We wanted this so much. She is so sweet. She is so happy.

Well, we asked for it, and we got it!  It was so strange how towards the end of pregnancy both Janelle and I had such a strong feeling that this whole thing was not real.  That we were just "playing house," and soon we would get jolted back out of our little fantasy and get back to normal life.  We could not convince ourselves that we were going to meet our new girl any day.  It is especially odd since neither of us remember feeling these things so strongly with any of our other girls.

Maybe this was true, counterintuitively, because of how much thought we put into this decision.  There is something a little surreal, perhaps, in having so much agency in planning out our and our children's lives.  In most of history, in most of the world, people could not and/or did not approach life this way.  Mostly, life happens to people and their well-being is determined by a combination of the circumstances they are dealt and their ability to craft goodness within them.  We have had the rare privilege and drive to craft our circumstances in extraordinary ways, including educational choices, financial/debt parameters, how to spend our time, where on the planet we wished to settle, the layout and comfort of our home, food choices for pleasure and excellent nutrition, and family structure including childbearing timing. This is a little weird, actually, and even implies a burden of responsibility that can feel fairly weighty, as it did at the time we were deciding to conceive this cutey.  There is not really a cultural pattern to attach this planning/execution process to, which, I theorize, is why the creation and fulfillment of our carefully crafted plans has an unmoored, or unreal quality to it.

In any case, we entered last week knowing that this was very likely going to be the week of our fourth baby's birth, and there was no way either of us could understand that to be true.  We cleared our schedule, we got things together, we did the appointments...in all material ways we were ready.  We even made a few rituals for ourselves: some female friends of Janelle's gathered around her a few weeks back to bless her and declare their support and solidarity; we made an evening ritual of music...singing the silly name songs we have come up with for Kali and Alida, the lullabies I wrote for them, and Kate Wolf's "Give Yourself to Love", which had been running through my head for a few weeks as birth was on my mind, and which, when I sang it for Janelle, she dearly wanted to hear every night until the birth came to pass; I even tried to write a new lullaby for the new little one, trying out a few tunes and recording them on my phone, though none totally hit home or stuck in my mind very well.

These rituals helped, truly, and my way of thinking about it was that it didn't really matter if it "felt real" beforehand...it was just funny that it didn't.  I felt confident that the reading and thinking and talking and ritualizing we had done in preparation was going to pay off when the time came.  I thought there was no way it was going to feel real ahead of time, but when it came around there was going to be no denying the reality of it, and we would then be back in the situation more common to human experience: making the best of what comes.  In a way, it seemed like it would be a relief to turn the decision-making back over to nature and turn our attention towards gathering around the person in the throes of the action and participating in her process, offering aid, wisdom, and support as best we could.

Which is more or less how it was, I suppose, though that treatment hardly does justice to the sweet, challenging, powerful, sacred process I felt so honored to participate in.  When on Saturday evening the occasional contractions turned into rhythmic ones, and Janelle started writing down the intervals, we put our well-crafted plan into action: sent out a few pre-written emails, called the midwives and other sundry attendants, brought a trash can with a fresh bag down from the garage, located the extra towels and plastic film dropcloth, then settled in to wait by making an apple/cranberry birthday cake for the little one.

As the next two hours unfolded, Janelle kept tracking the contractions, but wasn't really seeming to need much in the way of help or support.  People began arriving from near and far, and with each new arrival we sure hoped it wasn't a false alarm!  I think the midwives wondered sometimes, too, because Janelle was still beating everyone around the table at Boggle despite the laboring.  But a few of the squeezes were starting to be distracting after some time, so before she started losing we quit.  Anyway it was probably time, Ann (an attending friend who happens to be a midwife but wasn't, in this case, our midwife) thought, to move to the bedroom and try a little side-lying labor...she said she was getting a "side-lying feeling" about this and had the impression that that would help things progress to the next stage.  I always admire people who are so competent and experienced that they can begin to follow hunches and intuition in ways that compliment the hard evidence they use routinely.  Maybe as much as anything it was just helpful to the process to move to a different space and place our focus in a more concentrated way on Janelle (we turned from an assembly of supporters to a team of masseuses with two birth presiders waiting in the wings); perhaps sending this signal to the uterus was all that was needed, or perhaps Ann's thought that this would help with proper alignment of all the implicated parts was the ticket.  In any case this seems to have been the turning point to when labor started in earnest.

After a number of contractions had come and it was clear that things were accelerating dependably, Janelle stirred and declared her desire for a walk down and up the lane with just me for company.  Everyone thought that was fine, and that if ever it was going to happen, that was the time...soon such a walk would not be comfortable or advisable.  So out we went into the night.  The stars were so crisp and brilliant (there was no moon) and the air had just the right amount of chill to balance the lingering summer heat that the earth is still radiating.  This walk that we've done so many times was at once familiar and subtly transformed by the power of the process at work within and around Janelle's one tiny body in the vast starry universe visible through the resting sky.

It is often hard to tell what helps labor along or hinders its progress in a given instance, but clearly the walk didn't hurt anything.  There were more contractions on the way back up the lane then on the way down, and my job as a draping post that accommodates the instinctual movements of the laboring mother was cemented by the time we came back in.  Janelle thought she didn't want to go straight back to the bedroom yet, so we asked Kali to start a fire in the living room woodstove, and she soon had things pretty cozy in there.  A handful of contractions later, things were moving right along and my job as draping post/dance partner was feeling more serious.  Nobody seemed to want to leave the warm and spacious front room, though the midwives were starting to signal that they were "hearing the cervix change" through Janelle's voice and it was soon time to move to the place where birth was to take place, wherever that might be.  I don't know who mentioned that it would be fine to open up the futon and try some side-lying laboring, but we all seemed to like the idea (for one thing Janelle knew she'd soon be unable to tolerate clothing during contractions and the warmth of the fire might be welcome between).  Those of us taking care of particulars scurried around opening and readying the futon with plastic sheeting and an old queen sheet Mom Myers had found for the occasion.  Somewhere in there I ran to the bathroom or some such and came back to find Ann "dancing" with Janelle through a contraction.  I joked that I would tap her on the shoulder just as soon as it was finished.

Soon Janelle was on her side on the futon and needing to give herself pretty fully to the intensity to be able to tolerate it when a surge came on.  I crawled onto the mattress behind her and held her hands or stroked her hair or cradled her head and kissed and whispered to her as the surges came and went.  I was a little worried when Alida woke and came down that it would be too distracting for Janelle and that I would have to turn my attention to managing Alida's four-year-old impulses or anxieties, but she seemed to appropriately read the calmness and seriousness on the faces of the attendants, and was able to take in the unfolding of her sister's birth from the warmth and comfort of her Grandmother's lap.  She may not consciously remember this as an adult, but I wonder how it will affect her unconscious assumptions about womanhood, birth...what it means to be born into this world and join the community of humans.  There are lots of things in life we will probably wish we could give her or show her and not be able to, but I think I'll always be grateful for her being there for those moments.

We had talked with Leslie about the possibility of me catching the baby, and she had run through a mock delivery with me just in case she didn't get there in time. I felt like I would have done an o.k. job and would have enjoyed it, but I was also clear that I would only do that if it seemed like I was not needed at the other end of the mother.  When the time came, I knew I didn't want to move.  I could feel Janelle's strong grip on my hands and arms every time she bore down, and the way she threw her head back against my chest when the surges passed.  In between we rested together, nearly dozing off before Janelle would stir and reach for me again.  It's not that she couldn't have done it without me.  Of course she could have.  Someone else could have stood in for a few minutes or she could have reached into her deep reserves of personal strength and accomplished it on her own.  But I didn't want that.  This was my last chance to feel the power of birth blazing up through my lover's arms to her fingers and digging itself into my palms.  This was the only chance I had to communicate to her by my presence and responsiveness that she was wonderful in this and was doing it so well!  It might have been fun and quite meaningful to me to be so close to the emergence of my daughter, but I don't think it meant anything to Terah either way, whereas Janelle and I can always savor our closeness in those moments.

When Terah's skin first felt air, she was ready for it, it would seem.  Her heart rate had stayed up beautifully the whole time, and her vigor was a sight to behold.  The midwives say she tried to give her first cry before her body was totally out, and I believe that.  Certainly a few seconds later when she was passed up to Janelle for her first taste of love and comfort she was already squalling and the pink glow that showed on her face and head shot down to her toes almost immediately.  It was only a moment before she calmed and began to take in her new world: full of color, touch, and sound; voices that she had heard in her muffled envelope of flesh were now revealed in their full crispness.  Her first view of her mother's face...you could almost see her memorizing.  I don't often give voice to my tears, but this was a safe space and I allowed myself to be overcome by my emotions.

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I think it was soon after the midwives arrived (and just before the Boggle tournament) that there was a moment when I was standing at the dining room table while everyone else was headed to the back of the house to check on supplies or something of that sort, and a tune bubbled up from somewhere inside me; I began to whistle it and knew it was the beginnings of the lullaby tune.  I would have to say that that is probably the moment when the "reality" of the event settled onto me and I became fully engaged with the process.  I took a few steps to the piano to get a visual of the sequence of notes to aid in memory, then abandoned the tune to its fate (if it's really the one, I chose to believe, it will not let itself die) and joined in the conversations and preparations.

Since that time I have been messing around with variations on that same tune, and I think that, as of yesterday's garden-work-and-whistling session, I have now settled on something like a final version.  It goes like this....oh, wait....never mind.  I'll have to whistle it for you when you stop by.  No words yet.  Something about love and the elements, maybe!

A note about home birth before I get back to my fall cover crop seeding:  In the sleep-deprived day after Terah's birth, I could have cried thinking that I wish everyone who has a baby would have this kind of care as an option for them.  Not only does the reading we did convince me that it is actually safer than hospital birth (when undertaken by competent practitioners) for a variety of counterintuitive but in the end perfectly supportable reasons, but it just fits better with the kind of event it is in our lives.  Birth is, first and foremost, a family event in the most basic sense.  No, of course it would not be worth taking major safety risks to support an ideal family experience versus a compromised one if the psychological damage of the compromise is not convincingly drastic.  I believe humans are resilient enough to mostly bounce back from the less-than-ideal hospital birth environment.  But home birth is not a question of major safety risks.  When done well, it actually supports better medical outcomes, and supports better family process to boot!

Throughout this beautiful time, there was never a feeling of stress, or pressure, or tension.  No one was anxious or alarmed, despite the obvious intensity of the experience for all of us, especially Janelle and Terah.  Kali and Alida, my sister Emily, and Janelle's mother Sarah all got to be in on the event...the stories we will have to tell in our family will be about more than just how long they had to wait in the waiting room and how soon we could come home.  I have also been astounded to see how Terah makes not the slightest acknowledgement of raucous child noise going on in the room in which she is sleeping.  Is that just basic personality?  Could be, but I theorize that she went straight from hearing those same noises in muffled form to hearing them clearly, and the transition was nearly seamless for her.  Had we been at the hospital, she would have had a day and a half or more away from the activity of home.  Given how quickly babies memorize and calibrate to their environment right after birth, it seems to me that getting them used to the hospital setting and then immediately uprooting them and requiring them to re-calibrate after they've already passed their calibration "sweet spot" of the first few hours is a recipe for fussy babies.  I'm not saying Terah doesn't fuss, but her fussing is organized, and she is comforted dependably by us and our sounds and touches.  She is like a seed that is allowed to grow in the soil in which it germinated.

Which gets us into a whole other topic: her name.  Alas, it is a topic we shall have to deal with another time, since, speaking of seeds, the Daikon radish seeds are waiting in the garage for me to place them in the spent potato patch for their own germination.