I don’t know much but I do know that this will be a very different blog to The Day She Was Born from 2021!

So, on Wednesday 4th September at about 4.45am, I woke up to a very odd sensation. My initial thought was that I was weeing, but I had no control over it. As I ran to the toilet, it occurred to me that it might be my waters breaking.

Surely not, though! I was only at 37 weeks! And I still had work left to do! 11 days of work, in fact!

I woke Nathan and said ‘I think my waters have gone’. Groggily he said ‘OK, what should I do?’. ‘Nothing yet, I’ll call triage. You may as well try and get a bit more sleep’.

So I called Triage, which is like Ormskirk’s A&E for pregnant women, and they said they needed me to come in.

Now what you need to understand is that I was absolutely convinced that this baby wouldn’t be coming until I was 40 weeks. Like, 100% certain. Soph was overdue, so I was likely to be having this baby at around 40 weeks. I had a hospital bag packed, but it was just the emergency one that I’d stuck in the car to take to Greenbelt. And I had lots of housework left to do. And I had a fair chunk of admin left to finish.

So I quickly repacked the hospital bag, picked up my handbag and my laptop, and put them in my car.

I had a brief conversation with Nathan about him driving me to the hospital. But that seemed silly to me. I’d spent months deliberating how to have this baby and eventually I’d decided against planning the home birth that I really wanted because I didn’t want to risk Sophia having to get up in the middle of the night if it all went wrong and I needed to go to hospital. So, having made that call, what was the point of making her get up in the middle of the night now, so Nathan could drive me, when I was perfectly capable of driving myself?

I left Nathan with the tasks of getting Sophia to nursery as soon as he could, and making up a bed for my Mum and Dad who would need to come and take over childcare. At about 6, I got in the car and took myself off to Ormskirk. I was planning to get a Starbucks on the way, but I had an unusual and very intense sensation in my back, realised that this could be a contraction and thought better of it.

When I got there, I left my case in the car as instructed and made my way excitedly up the long slope to the maternity part of the hospital.

I had always joked that this long slope would become more difficult as I got bigger and bigger. I was not wrong, but I didn’t imagine that I’d arrive at the top and find the door locked! So I went back down and walked from the back of the hospital to the front (hospitals are not small places). It seemed inconvenient and typlical at the time, but on reflection I’m glad I got some exercise. My heart was pumping, the birds were singing and the sun was rising. It was quite lovely.

So I found a member of staff who pointed me in the direction I needed to go. I set off and took pictures as I went so that Nathan would be able to find me. When I got to the ward I was met by the very friendly midwife who I’d spoken to on the phone. I showed her my pants and pad, which I’d brought with me in a zip lock bag and she confirmed that it was my waters. She also said that baby would be here within 48 hours, which made me very excited and a bit terrified.

I updated Nathan and messaged my Mum, who was instinctively already awake (how often this has happened with different things over the years!).

At this point, people kept wanting to come and talk to me about what would happen if the baby wasn’t here 24 hours after my waters broke. I didn’t really want to have these conversations. I wanted to see what I could mange myself and tomorrow morning seemed like such a long way away. I get it from a medical point of view. Give me all the information early so I could mull it over and not need to make a rushed decision further down the line. But I’d spent months thinking about this, working out what I wanted and needed, what I’d like to happen and not, who I would be happy to see and who I didn’t want to see. I knew that talking about ‘what happens if there’s no progress’ was not helping me get into the right mindset. I let them tell me the options and said I’d decide once more time had passed and I had spoken to my husband.

The midwife hooked me up to the machine that monitored baby’s heartbeat and my contractions. I got my laptop out and cracked on. By this point, Nathan had stopped answering his messages. To be fair, I wasn’t overly concerned about this, because I had admin to finish off!

As my surges (a more positive words for contraction) got stronger, I logged them on a very helpful app called Freya and breathed through them. They were mostly in my back at that point. Once a surge was over, I went back to my laptop because it turns out that there’s a lot that can be done between surges! I finished writing the maternity leave handbook for our church wardens and church council members, dealt with as many emails as I could, cleared my diary for the next fortnight, and set my out of office.

It turned 10 and I’d still not heard from Nathan. With hindsight I should have realised that he had decided to take his Wednesday morning communion service and that’s why he wasn’t answering.

To be honest, I was quite happy on my own at that point. I even left to ward to go back to the car to collect my suitcase, pausing every few minutes for a surge. Unsurprisingly though, other phonecalls slowed my surges right down, in fact, the time between them doubled, which was disheartening. But in the end, Nathan came rushing in just after 11, in time for things to start ramping up, and all was well.

By this point, more waters had leaked and they were a pale green colour which meant that the baby had pooed. My dream of having a water birth began to look less likely, and when we were transferred up to the delivery suit and the wireless monitoring didn’t work, it looked pretty much impossible.

As we went upstairs, we were told that somebody had ‘just beaten us to the water pool room’ which is the one that I really wanted to give birth in. I was disappointed. We were directed into another room and just as I was walking in, two workmen said ‘can we just pop in and do a bit of drilling? We’ve been waiting weeks to do it and it won’t take long. You’ll be OK with that won’t you?’ ‘I’ll have to be’, I replied.

They then drilled in 4 corners of the staff computer monitor, and to be fair, they can’t have taken more than about three minutes. But the surges were increasingly intense and moving round to my stomach, and I was feeling really dejected about not being in the room with the pool.

So when the workmen cheerily shouted ‘good luck!’ as they left, I turned to Nathan and grumbled under my breath ‘f*** off’ with as much bile as I could muster. Not my finest moment. But at least I didn’t shout it at them, which I was tempted to do.

Nathan took charge of getting the room set up nicely. He closed the curtains, put the fairy lights up around the TV screen arm and found the birth playlist on my Spotify. Even though it wasn’t what we’d hoped for, we went ahead and started to make the room our own, and as calm and relaxed as we could.

Shortly after, I went from swaying through surges, holding Nathan’s hands, to needing to crouch on the floor to get through them. Our midwife, who we’d got to know through our pregnancy appointments, said ‘how are we feeling about some pain relief?’ ‘What have you got?’ I asked, pretty happy to take anything at that point.

I went for the diamorphine which was, I have to say, absolutely spectacular. I sat on the bed and once the injection had kicked in, I felt very pleasantly merry. It was just like being happily drunk all of a sudden, and it was brilliant. Our midwife said ‘it doesn’t take the pain away, but it takes you away from the pain’. I can highly recommend. I even quite happily managed some food.

At some point, it became clear that the water birth wasn’t going to happen, which was disappointing, but meant I could say ‘yes’ to all other forms of pain relief. We decided to give the tens machine a go. I bought this when I was pregnant with Sophia and happened to find it in a cupboard a few months back. I decided to throw it in the hospital bag, thinking at least it would have had an outing. It ended up being absolutely amazing and I used it for hours. It gave just the right amount of sensation to distract from the surges, which were really very intense towards the end. The hypnobirthing woman said that labour shouldn’t hurt. This is a lie. But there are ways of making it more bearable.

It all gets a bit blurry from there. I remember having some pethidine once the diamorphine had worn off, and after that getting onto the gas and air. I remember a trip to the bathroom where I was struggling to walk, and accidentally ripping my cannula out of my hand, which was dramatically bloody.

I asked Nathan to turn off the Spotify playlist and turn on Sophia’s lullaby music, which she listens to when she’s going to sleep. I wanted music which was calming and inspiring. I learned to feed Sophia with those lullabies in the background, and what could make me feel more calm than thinking about Sophia sleeping, and what could be more inspiring than thinking about something I’d already conquered?

At one point, I think during ward rounds, 4 people stood at the end of the bed and the doctor asked if I was thinking about an epidural. ‘Not right now, thanks’ I answered, because things were progressing and although it wasn’t pain free, I didn’t feel the need to make any changes yet.

With the curtains drawn, the fairy lights twinkling, the music playing, and the aroma of the oils from my amazing pregnancy massage, a real peace filled the room. Various people entered at different points – other midwives to see how things were going, doctors, students, – and they all said how peaceful it was. I just lay there, using the skills from the hypnobirthing course to breathe deeply and focus on allowing my body to do it’s thing.

I got into the zone and stopped speaking or even listening really. I just breathed in the gas and air, and pointed my finger up when I wanted Nathan to turn the tens machine up, and down when the surge was over.

It came to a point when I physically felt a lot of pressure to push. I absolutely knew it was what I needed to do. So I just started doing it. I remember the midwives saying that they could see the head coming and that he had hair. I wasn’t surprised – I’d been swigging Gaviscon for weeks! I put my hand down to feel him and touched the soft, downy part of his head. It was extraordinary and extremely motivating.

I remember lying there, pushing and getting a phenomenal vision in my mind, like looking down a very long tunnel, of the millions of women who have done this over millions of years, all the way back to the beginning. We are designed for this, made for it, and I knew in that moment that I was going to do it myself.

Some time passed and the midwife said that I’d been in this phase for an hour, so if the baby wasn’t here in 15 minutes, the doctors would want to come in. They suggested I shuffle up the bed a bit, or go onto all fours, to make better use of gravity. Before that, I’d really been struggling to move my body at all through the surges, so the midwives came to help me shuffle up the bed a bit.

But the threat of those doctors and their unpleasant, shiny, sharp instruments was a real motivation for me. To the surprise of everybody else in the room, I hauled myself over in one fluid movement, hugged the bed and started to push. Nathan made the sign of the cross on my forehead. In a couple more contractions, his head was out, and after the next contraction, at 8.29pm, he was born.

I have never been so proud of myself or felt so strong. For months, I doubted I could do it, but I did it. I even managed without the pool, which I was sure I would need!

I didn’t get to hold Sophia for over an hour after she was born. This time, I held Aidan for the whole first hour. We had so much lovely skin to skin, and boy, is it paying off!

Soon after, the placenta was delivered. I barely felt that compared to Aidan. I did have some internal stitches. The worst bit about it was that I was impatient for it to be over because I was really keen to contact our family and call Dad to see if he was OK with the name we had chosen.

I knew the day I found out I was pregnant that this baby’s name meant ‘light’. The first song I listened to was Shotgun, and knowing that I was pregnant was like a ‘sunny change in the atmosphere’. Aidan means ‘little flame’ or ‘firey one’, and he is Aidan, after the northern Saint Aidan, Bishop of Lindisfarne. Nathan and I met in Durham, and the northeast is a very special place to us.

And he is Jonathan, after Dad’s little brother. It means ‘Gift of God’. So our son is our little flame that came from God, a sunny change in the atmosphere indeed!

When we moved back to the ward, we weren’t the only people there. So quietly, like I did for Sophia on the day she was born, I sang Circle of Life to Aidan.

From the day we arrive on the planet and blinking step into the sun, there is more to see than can ever be seen, more to do than can ever be done.

Welcome, Aidan, and thank you, God.