In which I delivered an unassisted footling breech on the back porch in a windstorm.
It was another precip labor, where I had only realized that "this is IT" minutes before. Frustrated that dh wasn't listening to me about it (proof of a dream state-- dh is all over any labor alarm and would never behave that way), and doubting myself too much to call the midwife, I went outside to take a breather. As the wind whipped up, I moved from the yard up to the first step on the porch, cold in a sleeveless shift. I had a nasty contraction, one of those that comes from your thighs, through your back and straight into electrifying your cervix. That's when I felt the baby in the birth canal; out popped one foot, then another.
In the dream, I remember my rapidly cycling emotions, moving from panic to resolve to fear to determination. I remembered reading (during planning my UC-that-didn't-happen with ~N~) about how to deliver in a footling breech situation on Laura Shanley's site, and I tried to adopt the proper posture. I couldn't decide whether to continue climbing the stairs to get some help from my husband, and noticed the neighbor's gigantic bull mastiff crossing from their yard into ours. Smelling the birth situation, he was coming to investigate, and I didn't want him anywhere near me or the helpless, dangling child.
I remember thinking even if she didn't suffocate, she had to be FREEZING, hanging there in the cold wind. By the time the dog got to me, she was free. I reached over to smack him away, and that effort jerked me enough to push her out the rest of the way.
I scooped her up, tucked her into my bodice and rushed through the house (which was not my real house on the interior, but my Grandmother's) to my bedroom, placenta still inside. I clawed my way under the covers and kangarood the baby, layering both of us with too many blankets. She was looking at me with a quizzical "what? what just happened?" expression when my dh came into the room for the shock of his life.
What
the heck
was that about????????
You are just about the last person I expected to read a dream like that from. Wow.
ReplyDeleteMy only thought is - sometimes other things are metaphors for birth...and sometimes birth is a metaphor for other things.
ITA with Niki. And the fact that the interior is your Grandmother's house is significant too. Her house was your placenta, as it were, during childhood.
ReplyDeleteWhoa. That left me speechless.
ReplyDeleteWow. You're not pregnant or ovulating are you? Or maybe foreshadowing something happening in the near future? :)
ReplyDelete