders! who have apparently never seen a post-partum suturing!) and they stitch me up and I don't bleed to death. So, yay.
After that, apart from the gas-induced puking, and the pumpkin-sized haematoma *down there*, it was all pretty good. It helped that Q was the most gorgeous newborn ever. I am not even exaggerating. But I was still pretty pissed at all the people who told me that childbirth didn't hurt as much as you'd expect. Fuck knows what I was expecting? A headache? A dose of gas? A walk in the park? Whatever I was expecting, it wasn't what I experienced. So much so, that one of my first coherent thoughts was "I am NEVER doing that again."
A male friend came to visit. So, he asked, how bad was it? "Dreadful" I said. "Really?" He was surprised. "How does it rank with say, slamming your finger in the car door?" "Oh ho ho" I said, and here is how I explained it, so that a man could understand.
Imagine you have a basketball jammed up your arse. Like right up there, not half in half out. Then, imagine that every couple of minutes, someone is going to kick you right in the nuts. Okay, if you can imagine that, that's a good start. But: you can't start pushing that basketball out UNTIL you get kicked in the nuts. Now do that for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. Hurt much?