Last Friday I got up a little after seven to get the kids up and ready for school. Some time in the next hour or so I noticed that I was feeling contractions fairly regularly. Since I’d been having contractions off and on for a couple of weeks, I didn’t think too much of it at first. Also, though they were coming every ten minutes or so, they weren’t terribly painful. Even so, when Olof came back home from taking Tage to school, I told him that we might be having a baby later in the day, and that I was going to lie down for a while, in hopes that either the contractions would stop or that I would be able to get some rest in case I was in for a long day.

After lying in bed for about twenty minutes, I started to get the feeling that this was the real deal and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. I got back up just before nine-thirty and checked in with Olof again before heading in to take a shower. The contractions started getting closer together, but still weren’t very intense. They were painful, of course, but I could still move and talk normally through them. I started timing them anyway at about eleven, and for the next couple of hours they were coming anywhere from three to six minutes apart. Just past one o’clock, I told Olof that he’d better go pick Tage up from school, because we were probably going to want to leave for the hospital soon, and Petra and I went upstairs to have a bit of lunch.

After I’d eaten a bowl of fil, changed my clothes, and talked to the kids about staying with Helena until Farmor could come to get them, Olof and I grabbed our bags and headed out. We left our house just after two o’clock, and got to the hospital at two-thirty. By that time the contractions were getting quite a bit more intense, but staying four to five minutes apart. On the maternity ward we met up with a nurse who set us up in a room with me strapped to an external fetal monitor and a contraction monitor. She left us there for what she said would be fifteen or twenty minutes, when a midwife would come in and check the reading.

“Fifteen or twenty minutes” stretched to nearly an hour, due probably to a combination of the three o’clock shift change and the fact of hospitals running notoriously behind schedule. Sitting in the chair where I’d been stationed was increasingly uncomfortable for me, and the monitors kept losing the baby’s heartbeat, and weren’t reading my contractions at all, so I took them off about halfway through the time we were in there. Just before three-thirty I left the room to go to the bathroom, and when I got back the midwife had finally arrived.

I admit that I was feeling rather annoyed at this point, but as it turned out I needn’t have been. I started off somewhat defensively, explaining why I’d taken off the monitors and gotten up, but the midwife assured me it was no problem and agreed that it was better for me and my labor for me to be up and moving around. She did a quick external check of the baby’s position and determined that s/he was fully engaged, then did an internal check for dilation. I was at 4 centimeters, which was a bit disheartening after having spent an entire day with contractions. I must have let my disappointment show, because the midwife gave me a reassuring pat and said that it wouldn’t be long before we had a baby. I wasn’t convinced, myself, but I put on a brave face and Olof and I followed her to what would be our delivery room.

As soon as we got there I went to the bathroom and alternated between the bathtub and a hot shower, using the warm water to relieve the worst of the pain from the contractions. It didn’t seem to me that I was in there for very long, but the midwife’s notes show that I didn’t come out for about an hour. By then contractions were coming pretty close together and getting fairly painful. I asked then for the laughing gas to be turned on so that I could use it to manage the worst of the contractions. At 5:15, I asked the midwife to check my progress, and I had dilated to 7-8 centimeters. It felt like such slow going to me then, but in retrospect I can see that it really wasn’t.

At five-thirty I was feeling discouraged by the intensity of the pain and by how fast the contractions were now coming, so I asked the midwife to break my water. She agreed, but said that she wanted to wait until her colleague, who had gone to the ER on some errand, was back on the maternity ward. I said that would be fine, but before that happened, my water broke on its own at a couple of minutes past six. I felt the urge to push almost immediately, so I asked Olof to help me onto my knees in the bed. I leaned against the raised back of the bed and started pushing. Nine minutes later, at six-fifteen, Brynja came into the world, hand up next to her face, rosy pink and screaming.

After all my anxiety about that Dublin model nonsense, I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the way my actual delivery was handled. More than surprised, really … make that downright delighted. My midwife was absolutely perfect in every way — I can’t think of one thing that I would have had her do differently. She completely respected every one of my wishes, from no IV needle to no continuous monitoring to waiting for the cord to stop pulsing before cutting it. She never–not once–tried to impose her own ideas or opinions on us, and left me and Olof to ourselves to work through the labor together. She checked on us often enough that we felt she was available if we wanted or needed anything, but she was always unobtrusive and deferential. It was exactly the birth experience I wanted and needed to have, easily the best of the four for me. I keep reading and re-reading my copy of the labor and delivery notes, and every time I get a little swell of pride and satisfaction, remembering how well it all went. Every mother should have it so good.