it's so hard to know where this story starts. does it start when i went into labor? does it start when i conceived my son? does it start when i made the conscious choices to trust my body and my babies to follow the path that was ours to follow? does it start with the unsatisfying, yet technically "lovely midwife-attended birth center birth" of my older son? does it start with the many miscarriages and fertility challenges i faced throughout my fertile years? does it start with the sexual abuse i experienced as a teenager? does it start with my first baby, stillborn when i was a young teenager?

on october 1st, 1998, i had yet another miscarriage (my twenty-second pregnancy). six months earlier i'd had a ruptured tubal pregnancy that cost me my left tube and ended up in an emergency surgery and blood transfusions. my husband and i were pretty shaken up by this and were discussing not trying to have any more children because the pain of the losses was so great and because he was so frightened by my ectopic pregnancy.

i never did have another period after that miscarriage. i remember that on the weekend of halloween i was at a friend's party when it occurred to me that maybe i was feeling pregnant. then i thought, "surely not!" i had never gotten pregnant immediately after a miscarriage like that. in fact, usually my body seemed to have a natural 3-month (or more) break between pregnancies. i chose not to take a pregnancy test. once i was sure that i was pregnant, it occurred to me that the miscarriage might not have been a miscarriage, but just a threatened one, or it might have been a multiple pregnancy and only one baby was lost.

i do remember once when i was around 2-1/2 months pregnant and all of my early pregnancy symptoms were starting to dissipate. i got worried that i might be losing the baby, so i asked a friend who was a midwife to bring her doppler along to a circle we were both attending. we listened and oh, i remember *so* well the little group of women standing around the sofa on which i was lying, and the way their faces lit up when they heard that strong little heartbeat. looking back, i'm not sorry i made that choice...it was what i needed for reassurance at the time. but i don't think i would need to do that again in another pregnancy. it was just something that i needed to grow through.

when i was three months pregnant my husband got out of the army and we began a new adventure. we moved 800 miles away from our family. this was great for us. we left behind 95% of our possessions, moving into a furnished apartment (provided by his company) with just a few books, a few videos, a small 13" tv/vcr, and our dishes, our bedding and a week's worth of clothing apiece. oh, and the computer! mustn't forget the computer! lol the previous year had been pretty bumpy for us, relationship-wise. we nearly broke up over a poly relationship gone awry. the time away from family and friends, with just each other and daystar (our son, who was 7-1/2 when we moved), was wonderful. we took lovely drives in the country. we visited little towns with antique shops and art galleries. we went to the park to play. we laid in bed snuggling. we watched movies. we just did everything together. ::smile::

the pregnancy itself was wonderful as well. i had the usual exhaustion of early pregnancy, and a little bit of nausea, but not much. when we got settled in our new home, i found the local la leche league group and started attending meetings. this was really good for me because i had been unsatisfied with my nursing relationship with daystar and wanted good support. i did have a pretty nasty cold that turned into bronchitis when i was around 5 months along. that sucked lol i coughed and coughed and coughed...and peed and peed and peed...i had to buy depends! :( otherwise, i felt great during pregnancy! when i was about 7 months pregnant, my family got a nasty flu bug. both daystar and mark spent the better part of a day puking their guts out. (sorry! lol) the next morning i woke up with a fever and feeling nauseous. i had been talking to my friend rhea, from the unassisted birth email list, about using meditation and affirmations to heal myself. so i sat in the bathtub and had this conversation with myself:

"why am i sick?"
"because my husband works in an er and brings home every bug on the planet."
"why am i sick?"
"because my family was sick and gave it to me."
etc.
finally i got to:
"why am i sick?"
"because i took care of everybody else and the only way i'm going to get the same kind of pampering is if i get sick too."

aha!

so i went and asked my husband, "would you take care of me, let me stay in bed all day and pamper me and bring me food, even if i wasn't sick?"
he said, "of course i would, if that's what you needed!"

so i lay back down beside him in the bed and began a simple meditation that i have since used for a hundred different aches, pains, and ailments.

i started with a simple breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out and said silently with each inhale/exhale, "in/out, deep/soft, here/now." after a few repetitions of that, i was nicely relaxed and could begin with the same breath rhythm saying, "my body is whole, and healthy, and pain-free." that first time it took me about half an hour of this meditation before all of my symptoms were gone. (after several years of practice this often works for me within 5-10 minutes.)

in my 7th month, we came back to oklahoma for a visit. i had my belly painted at the medieval fair, which was so much fun! :)

i told a lot of people about my plans to birth unassisted. most of them said, "i could never be that brave!" but not one of them, even the doctors and nurses who worked with my husband, gave me much grief about how dangerous it was. there were only a few who had questions about safety at all, and every one of them accepted my answers.

i printed out a list of affirmations i wrote and adapted from other people's suggestions, in pretty fonts (of course, i'm the desktop publishing queen lol), cut them out, and stuck them up all over the walls in our apartment. this really helped me to keep my focus on my ability to give birth and to nurse my baby.

because i wasn't exactly sure of my conception date was, especially if the miscarriage hadn't actually been a miscarriage, i didn't know just when to expect the baby to arrive. i started having contractions for several hours at a time in the middle of june. daystar was distressed by this because he wanted his birthday (june 23) to happen before the baby was born. sometimes these contractions would be every 3-5 minutes for a full 24 hours. i got discouraged a few times, but was really trying to trust my body. they were not painful but could be very intense. since i know that labor and birth can be painless and since i had done some emotional work preparing for a painless birth, it didn't occur to me to think this wasn't "real labor" because it didn't hurt. this early early early labor lasted for a month! at least daystar got his wish! ::grin::

for several years, i had kept a small terra cotta pot on my personal altar. inside it were tiny little chips of smoky quartz ("apache tears"), one for each baby i had lost. the pot was sealed with a cork. on june 6th, i was inspired to let go of my babies, feeling that perhaps this baby wasn't ready to come into our family until we had let go of the babies that had come before him. i wrote a poem, buried the stones, and left the pot on my altar, empty, with the cork beside it. i saw this as symbolically opening my heart to this new baby. i also kept a small birthing goddess figurine there.

on the night before daystar's birthday i stayed up late making his cake. this was the first year i'd made a sun cake for him, and it's now become a tradition. it's a round cake, frosted yellow, with yellow and orange spirals drawn on it with that gel icing stuff, and the pointy ice cream cones (sugar cones) stuck into the sides of the cake for the sun rays. we woke him up early and led him into the living room where we had the cake set up. he blew out the candles and we gave him his gifts. among them were a controller and a memory card for a playstation. he said, "cool, dad, now we can use these when we rent a playstation at the video store!" that's when we turned him around to see his new playstation all hooked up to the tv and ready to play! lol he was ecstatic!

i did get a bit discouraged at times because the intensity of the contractions kept me awake a lot of nights and while i really wanted the baby to choose zir own time to be born, i really also wished that zie would either go ahead and arrive already or quit teasing me! twice during that month i kept mark home from work thinking that this was "it", only to have things peter out eventually. we did enjoy laboring together at various times over that month, making love, kissing, giving each other massages, taking baths and showers together, etc. that was probably good because when labor really got here we didn't have much chance to enjoy each other!

both my parents and my in-laws came to visit during may/june. i was glad the baby wasn't there yet, though i did spend the entire length of the movies tarzan and star wars episode i breathing through contractions with my mil sitting beside me worrying lol

on july 11th, we slept all day as usual (since my husband was working nights). and as usual, i was up every hour or so to pee, and each time there was some bloody show, but no contractions to speak of. the day before that, the contractions had become a little bit painful, so i was really a little disappointed when they disappeared when i went to sleep. when our alarm went off at 5:00pm, my husband asked, "are you having any contractions?" i told him no, but that i was having some bloody show. we stayed in bed talking and snuggling awhile. at about 5:30 or so i said, "hey, you know those contractions i'm not having? they're getting kind of intense!" he wondered if he should stay home, but i didn't want to keep him home again, because i really didn't know for sure if this was "it" or not, and i figured his coworkers were going to get pretty tired of this soon.

by the time he left for work at 6:45, i had tried the shower and the bathtub, then bed and the computer chair. my body was demanding that i be on my knees during each contraction, which were getting quite painful and probably coming every 2 minutes. (that's a guess, as i didn't really time them...they just seemed to me to last about a minute and a half or so and were coming right on top of each other. i was quite sure by now that this was "it" but i figured i had many, many hours left, judging by my 48-hour labor with daystar (duh!). i spent the next hour on my knees in front of the sofa, leaning on the sofa between contractions and getting down on my hands and knees in front of it during contractions. i was hurting pretty badly, things were getting more and more intense, and i was moaning loudly with each contraction. daystar was still asleep.

i called mark at work at 7:50pm and asked him to please come home. he said, "i'll call you back in a few minutes, okay?" and within the space of 2 or 3 contractions i heard him bounding up the stairs (we only lived a few blocks from the hospital where he was working). we got into the shower again but i couldn't get comfortable there so it was back to the sofa. i continued in the same pattern i had been, with mark rubbing my back and talking to me as well as getting things ready for the birth (not exactly sure what he was doing, but he kept bustling around the house and i kept calling for him to "get back in here!!" ::grin::). probably one or two contractions out of each half hour i screamed and cursed and said, "i can't do this!!!" but the rest of the time i found that a low moan was good. i also talked a lot to the baby during contractions (what a myth that "real labor" contractions can't be talked through!) saying, "oh, yes, baby, we can do this. please come out now, mama wants to hold you. we can do it. we are doing it," etc.

all this time, daystar was still sound asleep in his room. i'm not sure exactly when he woke up, but i think it was around 9:30 or 10:00. he wandered in and out of the living room, played on his playstation, hugged me a few times, but mostly stayed in his own room. he still hadn't decided for sure whether he wanted to be in the room for the birth or not. i remember asking him a couple of times if i was scaring him with my loud noises and him saying "no" and then mark looking at me and mouthing "just a little bit!" :)

i was getting pretty frustrated and upset because i was in so much pain (all in my back and low belly) and i was scared that it was going to last hours and hours. i wasn't getting any rest at all, my knees hurt horribly, and every time i tried to sit down between contractions i regretted it because it hurt so badly to try to move into my hands & knees position after the contraction started. i know that at one point i did tell mark that i couldn't do it (i didn't actually ask to go to the hospital, just said i couldn't do it) and he told me that we would not be going to the hospital. i remember thinking, "well duh! of course we won't!" ::smile::

suddenly, right in the middle of a contraction, i stood up and started sort of running around the room! i made a little circle around the armchair in our living room. mark asked me what i was doing and i said, "i don't know!" then i felt my water bag pop. i knew that i had felt only a small bubble of fluid in front of the baby's head, and sure enough there was only a tiny bit of fluid that came out, but i felt the pop. and then a weird feeling of turning and moving down (i'm sure this is when the baby turned from posterior - zir face toward my front - to anterior - zir face toward my back...daystar did the same thing just before he was born!) and a sudden intense urge to push. i hit the floor on hands and knees, about halfway across the room from where i had been before.

i had thought, before, that i didn't want to push, that i just wanted to let my body push my baby out gently. well, my body was having none of that! i felt an uncontrollable urge to push and push now and push hard. i only pushed when i felt an urge and i don't know for sure but i think it was only 3 to 5 pushes before his head crowned.

i kept asking mark (who was not terribly happy about having to wipe my butt! one of the hazards of hands & knees birth!) if he could see the baby's head yet and he kept saying no. finally i reached back and felt his head about to crown and asked mark why he hadn't told me! he hadn't seen it because of the angle my body was at (i guess i had sort of moved more upright, leaning back on my heels at that point). i think i pushed once or twice more and there was his head and then his whole body slipped out of me. it was 10:41pm :)

mark was worried because the baby was really purple and didn't breathe immediately (i guess i just thought he knew that was normal) so he rubbed him really good with the towel. i turned over to a sitting position (getting my foot tangled in the cord in the process) and mark handed me the baby. it's odd, i don't remember at all how we discovered that he was a boy...there was no huge moment of revelation! ::grin:: he sort of nursed a little bit while we sat there, but wasn't all that interested. daystar called the proud grandparents and a few other friends with the news, and sent out an email to a few people too.

the young-laughingwolf family are ecstatic to share with you our news...proud mommy maka, daddy mark and big brother daystar are thrilled to announce the birth of our newest and littlest family member!
(daystar says: our new baby is a boy, he was born at 10:41 pm sunday, july 11, 1999. he weighs about 8 lbs even, but we don't know yet how tall he is, and we have not named him yet.)

within a few minutes (i don't know, maybe 10 or 15?) i got up and got in the bathtub with the baby. daystar got in with us pretty soon. we stayed in about half an hour, during which time he really nursed strongly.

i was having really painful contractions and when i reached inside i could feel that the placenta had already detached and it seemed to be sort of stuck in my cervix. i pushed a few times but it hurt so i quit. finally i decided that the contractions were so painful because the cervix wanted to close and couldn't, so i handed the baby to mark and squatted in the tub to push the placenta out. i put just a little bit of traction on the cord to help it along and out it slipped. i washed it really well, getting all of the clots loose so that it wouldn't get smelly.

then it was time to go pile into our big family bed! we wrapped the placenta in a couple of cloth diapers and then weighed the baby — about 8 pounds (while i held the placenta above him) and talked to a couple more people on the phone, and then we held a short dedication ritual, introducing the baby to the elements and our god and goddess, and i filled his medicine bag (made for him before birth by our good friend mamabear). then we really did pile into the big bed, all four (four!) of us, but i don't think i slept much. mark held the baby on his chest when he wasn't nursing (just as he had on daystar's first night). i just stared at him and marveled!

when he was 21 hours old, we attended his first out-of-the-womb la leche league meeting while daddy and daystar went to the movies. we had a blast (okay, he slept, mostly!) and nobody asked to hold him or got too close or anything. they agreed that he was surely the youngest baby to ever attend :) oh, and he amazed them with the hugest volume meconium diaper i've ever seen! lol one friend did ask, "is that his placenta?" after seeing me change him. then he and i went to wal-mart to pick up pictures (and wouldn't you know? most of our pictures were on a black & white roll that their stupid machine couldn't process!). we were pretty proud of ourselves because we successfully nursed in the sling while i went potty in the wal-mart bathroom! lol

our experience with doing a "lotus birth" (leaving the placenta attached until the baby releases it) were very interesting. i wrote this at 32 hours postpartum:

the cord is quite dry and brittle. i sort of expect it to break free sometime today. the placenta is not dry (just wrapped in 2 cloth flatfold diapers) but doesn't smell at all. when i unwrap it to change the diapers (about twice a day or so, unless daystar accidentally "squishes" it in his enthusiasm to get closer to the baby) it smells sort of like what my period blood/lochia smells like...just very...fleshy. not bad at all, and when it's all wrapped up i don't smell it a bit. it's very interesting to me that if i touch or move the placenta bundle, even slightly, he is aware of it. he startles just like he does if he's touched unexpectedly. isn't that cool?

we chose to cut the cord the following day because it had broken almost completely through and the rough edge was scratching his tummy. we made a little ritual out of it, mark cutting the cord with his athame (ritual knife), at the spot where it was broken, and then again an inch or so from his navel. the piece that was still attached to his navel fell off later that same day, and we coated it with beeswax and put it into his medicine bag. the longer piece that was between him and the place where the cord broke, i shaped into a circle and wrapped in a figure-eight pattern with sinew. we put the placenta in the freezer and, when he was about 3 months old, we buried it back home on our sacred land. the piece of cord i have kept on my altar or with my sacred things.

i felt so great the first few days after he was born! my knees were a bit bruised, but i had no tears, just a couple of small skid marks and just some sore muscles in my back.

on wednesday, when he was almost three days old, we named him and sent out this email:

the official word:

the baby's name is griffin mead young....but he'll probably be known as "griff".

he is named for maka's maternal grandfather, whose full name was otto alvin griffin, but who was known to everyone simply as "griff". papa griff passed over thanksgiving 1994, just before we began trying to conceive again. we hope to honor his spirit with this choice.

and he is named for mark's maternal grandfather, mead young. grandad is an amazing man with a pioneer's spirit, one of the most honorable men we have ever met...and one of the hardest working (still working hard at 90 years young this year!) we hope and pray that his integrity and ingenuity are passed on to baby griff along with his name.

about 5 hours after i noticed my milk had come in, i woke up with chills and shakes, a temp of about 101.? (my teeth were chattering so hard i couldn't keep the thermometer in my mouth!). i had a horrible headache, sore throat with swollen glands, and ache like the 'flu. it took me several days before i noticed that i had a sunburn-like rash all over my body. i told mark, "look at this! i've seen this rash before!" it was exactly like when i had toxic shock syndrome back when i was 18. i did not want to go to the hospital, i did not want my brand new baby getting all of those antibiotics and steroids through my milk...so i sought out other options. my best friend talked with several homeopaths online and we found a remedy that worked. during the time that i was sick i was pretty worried because griff never seemed satisfied at the breast and he wasn't gaining weight. as soon as we found the right homeopathic remedy, my symptoms began to disappear and i suddenly found myself engorged like i'd never been before or since!

by the 31st of july, i was finally feeling much better, though i still had some lingering joint pain (actually this has never gone away) and the mucosal tissue injuries were still healing, though i wasn't getting any new ones. griffin gained 8 ounces that week for a high weight of 8 lbs 5 oz and was 22 inches long (from 19 inches at birth). nursing was finally going incredibly well, and he was turning into a very contented, happy baby, only crying when i changed him.

what a lovely, beautiful child we made! ::smile::