The Birth of Elder Ocean

Motherhood is feeling more and more expansive as the years go by.. I’ve been breaking down the walls and barriers to my limitlessness, little by little, and unearthing my connection to the boundless universal love of which we are all a part.

My children are the catalysts for this transformation, for the slow and steady deconstruction of conditioned patterns and belief systems, and the strengthening of my realization of myself as divine unconditional love.

I try to embody this expansiveness. It’s not always easy. Sometimes it feels more straightforward to be short tempered, to feel as if my cup isn’t full, or to take my frustrations out with my kids. But that is the patterning.. not my ultimate truth. Just a story I’ve told myself that is/was necessary in order to exist in this world.

My pregnancy with Elder was a huge awakening in this realm. I’m sure his spirit helped me see what I needed to bring into my life to heal and examine before his arrival. What a blessing these little souls are, helping to make the world a better place before they are even embodied in this realm.

I will share Elder’s birth story below. It’s more of a nuts and bolts type of description of the day of his birth without a lot of reflection or depth. I’m sure as time goes on all of the little messages and lessons will reveal themselves to me in greater detail. But for now, the play-by-play :)

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I woke up on the morning of Elder’s birth and felt something slightly different. I was wanting alone time even more than I usually do.. the kids felt very overwhelming to me. I was having tightening sensations but they just felt like intense Braxton Hicks and not like regular contractions. 

I had two regularly scheduled zoom meetings to attend, one for school at 9am and one with my mentor at noon. I experienced a handful of these tightenings in both the calls.. the weather here had shifted too, and it rained, so I assumed the change in pressure was making my uterus just feel some kinda way. 

After my call with my mentor ended around 1:30, I went out and was wanting to eat something but nothing seemed appetizing. Taylor and I talked back and forth for a while about what to do about food (very common occurrence during this pregnancy!) and ultimately decided to just get Chipotle. 

I was feeling that slightly overwhelmed feeling from being around the kids, and went into my room to read while Taylor went to pick up our food. 

While I was reading and he was gone, I had some more intense tightening sensations that made it hard to focus on what I was reading. I fell asleep for what felt like a long time but could have only been 10-15 minutes. 

Around the time Taylor got back with the food (3:50) my sensations starting getting more regular. It’s hard to describe what they felt like, but they didn’t feel like contractions. There was no sensation at all at the top of my uterus or in my back at all.. but there was a very localized discomfort right above my pubic bone. That was the only place I was really feeling anything close to “pain” even though my entire uterus was tightening. 

Throughout this pregnancy I felt more pressure in that spot and onto the top of my pelvic brim all along the front of my pelvis too.. I contributed it to the fact that baby was persistently posterior (his face looking out towards the front of my body) and his hands and arms were up by his neck and face. It could also have been some sort of tightness or misalignment in my uterus/ligaments. 

So around 3:50 the sensations started getting more regular and I was still in denial that it was actually birth time. I’d never felt contractions like that before and had no idea what was going on. They weren’t long at all. And they weren’t super patterned. 

Every time I was about to have a tightening, I had to pee.. and once I peed then the tight feeling would come. This went until about 5:30. This whole time Chosen was napping and Mazzy was watching a movie and it was fun to just have me and Taylor spending time together, making out, talking, and laughing :) 

I asked the baby to shift a bit so the tightenings felt more normal and less of a localized discomfort in the front and within a couple of sensations, things totally shifted and I started feeling the tightenings spreading evenly all along my lower uterus. This is different than my last birth experiences where there was a full body contraction feeling from the top of my uterus down and around my back OR with Chosen’s things just felt intense without really feeling discomfort. 

Around 5:30 I dropped some mucus/bloody show after a tightening and thought “woah.. I guess things are actually happening in there!” Around this same time, the kids both came in the room and my body stopped feeling in flow and starting just feeling a yucky crampy feeling. Also hard to describe the difference between the regular tightenings and the dull yucky crampy feeling when the kids were around but it made me feel very whiney. 

Taylor put another movie on for the kids and they came in and out of the room still for the next few hours.. every time they would come in, the sensations would either stop altogether or just start feeling that dull crampy achey feeling. I kept having to remind myself that I was working with my baby and everything was happening perfectly so I didn’t slip into victim mode. I just kept thinking that this baby was waiting for the stars to align before they came. I also kept staring out the window at one particular cypress tree in our back yard that I have a special connection with, and I really felt grounded, uplifted, and supported by her age and wisdom and overall presence. 

Eventually Taylor got the kids ready for bed and around 8:15 our friend Sky came to take the kids on a drive until they fell asleep. After they left, I really got back into a flow and things felt a lot more intense. The coyotes were back behind our back fence howling to the moon and I felt a connection with their wildness, too :) I kept having the same lower uterus tightening discomfort during contractions and it started radiating to my hips and down the tops of my thighs. 

Taylor had already blown up the birth pool a couple days prior and I asked him to bring it in and start filling it up. Once the hot water ran out I got in and it really did help with the sensations I was having. I was worried that the hot water slowed or stalled the pattern because the sensations felt so much shorter in the pool. 

Ultimately the smell of the new pool and the fact that Taylor wasn’t in it with me (I felt like it would have felt too cramped with him in there too) bothered me to the point that I was standing between contractions and then just getting back down on all fours or sitting in the water during a contraction. Then I just decided to get out of the pool all together. 

I would randomly check my own cervix a few times throughout this whole process and I couldn’t feel much of anything progressing each time I checked. I could feel my cervix as mushy but I couldn’t really reach it that well, didn’t want to pull it forward, and I kept just thinking “all these sensations have to be creating some sort of change here or this is just going to take forever!” 

After I got out of the pool, I kept thinking in my mind “I’m so glad I’m a woman! I’m so glad I get to bring souls into this realm!Thank you spirit for choosing to incarnate into a female body this lifetime!” partly as a way to give myself a pep talk and partly just because I was just really feeling it!! But also ultimately I felt like I was still in my head too much .. I was analyzing myself from my midwife brain, thinking too much. I asked myself “what can I do to drop out of head and into heart/body?” And then I said out loud “what about CBD?” Taylor said he was also wondering if that was a good option for me. 

I took about a half dropper of CBD oil and pretty immediately afterward the sensations got a lot more intense and I really let go of my thoughts and dropped into my body. Taylor said afterward that I was off in kind of a trance mode and said out loud, “What is coming in here?” (I don’t remember this at all but in hindsight maybe I was confused because Elder is a boy and I had been expecting a girl my whole pregnancy?? Or it could just be that he is an alien 👽:) ) 

I partially chose and partially just had to vocalize more loudly during the sensations and after about two contractions I felt the baby move all the way into my birth canal and felt his wrinkled scalp at my yoni opening! 

I’ve never given birth outside of the water (aka a land birth) and the sensations of his head filling up that space and then me having to choose to release him quickly or try to breathe him out slowly is something I will probably forget because #birthhormones but I hope I can hang on to a bit of the experience forever! It was so intense. I felt more of the stretching/burning sensation at the top of my yoni instead of in my perineum, which was also very intense and uncomfortable. I think in hindsight his head was deflexed which contributed to the intensity and where the burning sensations were happening.

Taylor was behind me for most of this and I was trying to get in a comfortable position but I just couldn’t. Every time I tried to take a new position, I could feel the baby’s head wanting to come out more, which I didn’t know if I was ready for. I asked Taylor kind of rhetorically “What is HAPPENING?!” And he said “the baby started coming out and then kind of sucked back in.” Which felt weird and I could also feel the baby kind of shaking his head a bit within my yoni! Ultimately I ended up turning around so I was on all fours facing Taylor and decided to let the baby out quickly. “Once this part is over, I will have my baby in my arms.” 

So I just allowed his head to come out fast and felt myself tear as he did come out .. and had to make a lot of really big noises during that too. Then I felt Taylor touching the baby or my legs or something and said “don’t touch” and he was like “Really? Ok..” and then the rest of the baby’s body ejected out of me  right onto the floor in a rush of fluid after that !

Elder cried pretty much right away and afterward our friend who was here in the other room minding the sleeping kids said he checked his phone when he heard the first cry and it was 9:35 pm. 

About 10 minutes later Taylor started taking video and in the video you can see my realization that Elder is actually in fact a boy and not a girl like I thought the whole time ! Taylor and I both also commented on how much smaller he seemed than Chosen at his birth. 

In the end, after all that, I birthed the placenta and then gave the baby to Taylor while I showered real quick, and our whole family ended up in bed by about midnight. The kids came in at different times after the birth to meet the baby - Mazzy about 30 minutes after the birth and Chosen right before we all went to bed - and they were both so sweet and clearly very excited and in love immediately :) 

That is the story of Elder’s birth! From about 3:50 - 9:35 on Wednesday June 23, 2021, which is about twice as long as my last birth! The addition of two interested and active kids during this labor really had an effect on the duration. I really love the story though and I love this sweet little surprise BOY we have .. btw he is 8 lbs 8oz and 22 inches long, so not super tiny by any means but over a pound and a half smaller than my last baby at birth! So thankful for this amazing addition to our family and for the help and kindness of our friends, and the well wishes and prayers of our family. Can’t wait to see how this little one changes the world around him, including us as his family! 

Interesting to note: 

• Elder is my first baby with absolutely no tongue tie, woo hoo! No skin tag near his ear either, which both my other kids have, in addition to their tongue ties.

• I didn’t bleed at all really.. which is awesome! I’ve bled less and less with each sequential birth.

• This was my first pregnancy and birth with no midwifery or outside care at all. I did do regular spiritual based therapy sessions throughout my pregnancy and had a period of regular massage for part of it too, but besides that no one else cared for me besides myself! The process of going through an entire pregnancy and birth while only tuning into myself and my inner knowing for answers to any questions or concerns that came up was a huge growth experience for me and felt very empowering.

• I didn’t take any prenatal supplements throughout the pregnancy either. I did do some random individual supplements at certain points for a week or two here and there throughout the pregnancy when I felt like I should intuitively .. but no regimen for the entire pregnancy. I also focused more on herbal infusions rather than manufactured supplements.

• Physically this was probably my easiest pregnancy. I did get poison ivy for the last two weeks of it, but besides that and some SI joint pain that was resolved quickly after one pelvic floor PT session, it was a really comfortable pregnancy for me :)

• I tore more with this birth than with my last (bigger baby) birth.. but less than with my first birth. I’m guessing it’s because of the deflexed head (which makes a much wider diameter as it comes out than a flexed head!).

• There are fires happening pretty nearby to our home (less than an hour away) ..and the air smelled of smoke off and on in the days and nights leading up to the birth.. (and still does.. fires are still burning).. but then the day of his birth it rained a bit.. I really felt connected to those elements of fire and water (rain) and air (smoke) during his birth. And it turns out his astrology is Cancer sun (a water sign), and Sagittarius moon (a fire sign), plus he’s an Aquarius rising, (which is an air sign).. add in the fact that I gave birth out of the pool (on land/earth) and we have all four elements! :) In general I was very drawn to water — specifically the ocean — during his pregnancy.