It was the dolphins frolicking in the background for me. That whole paragraph played like a movie trailer as I read it. Your writing is so sublime. Your heart, just the fuckin best.
Scorpios rule 🙏✨ I felt all this, Ally. I had a very traumatic first birth that ended in an emergency caesarean. The smell of panic in the air. My daughter is 33 now! And I have a 31 year old son, too.
What beautiful children you have ❤️
I wrote a poem about yoga recently, I think it might make you giggle, especially if you had hardcore teachers who sat on you 😬
I absolutely love your writing. Hugs, Francesca xx
Ally, as a bonafide soul surfer, I rode every way of this essay with you. And remembered, viscerally, the very similar circumstances of the birth of my firstborn, Jesse, my face wet with tears. I can only manage a great “thank you” in this moment, as I am having such big feelings, but know this: I think you write exquisitely, with guts and heart, precision and looseness, and perfect humor too. You always take me on an important journey.
Happy Birthday to your sweet baby nineteen-year-old! ❤️ Your son and daughter are so extremely lucky to have you as their mom. Your photos in this are just the best. So full of love. 💞
So many similarities between your story and mine, though I and my kiddos are [at least] a decade older. I'd hoped it was just the year, and the rural hospital, but here you are telling an eerily similar tale from a hospital in L.A.
Glad you got this one down on "paper" for your kiddos to have and hold from this day forward. Well done, mom!
So sorry to hear you had a similar experience, Elizabeth. Sadly there are a lot of us. But I’m very glad you and your kids are okay. Wild the things we all go through, isn’t it? Hugs and love ❤️
Thank you so much, Holly. It is such a huge and humble undertaking and I remember when I was pregnant so many people winking or shrugging and saying “women have been doing this from the beginning of time” and yeah, but a lot of them did not survive the experience. It just feels like another example of unrealistic expectations that we often accept as gospel or a thing we feel we should be able to do in some prescribed way and it’s exhausting. I am also relieved and grateful to be here to tell the tale and to love these two humans with my whole entire heart. Thanks for being here, Holly. Hugs and love.
It's the final photo of you and your kids that got me. That smile of yours, "Yup. Mine. These little people, they're mine and I'm theirs." The way your kids are holding you, "Yup. Ours. This gorgeous woman, she's ours and we wouldn't trade her for anything."
Billions of people are parents, billions called mum and dad titles that signify a connection. We choose the belonging, though. We choose the love. That photograph is full of beautiful, formidable choice to love and belong.
I'm getting ready to release the next episode of my radio show and this comes up in my feed. My guest (a doula) narrated your experience - and mine - without ever having talked to either of us about it. She spoke about why your birth went sideways when that nurse walked into the room, and why my birth ended up with the baby being ripped from my body. Each of us thinks that we are having our own experiences when in reality our medical system decides our experiences well before we have the first contraction. I would think she's a she except she's just paying attention.
It will be out Wednesday. As I listened to her narrate what happened in my birth room step by step, I realized that as much as I heard the words about how the American way of birth is broken, I never understood the meaning.
“ …which was really weird because I wrote the whole thing down.” 😂
I didn’t live in California when my kids were born, but I, too, had wanted a drug-free birth and the energy, if not the experience, of dolphins leaping through waves as my baby came forth. Part of me has always held onto a belief that I failed at childbirth—twice—because I had to ask for an epidural each time, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt at the time. I’m not sure where to mention that both of my daughters were “stargazers”, which is what some people call a baby who is born facing up. It is a beautiful idea far removed from the excruciating physical reality.
Anyway,
a few days ago, I “came off” a horse. He spooked and I fell, landing on my lumbar spine. Long story short, I have compression fractures in two vertebrae. It hurt like a motherf***er, even with hydromorphone in my system. At one point, as I lay in the trauma unit awaiting another scan, it occurred to me that my back felt the way it had when my stargazers were struggling into the world. I didn’t have the weight or the pressure of contractions, but I can say with confidence that back labour feels pretty much equal to breaking spinal vertebrae. The good news is that I now see that the idea of failure does not belong in a delivery room (is there no area of life that humans will not turn into a competition?). The better news is I will be fine 🍀
Thank you for your authentic and wonderfully written essay.
Oh my gosh. First, I am so glad you will be okay. And second, I really relate because I think I felt that feeling of failure in so many chapters along the way. First when I was not getting pregnant. Then, because I could not seem to practice non-attachment around the experience of not getting pregnant, which felt like a failure in my spiritual practice. Then my birth didn’t go the way it was “supposed to go” because I did not just “squat down and push the baby out.”
With my daughter, I was so traumatized from what had happened with my son, I did get an epidural. I did not feel like a failure with her, though. I think by then I had gotten my head around the idea that as long as mom and baby walk away and are healthy, you had a great birth. I did the baby-wearing, co-sleeping, breastfeeding thing, and just accepted that the births went the way they went. My daughter’s birth was a lot easier. I did have one moment really early when alarms started blaring and six nurses ran in, and someone gave me a shot in the arm. Apparently I had a contraction and my uterus stayed contracted so they gave me something to make it relax. Then my doctor called and said if that happened again I was having a C-section. And I was just like really?? Am I just destined to have these life-threatening birth experiences?But okay. Fine. I surrender. And as soon as I let go of that last little bit of resistance the rest of my labor with her was textbook. The epidural was magical and I loved it lol. I felt zero need to go through that agony again, and a lot of fear of dying and leaving my son alone in this world. I had a full-on panic about that the day before I had my daughter.
I wonder how much less we’d suffer if we weren’t so hard on ourselves. It’s all hard enough without having these expectations about *how* we’re doing everything on top of just, doing everything and giving ourselves a little compassion, because it’s a lot. Anyway, again, so glad you’re going to be okay. Sending you a ton of love and support during your healing ❤️🩹 And I thank you for being here xx
God, that line about the grave opening shifted something in me. Yes and yes. I had a really similar birth experience, and my prayer was the same. Just let us go together, whichever way that might be. But my mom was there, and I couldn't bear to leave her out of the pact, so we stayed. She was a NICU nurse for many years, and she brought my daughter back first, and then me, like a real boss bitch. She just stopped being the retired mom in there, and she told everyone what to do, and now here we are, living and eating coffee cake for breakfast, six years later. It's so hard to write about these things, but you did it incredibly well, which surprises me not even a little bit. (Also, I'm still recovering from an "orgasmic birth" series I watched while pregnant. I was never even close to climaxing the whole damn time. I feel totally cheated. Maybe I just needed dolphins to be present.)
Omg, that is the most unbelievable story that your mom was in there with you, and that she *saved your lives.* My god. That is freaking fantastic, Kendall. That gave me goosebumps and is maybe the boss-bitchiest thing in all the land. I feel like we should send your mom a medal.
And omg yes. I got those orgasmic birth videos, too, and WTAF. I was going to share that in the dolphins paragraph, but I was afraid people might google, and honestly, no one needs to see (or hear) that. God bless those women but howwwwwwww??? Also. The Scientology silent births?? You want me to BE QUIET while I am pushing a baby out of my body? Fuck no. I mean no for a million other reasons, too. But yeah.
We should absolutely send my mom a medal for all of the reasons. And also, I did not know about the Scientology silent births oh my god WTAF???? I did see that Quiet Place movie though, and I think the only valid reason to not scream while in labor is if the only alternative would be actual aliens flaying you alive if you uttered a peep. Whose cult-addled idea was that??? Tom Cruise jumped on a couch on live television shouting his love for Katie Holmes-- maybe we could have encouraged some silence there instead?! No. No way. Let the women scream. The well-medicated lady in labor in the room next to mine asked the nurse to please convince me to change my mind about the epidural because I was so absolutely feral, and I have zero apologies.
Yes. It’s something about everyone in the room being silent and only communicating with the mother through hand signals. Language can create emotional imprints or something. The mother can grunt I think lol or groan, but “silence is encouraged.” I mean. Wild horses could not entice me into that whole hot mess, but whatever.
Oh Ally! I loved this. Couldn’t stop reading. I had a similar experience in Los Angeles in 1998 as part of a big New Age church which I have written about but never published. Yoga… New Age… so similar. Thank you.
Yes it was really something at the time. Definitely a lot of pressure to do things a certain way 😵💫😳 And then you know, a lot of these same people doing atrocious things in their free time. And so it goes.
“Freeze…eat…paint…” So hilarious and true. Pretty sure we buried the placentas at the base of trees or in the garden. We had four home births with midwives and no drugs when it was technically illegal to do so here. My wife has an unusually high pain threshold, even for women for whom absorbing pain is a cliche. Whatever else we have passed on to our daughters, they affirm that the rebellious spirit they all have comes from both of us. But I honor the unique pain and power of women who have given birth. I witnessed four up close and in addition to experiencing the profound joy of the miracle of life, they were life-changing for me as well. Becoming a father forever altered me. What a privilege.
I’m really happy for your wife. I would have loved to be at home with a midwife and a doula and support like that, though I suspect my son and I would have ended up in the hospital, anyway. I didn’t want to go into too many details, but I suspect we fell into the category of people who would not have made it through childbirth if it had happened a hundred years ago. Today I think if I’d planned a home birth, we would have started at home and been transferred by ambulance to a hospital, at which point they do a C-section automatically. But I love it for all the women who are able to have those experiences like your wife did, I think that has to be the most empowering feeling. And I did feel empowered, but I got a huge dose of “everything can be taken from you in an instant, even your own life” on the side. Which is, maybe not ideal during childbirth, but probably a good lesson, ultimately.
I did not want to intimate that your experience was less valid or anything like that. Comparison is pointless and we can all be glad for medical practices around childbirth have dramatically improved over the last few generations. Our experience was unique to us and not better or more authentic than anyone else’s; just different. That said, my wife is a badass. Her toughness is legendary in our family.
It was the dolphins frolicking in the background for me. That whole paragraph played like a movie trailer as I read it. Your writing is so sublime. Your heart, just the fuckin best.
Happy birthday Dylan— scorpios rule 🤍
Thank you so much, Kate. Wish I’d known you then. The texts would have been comedy gold. But we have now and I’m so grateful. Scorpios do rule 🙌🏼
Scorpios rule 🙏✨ I felt all this, Ally. I had a very traumatic first birth that ended in an emergency caesarean. The smell of panic in the air. My daughter is 33 now! And I have a 31 year old son, too.
What beautiful children you have ❤️
I wrote a poem about yoga recently, I think it might make you giggle, especially if you had hardcore teachers who sat on you 😬
I absolutely love your writing. Hugs, Francesca xx
And thank you so much, Francesca 🙏🏼❤️
I think you’re going to have to share this poem! I’m already laughing 😂
Voilà https://open.substack.com/pub/francescabossert/p/you-must-try-yoga?r=27ovr5&utm_medium=ios
💀💀💀This was fantastic. I think I know him 🤣
Ally, as a bonafide soul surfer, I rode every way of this essay with you. And remembered, viscerally, the very similar circumstances of the birth of my firstborn, Jesse, my face wet with tears. I can only manage a great “thank you” in this moment, as I am having such big feelings, but know this: I think you write exquisitely, with guts and heart, precision and looseness, and perfect humor too. You always take me on an important journey.
Thank you for making my entire day, week, month, everything, Trish 🥹❤️🩹🙏🏼
❤️
I couldn't have said it better. Thank you, Ally and Trish. ❤️
That last line, oooff, it really got me. I love how you can read it both ways - you’ve given that to them, and they’ve given that to you. ♥️
So glad it read the way I wanted it to ❤️🥹🥳
Another one where I just started crying. I know what you mean.
Can’t remember the last day that passed when I didn’t cry at some point, friend. Hugs ❤️🩹❤️🩹
That second pic? That's what love looks like.
My whole heart in a photo ❤️
Theirs, too, I bet.
Happy Birthday to your sweet baby nineteen-year-old! ❤️ Your son and daughter are so extremely lucky to have you as their mom. Your photos in this are just the best. So full of love. 💞
Thank you so much, Jennifer ❤️
Enjoy today with your son and daughter! 💗
Thank you, Mary ❤️
I cannot wait for your memoir, Ally!!! And happy birthday.💜
Thank you!! We had a great weekend ❤️💕
So many similarities between your story and mine, though I and my kiddos are [at least] a decade older. I'd hoped it was just the year, and the rural hospital, but here you are telling an eerily similar tale from a hospital in L.A.
Glad you got this one down on "paper" for your kiddos to have and hold from this day forward. Well done, mom!
So sorry to hear you had a similar experience, Elizabeth. Sadly there are a lot of us. But I’m very glad you and your kids are okay. Wild the things we all go through, isn’t it? Hugs and love ❤️
Ally! That bit about the mother’s grave briefly opening! It is so beautiful, so resonant.
This took me back to my birth and birth plan and wet did and did not go as planned. Oh what a precarious thing, bringing life into the world.
So glad everything in the end went well. And sending you a young self a hug. I can only imagine what a terrifying time that was.
Thank you so much, Holly. It is such a huge and humble undertaking and I remember when I was pregnant so many people winking or shrugging and saying “women have been doing this from the beginning of time” and yeah, but a lot of them did not survive the experience. It just feels like another example of unrealistic expectations that we often accept as gospel or a thing we feel we should be able to do in some prescribed way and it’s exhausting. I am also relieved and grateful to be here to tell the tale and to love these two humans with my whole entire heart. Thanks for being here, Holly. Hugs and love.
💕
It's the final photo of you and your kids that got me. That smile of yours, "Yup. Mine. These little people, they're mine and I'm theirs." The way your kids are holding you, "Yup. Ours. This gorgeous woman, she's ours and we wouldn't trade her for anything."
Billions of people are parents, billions called mum and dad titles that signify a connection. We choose the belonging, though. We choose the love. That photograph is full of beautiful, formidable choice to love and belong.
Thank you so much. I love that picture. I think it was my birthday. Two best gifts in my life right there ❤️❤️🥹🥹🙏🏼🙏🏼
I'm getting ready to release the next episode of my radio show and this comes up in my feed. My guest (a doula) narrated your experience - and mine - without ever having talked to either of us about it. She spoke about why your birth went sideways when that nurse walked into the room, and why my birth ended up with the baby being ripped from my body. Each of us thinks that we are having our own experiences when in reality our medical system decides our experiences well before we have the first contraction. I would think she's a she except she's just paying attention.
I would love to listen, Suki. I just subscribed ❤️
It will be out Wednesday. As I listened to her narrate what happened in my birth room step by step, I realized that as much as I heard the words about how the American way of birth is broken, I never understood the meaning.
I will be listening Wednesday, glad we’ve connected, Suki
“ …which was really weird because I wrote the whole thing down.” 😂
I didn’t live in California when my kids were born, but I, too, had wanted a drug-free birth and the energy, if not the experience, of dolphins leaping through waves as my baby came forth. Part of me has always held onto a belief that I failed at childbirth—twice—because I had to ask for an epidural each time, and maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt at the time. I’m not sure where to mention that both of my daughters were “stargazers”, which is what some people call a baby who is born facing up. It is a beautiful idea far removed from the excruciating physical reality.
Anyway,
a few days ago, I “came off” a horse. He spooked and I fell, landing on my lumbar spine. Long story short, I have compression fractures in two vertebrae. It hurt like a motherf***er, even with hydromorphone in my system. At one point, as I lay in the trauma unit awaiting another scan, it occurred to me that my back felt the way it had when my stargazers were struggling into the world. I didn’t have the weight or the pressure of contractions, but I can say with confidence that back labour feels pretty much equal to breaking spinal vertebrae. The good news is that I now see that the idea of failure does not belong in a delivery room (is there no area of life that humans will not turn into a competition?). The better news is I will be fine 🍀
Thank you for your authentic and wonderfully written essay.
Oh my gosh. First, I am so glad you will be okay. And second, I really relate because I think I felt that feeling of failure in so many chapters along the way. First when I was not getting pregnant. Then, because I could not seem to practice non-attachment around the experience of not getting pregnant, which felt like a failure in my spiritual practice. Then my birth didn’t go the way it was “supposed to go” because I did not just “squat down and push the baby out.”
With my daughter, I was so traumatized from what had happened with my son, I did get an epidural. I did not feel like a failure with her, though. I think by then I had gotten my head around the idea that as long as mom and baby walk away and are healthy, you had a great birth. I did the baby-wearing, co-sleeping, breastfeeding thing, and just accepted that the births went the way they went. My daughter’s birth was a lot easier. I did have one moment really early when alarms started blaring and six nurses ran in, and someone gave me a shot in the arm. Apparently I had a contraction and my uterus stayed contracted so they gave me something to make it relax. Then my doctor called and said if that happened again I was having a C-section. And I was just like really?? Am I just destined to have these life-threatening birth experiences?But okay. Fine. I surrender. And as soon as I let go of that last little bit of resistance the rest of my labor with her was textbook. The epidural was magical and I loved it lol. I felt zero need to go through that agony again, and a lot of fear of dying and leaving my son alone in this world. I had a full-on panic about that the day before I had my daughter.
I wonder how much less we’d suffer if we weren’t so hard on ourselves. It’s all hard enough without having these expectations about *how* we’re doing everything on top of just, doing everything and giving ourselves a little compassion, because it’s a lot. Anyway, again, so glad you’re going to be okay. Sending you a ton of love and support during your healing ❤️🩹 And I thank you for being here xx
God, that line about the grave opening shifted something in me. Yes and yes. I had a really similar birth experience, and my prayer was the same. Just let us go together, whichever way that might be. But my mom was there, and I couldn't bear to leave her out of the pact, so we stayed. She was a NICU nurse for many years, and she brought my daughter back first, and then me, like a real boss bitch. She just stopped being the retired mom in there, and she told everyone what to do, and now here we are, living and eating coffee cake for breakfast, six years later. It's so hard to write about these things, but you did it incredibly well, which surprises me not even a little bit. (Also, I'm still recovering from an "orgasmic birth" series I watched while pregnant. I was never even close to climaxing the whole damn time. I feel totally cheated. Maybe I just needed dolphins to be present.)
Omg, that is the most unbelievable story that your mom was in there with you, and that she *saved your lives.* My god. That is freaking fantastic, Kendall. That gave me goosebumps and is maybe the boss-bitchiest thing in all the land. I feel like we should send your mom a medal.
And omg yes. I got those orgasmic birth videos, too, and WTAF. I was going to share that in the dolphins paragraph, but I was afraid people might google, and honestly, no one needs to see (or hear) that. God bless those women but howwwwwwww??? Also. The Scientology silent births?? You want me to BE QUIET while I am pushing a baby out of my body? Fuck no. I mean no for a million other reasons, too. But yeah.
We should absolutely send my mom a medal for all of the reasons. And also, I did not know about the Scientology silent births oh my god WTAF???? I did see that Quiet Place movie though, and I think the only valid reason to not scream while in labor is if the only alternative would be actual aliens flaying you alive if you uttered a peep. Whose cult-addled idea was that??? Tom Cruise jumped on a couch on live television shouting his love for Katie Holmes-- maybe we could have encouraged some silence there instead?! No. No way. Let the women scream. The well-medicated lady in labor in the room next to mine asked the nurse to please convince me to change my mind about the epidural because I was so absolutely feral, and I have zero apologies.
Yes. It’s something about everyone in the room being silent and only communicating with the mother through hand signals. Language can create emotional imprints or something. The mother can grunt I think lol or groan, but “silence is encouraged.” I mean. Wild horses could not entice me into that whole hot mess, but whatever.
Oh Ally! I loved this. Couldn’t stop reading. I had a similar experience in Los Angeles in 1998 as part of a big New Age church which I have written about but never published. Yoga… New Age… so similar. Thank you.
Yes it was really something at the time. Definitely a lot of pressure to do things a certain way 😵💫😳 And then you know, a lot of these same people doing atrocious things in their free time. And so it goes.
There are a lot of men like that… an offense to pigs. sigh.
Yep. I practiced Bikram for a while so… there’s that. With New Age “change your thinking change your life” they get to blame the victim too.
Ha! I did Bikram classes for a little over a year. Then I met the guy and never did one of his classes again. He is such a pig. No offense to pigs!
“Freeze…eat…paint…” So hilarious and true. Pretty sure we buried the placentas at the base of trees or in the garden. We had four home births with midwives and no drugs when it was technically illegal to do so here. My wife has an unusually high pain threshold, even for women for whom absorbing pain is a cliche. Whatever else we have passed on to our daughters, they affirm that the rebellious spirit they all have comes from both of us. But I honor the unique pain and power of women who have given birth. I witnessed four up close and in addition to experiencing the profound joy of the miracle of life, they were life-changing for me as well. Becoming a father forever altered me. What a privilege.
I’m really happy for your wife. I would have loved to be at home with a midwife and a doula and support like that, though I suspect my son and I would have ended up in the hospital, anyway. I didn’t want to go into too many details, but I suspect we fell into the category of people who would not have made it through childbirth if it had happened a hundred years ago. Today I think if I’d planned a home birth, we would have started at home and been transferred by ambulance to a hospital, at which point they do a C-section automatically. But I love it for all the women who are able to have those experiences like your wife did, I think that has to be the most empowering feeling. And I did feel empowered, but I got a huge dose of “everything can be taken from you in an instant, even your own life” on the side. Which is, maybe not ideal during childbirth, but probably a good lesson, ultimately.
I did not want to intimate that your experience was less valid or anything like that. Comparison is pointless and we can all be glad for medical practices around childbirth have dramatically improved over the last few generations. Our experience was unique to us and not better or more authentic than anyone else’s; just different. That said, my wife is a badass. Her toughness is legendary in our family.
Oh I didn’t take it that way! Genuinely happy you had the experiences you did ☺️