“I can see the head!’ the midwife exclaimed triumphantly in her lovely accented English.
“Well,” I thought, “could we not just grab it and pull it out?” as it dawned on me that the real miracle of birth is that anyone does it more than once.
Tallinn, ESTONIA
I had vastly overestimated my endurance for pain, and was now using what little energy I had left to plot an end to my agony. Maybe now I could have the drugs? This had all started out so warm and friendly . . .
Prior to any actual discomfort, I could appreciate my circumstance: American lady delivering her first baby in Estonia. I noted that unlike an American hospital, where the term health care merely implies that somebody (somewhere) might, in this Estonian clinic, where my husband and I were about to become parents for the first time, I felt utterly cared for as if by family. Even the food service came with a finger-wagging matron.
It was reminiscent of a bed and breakfast, except for the IV pole and emergency pull-cord behind the bed. In fact, we had checked into our hospital room as we might have done at a hotel with the addition of teensy diapers and wee little clothes that were not my swimwear.
We’d packed books, magazines, laptops loaded with movies, TV shows and music; refreshments, our phones, a camcorder, a digital camera, a regular camera, my favorite pillow and lounging clothes. Looking back, those are the items we’d take anywhere for any amount of time, so why not the maternity clinic?
Waiting for labor to start in earnest, we settled down to watch sitcoms on the laptop. We joyfully began timing the minutes between contractions. “Is this it,” I chuckled. I’d had pimples that hurt more.
Approximately 9 minutes later, my husband was pausing our entertainment every 45 seconds so I could squirm and beat my fists on the pillows. What had I gotten myself into?
Cue nursing staff. Now, in our cozy ‘hotel’ room, all the people not in excruciating pain were, of course, offering me advice as to how to alleviate some of it. Midwife suggested I sit under a warm shower.
I didn’t know if this was ‘regular’ (i.e. Western) protocol or Estonian folk wisdom they were proposing, as it was my first time. I did know that a shower can’t relieve a hangover and so it wasn’t all that attractive as a cure for childbirth. Besides, how was I going to get from the bed to the bathroom anyway? Moving was a serious obstacle.
My gentle midwife had more suggestions, but I had only one rebuttal: Drugs!
Alas, it was too early for that. Judging by the last time the doctor (a very nice lady, really) had inserted her fist into my cervix, I needed to slog down several more hours worth of oxytocin.
We hadn’t taken any childbirth classes, as we couldn’t find any in English. Estonian-language ballroom dancing instruction had nearly ended in broken toes and divorce so we’d thought to leave the birth process to instinct and medical professionals.
Such classes teach fathers how to assist their women as they grunt and writhe their way toward motherhood. We’d already decided that this father’s role would be to remain positioned somewhere upwards of the action, so as to keep a bit of the ‘mystique’ of womanhood alive. I know now this was a ‘fantasy’ of modern childbirth I shared with many others whose cover has been blown.
I’d read books that talk about coping with labor, advising mothers-to-be to have candy and bottled water on hand for dry mouth and thirst. They also suggest having snacks available to keep up your energy.
Americans will eat anything anywhere, just ask a New York city hotdog vendor. But, as I lay with my ankles flailing about my ears, slowly losing my dignity along with my energy stores, I simply could not think about eating. Instead I continued thinking about how to cheat the pain. While I hadn’t specified it in my birth plan, it seemed an ideal time for an epidural. Alas, now it was too late. ‘Perhaps if you breath this way,’ my young midwife encouraged. In Russian. Or Estonian. Or something.
From past doctor visits, I’d been on the one hand comforted by my understanding of Estonian health care as homeopathic, but now I was apprehensive for exactly the same reason. Estonian doctors are bit stingy with pharmaceuticals. Nine times out of ten you’ll leave your doctor’s office not with a prescription on official paper, but the name of some herb scrawled on a Post-It Note. What you need is maximum strength valium and what you get is a recipe for eye-of-newt tea.
At this hospital, we had an earth mother’s dream-come-true. A delivery room with a giant tub, a rocking chair, a birthing stool, a rope and ball in addition to the bed, which had no stirrups! With the enthusiasm of the expectant mother, I’d thought it a refreshing scene when we’d toured it, compared to the American version, usually filled with electronic gadgetry that can only be operated by degreed professionals. Little did I know this room and its toys would soon become a playground of pain.
Surprisingly, this clinic did offer a variety of Western style pain management alternatives – none of which was tea leaves, sea salt or snake-eye boullion – but the midwives were clearly pleased with my decision not to have an epidural – they were going to stick to the plan. To be fair, I’d planned a water birth.
I’d read that floating cut labor pain in half, and I was told the midwives would coach me through it. It soon became not just a method for the birth of my baby, but an event I’d planned like a cocktail party. I brought candles. My husband had prepared a playlist of uplifting music. I had a modest tank top I’d wear for the video. And so it was. The lights were dimmed, the candles lit and music played. The camcorder was ready to capture the joyous moment during which I would triumphantly raise my slippery baby from the water.
By the time I got into that tub I was ready to slide down the drain. Leaning over to assist me, the doctor burned her coat on one of the candles. The water labor was slowing down the process, they said, and so we moved to another part of the ‘playground.’
It had only been six hours but I was thoroughly exhausted. Parenthood is forever and I couldn’t even get to the parenthood part. What’s the matter with me and how much longer are we going to screw around before somebody gives me some drugs,” I thought. “Gas now?” my throat scratched out. In Estonian. Or something.
A flicker of disappointment blinked across the face of my young midwife. “Are you sure you want to do that?” she asks, her tone of voice implying that introducing drugs now would only ruin a perfect afternoon.
What now?! The midwife and doctor consulted briefly and explained that we would do an emergency cesarean. “But I’m not through!” I thought loudly.
My performance, or lack thereof was actually boring these women?! They felt I wasn’t up to the task and had decided they may as well try to get home for dinner. “I can do this, can’t I?” I wondered. “Just give me another chance!” I wanted to shout. But there wasn’t more time for Dylan who was also exhausted. It looked like I’d get the epidural after all.
Under the glaring lights of the operating room and knocked out from the waist down, a mere 10 minutes was all it took before a surgeon whisked a gooey little boy past my barely seeing eyes. There was no pain now but the pain of not being able to hold him, to hear his short breaths against my cheek, to meet him the way mommies and their babies have been meeting since time began.
The surgeons had been rather liberal with the iodine and I was now a big orange mommy. Without a baby. What was taking them so long?
Soon, my husband, glowing with pride, brought me our child. Because of the drugs I was nearly useless, but I put him to my breast, and sleeping though he was, he began to suckle.
My body, having betrayed me so thoroughly hours before, was now doing exactly what it was supposed to do! I really was a mother. In Estonian and English!
Whatever I’d pictured in my head, candle-lit and perhaps with a bit of gas-induced haze, the reality had definitely been a foreign place. It might have been strange even in my own land. Yet here we were never alone, made instead to feel welcome and safe by people whose mother tongue was learned from mothers who didn’t have the luxury of hospitals.
While pain and anxiety seemed to overlay most of our experience, my memory will be of the three of us, ensconced as we were in room number six, amid the debris of our enthusiastic preparations for Dylan and the now-suspended reality of his arrival.
We, a little family of three, spent four days in our room, my husband sleeping off the exhaustion of watching me labor and I wreaking havoc with a video camera.
On our last morning as we prepared to leave, we noticed the food service cart outside our room. We explained to the uniformed woman, in our best Estonian (much hampered by our severely marginalized new-parent brains) that we were leaving, and would not need a meal. She listened and calmly continued to fill our bowls with seljanka, and without saying a word set the meal up on the bedside table as she’d done since we arrived.
Before she left us, she gave me one of those looks only mothers can give. I remember what she said with that look, and it comes back to me with the smell of Estonian hospital food – closer to a home cooked meal than most people get at home in the United States.
“You may be a foreigner, with your own way of doing things, but wherever you go from here on out, you’re a mother and you need your strength. Now, get in there and eat that food I’ve put there for you and don’t think I won’t be back to see that you’ve eaten the fruit.”
How about that? I was an Ema. That’s Estonian for mother.
The Overhead Bin 
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