Let’s start at the beginning.

The last few days have been the scariest, craziest, most surprising, and best days of my life.

Our new daughter, Micah Lyric Stanfield, is just five days old, and I’m already finding myself grasping for the quickly fading memories of her birth. I know, I know, guy’s don’t write “birth stories.” I’m not really doing this to write a birth story. I want to have an account of what it was like, so I don’t lose these memories. I figure I might like to read them later, like a month from now, or five years from now, or 25 years from now.

Let me start off with this: I can tell you without question or apology that watching Micah’s birth process was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Ever. Was it immeasurably harder on my wife, who was actually the one laboring and making it all happen? Of course. Still the hardest thing I’ve ever done? Definitely. As I type this, Micah is laying on the couch beside me, squirming and making little noises that “cute” doesn’t begin to describe. I’m reminded a million times a day that it was all worth it, and why Lorean and I both would do it all again if that’s what it took to bring Micah to us.

So here’s what happened.

A couple months into her pregnancy, my wife Lorean decided she wanted to have an all-natural birth. At first, I did not share her enthusiasm for the idea. Before we got pregnant, I thought that women who had natural births were a little crazy. God has given us brilliant minds and scientists and doctors that have engineered ways for women to deliver babies feeling little or no pain; why not make use of all that? “Just give her the drugs” was pretty much my philosophy. Then Lorean started doing tons of research. She told me the things she was learning, and the reasons why people choose to have babies without interventions. Long story short, by about the 7th month of her pregnancy, she had completely won me over. I pretty much did a 180 degree turn, and I was on board for a drug-free, natural birth. I was still a bit apprehensive, but not because of anything related to safety or medicine (or lack thereof), but more because I was unsure about the pain Lorean might have to endure.

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7th
Our due date was September 27th. That day came and went. The next week came and went. Lorean’s first contractions started around 6am on Thursday, October 7th. They were pretty mild, from what she told me. Lorean could walk and talk through them. So that’s what we did. Though I wasn’t sure if this was “it” or not, I decided to stay home from work. We went to the park and walked a few miles before coming back home. Every few minutes Lorean would walk a bit differently, and I would know she was having a contraction. Other than that, and the growing sense of anticipation we both had, things were pretty much normal.

At 1 o’clock that Thursday afternoon, we went into the birthing center for a previously scheduled appointment with Christine, our midwife. Christine checked Lorean and told us she was almost 3cm dilated. We went back home feeling pretty good about things. After the appointment, Lorean’s contractions immediately became more painful. They were still only about 30 seconds long, and they were happening in a range between every 2 minutes to every 5 minutes. It was all getting visibly harder on Lorean; this is when things started getting difficult for me. I could tell they were hurting her, but they were nothing compared to what was to come.

By Thursday night the contractions had gotten pretty rough – we had Lorean set up on the floor, in the corner of our bedroom between the wall and a bookshelf with pillows crammed into the corner. It doesn’t sound comfortable, but it was how Lorean felt best. I called Christine at 2am, because the contractions were now happening every 3-4 minutes consistently (I know, because we downloaded this “Contraction Timer” app on our iPhones. We had those things timed with pinpoint accuracy. Thanks yet again, Technology). Christine asked how long they were lasting; I told her still only about 30 seconds. She said there was no need to come in to the birthing center until the contractions were consistently a minute long. She said to tell Lorean to just rest and drink plenty of water. Resting was out of the question by now because of the pain, so I tried to have her drink every few minutes.

Lorean’s mom had arrived late Thursday night around midnight. At about 4am, the three of us were downstairs in our living room. Lorean was unable to sleep because of the contractions. Feeling completely useless, and sleepy, I went upstairs to sleep. I remember waking up around 5am, nervous and confused, and wondering where Lorean was, and if I had been dreaming. I went back downstairs, not really sure if I had actually fallen asleep or not. Lorean was on the floor in between the couch and the coffee table. In between contractions she was trying to sleep sitting up, because they hurt far worse lying down.

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 8th
As the sun rose and flooded our living room Friday morning, Lorean’s contractions were getting steadily longer and more intense. She was hurting, but at least we knew that longer contractions were a good thing, because longer contractions meant more productive contractions — the type that would open the cervix more.

So, we went into Friday morning without real sleep (or any sleep, in Lorean’s case), but with a sense of excitement that today was going to be “the day.” I called Christine again around 9am to report that the contractions were now lasting longer. Again she told me there was no real reason to come in until the contractions become consistently less than four minutes apart, and lasted more than a minute. She said the most common mistake that first time parents make is coming in to the birthing center before they need to. I hung up a bit disheartened, but knowing she was right — we could sit and have contractions at home, or we could sit and have contractions there. I think in some wishful, irrational part of my brain, I thought the sooner we got to the birthing center, the sooner we’d have the baby.

By Friday at around 3pm, L’s contractions were pretty much all over a minute long, and they were getting closer together. Around 3:30, I made the call to Christine, and reported confidently that the contractions were now under 4 minutes apart, consistently, and lasting longer than ever. Christine said we could come in if we wanted to. We both wanted to, and we agreed it would be best, just in case things progressed quickly.

We got to the birthing center at about 4pm on Friday afternoon. Lorean was really hurting, and had been for quite some time. I think we both thought the baby would come sometime that night. But she didn’t. We went through the whole night, basically waiting for some sign of progress, but not seeing one. Things went on this way into the evening, then into the night, then into Saturday morning. I had so many text messages on my phone asking for updates, I could barely keep up with them. The only problem was, I had no updates to give, though I desperately wanted to be able to give back some good news. Nothing was happening.

By this time, Lorean was really in a huge amount of pain. There’s only so many times you can give encouragement before it becomes hollow and empty in your mouth. I don’t know how many times I said, “You’re doing great, baby,” but by the 100th time, Lorean must’ve wanted to smack the words out the window. I didn’t have much ammunition at my disposal, so I just kept lobbing whatever slow BB’s of comfort I could find. But I meant it; she really was doing great. When I didn’t feel like hearing myself say “You’re doing great” again, I would mostly just tell her how much I love her. She suffered mostly in silence, every now and then asking for a drink of water or a bite of a cracker. She had now gone two days and nights without sleep, and mostly without food. She had no appetite whatsoever, and usually eating anything led to extremely painful contractions.

Sometime in the late hours of Friday or the early hours of Saturday – I can’t remember which – Christine agreed to check Lorean. She was now 7 to 8 cm dilated. This was good — these contractions were serving a purpose! We took this as a sign of encouragement, and Lorean labored on.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 9th
Early Saturday morning, with the sun filling our room at the birthing center, the midwives there agreed to break Lorean’s water, with hopes of progressing things along. Lorean and I were, of course, hungry for ANY option that might make things progress. So they broke her water. A few of hours later, they checked her again and reported she was 10cm dilated. It was time to push! Feeling unbelievably tired, Lorean put her game face on.

It should be noted here that Lorean is the toughest person I know. Not the toughest woman I know, the toughest person I know. I never heard her complain her entire pregnancy. When she gets sick, she doesn’t say a word. Lorean once went three years without really ever being able to breathe fully because of sinus problems — I never heard her complain about it to any of her friends. She is so strong. She is incredible.

All that to say, when I saw her face wrinkling in anguish every few minutes, and even between some contractions, I knew that my beauty was really hurting. And it tore me up inside. It was like a team of people had led me into an observation room with a large plate glass window and said, “Here, watch the person you love the most in the world go through an absolutely ridiculous amount of prolonged, repeated torture. Press the red button to make it all stop. Oh, and you should know in advance, there is no red button.”

So around mid-morning on Saturday Lorean started pushing. She led the midwives to believe that she was feeling “an urge to push,” but in reality, she wasn’t. She just wanted to do SOMEthing to make this baby move down and out, to move things towards completion, so she sort of told them what they wanted to hear. She pushed and she pushed. They had her trying all different kinds of positions to help coax the baby out. They told us the baby’s head was less than two inches away. Because of a complication I won’t go into here, the baby wasn’t progressing any further. We were so close, yet nothing was happening. The same complication was making things insanely uncomfortable, difficult, and painful for Lorean.

After about four hours of pushing, I wasn’t seeing any progress. I looked around me. We were in a beautiful room at this birthing center. Sunlight filled the space. Three supportive midwives were giving encouragement. An awesome photographer named Heather was there, also speaking words of encouragement. And there was my wife, my bride, in the middle, suffering again and again, without any reward. She had been playing that role for well over 50 hours now. The midwives’ encouragement was making me sick. I felt like they were lying to her, and when I told her “You’re doing great. Everything’s going to be OK,” I felt like I was the worst liar in the room.

THE BREAKDOWN
I felt like I was about to lose my mind. I didn’t know if I was going to yell at all of them, “DO SOMETHING!” or just break down in tears at my next word. I said, “I’ll be back, baby,” in L’s ear. She said it was OK, and I left. I walked past the room where my mom had been patiently, nervously, anxiously waiting for hours on end. I walked past my father-in-law, who was asleep in the lobby. He had stayed the night with his wife, Lorean’s mom, patiently waiting for good news about their first born’s first born, but receiving nothing. I walked outside around the corner of the building, and I completely lost it. For about 15 minutes, I bawled my eyes out like a baby who had just been woken up from a good dream. I questioned our decision to have a natural birth. I questioned my wife’s ability to go on without sleep or food. I questioned my ability to continue supporting her. I questioned if any of this was worth it. But mostly I questioned God. I just kept picturing Lorean, sleepily hunched over in pain, craving rest but getting none. I kept picturing the way I thought it was all going to be. I think my exact words at one point, through salty-tasting tears and half-breaths, were, “What the hell are you doing, God?” I cried until I couldn’t, I walked around the building three times, and I went back inside.

When I got back inside, Christine’s apprentice, Jordan, called me into the room. With an excited look on her face, she said, “Christine wants to talk to you!” My heart leapt inside my chest. Surely this was some good news. My mind started racing about what it could be. Did they see the head? Was the baby halfway out after a sudden turn of events? I saw a light at the end of the tunnel. I hurried into the room. Nothing looked different. Lorean sat in the middle of the bed, the midwives standing around her.

“Well, things have digressed back to about 8cm. The baby is fine. Mother is fine. But we need to discuss your options.”

The words hit me like a cinder block to the gut. I thought I was brought back in here to see or hear something good, not this. Everything had come to a screeching halt. After about 4.5 hours, all of Lorean’s pushing had gone nowhere. It had actually taken us backwards. Discovering this, on top of the fact that pushing during contractions was causing the worst pain of the entire weekend, this news was almost too much for her to bear.

To their credit, the midwives were still very encouraging, and they actually meant it. Lorean had been so strong, so tough. Micah was 100% fine (they checked her heart tones every few minutes throughout the whole process), and Lorean was fine too, other than being on the brink of utter exhaustion. They told us we could stay there and wait it out. They even told us we could go back home and wait for things to progress there. Go back home?!?!?!? After all of this, to go back home, and wait through even more painful contractions than before sounded like some kind of weird pregnancy pergatory/hell combo. I was numb. I was speechless. I looked at Lorean. She was about to break down.

They also told us we could, of course, transfer to the hospital if we wanted to, and that there was no shame in that, but that there was no medical reason to do so, since neither baby or mother were at risk in any way.

DECISION TIME
The midwives left the room so that Lorean and I could talk. She was exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally — just spent in every way a person can be spent. After two and a half days of pain without gain, she was losing hope fast, and I wasn’t far behind her. It was all I could do to not scream out, “Baby, let’s go to the hospital!!!” But I wanted it to be her call. I knew my wife would say if she was done with this, and I didn’t want to force her to do anything. After exchanging some tears and some honest thoughts, we made the decision to transfer to CMC Pineville (we had already decided that if we had to transfer, we would go to CMC Pineville, because of really positive experiences friends had had there). Lorean was in so much pain at this point, and had had such an ungodly number of contractions since Thusday morning, that she didn’t care what it took — she just wanted this baby to be out. She said, “I can’t just keep doing this with no end in sight. I just need this to be over. I need to be done.” I reassured her this was the right decision, and the best thing to do. With no end in sight and no chance for sleeping through horrid contractions, something had to change. What we were doing wasn’t leading anywhere, and it was time to do something else.

I left the room and informed the midwives of our decision. “We’re going to transfer.” The words rolled off my tongue and tasted like honey. Not because I hate the birthing center. Not because I love the hospital. Simply because it was something, anything, different from what we had been doing, and because of that, it held promise for things improving.

THE MAD DASH
The next half hour was a blur. Christine calling CMC Pineville (where she had previously worked for 10 years as a Labor and Delivery Nurse) to prepare the way for us, the other midwives and me picking up all our belongings and throwing them into the trunk of the car, handing one of them the keys so she could start the A/C, excitedly and nervously telling our parents what was happening. All of it happened in a matter of seconds, it seemed. Before I knew it, I was driving my wife to CMC Pineville, with family and midwife in tow or behind us in other cars, and my poor wife in the passenger side, still having incredibly painful contractions.

After an eternity, we got to Pineville’s maternity wing. We walked in the doors, and I immediately felt a sense of peace, relief, and renewed hope. I later found out that every single person in both our families felt the same thing. I knew we had made the right decision. We were greeted when we walked in by a lady who knew our names, knew we were coming, and had a room already prepped and waiting for us. She hugged Christine, our midwife, whom she had worked with years earlier. They ushered Lorean into the room while I filled out paperwork and rattled off Social Security numbers.

I got to the room where Lorean was now in a gown on the delivery bed, having some of her worst contractions yet. By this point, terms like “pain” and “hurt” had lost all meaning to me. We had been doing the routine of contraction, wait a few minutes, contraction, wait a few more minutes, since Thursday morning. It was now Saturday afternoon, around 4pm. I was completely desensitized to whatever my wife was enduring. I was also running on fumes, having not slept the past two days, and feeling like I had been chosen to participate in some twisted social experiment with hidden cameras waiting to see when I would crack or something. I just kept looking into Lorean’s eyes in between contractions, repeating the same old mantra: “You can do this. We’re almost there. You’ve got this. You’re doing great,” pretty much having no clue what was coming out of my mouth.

They gave Lorean a drug called Pitosin that basically makes contractions more powerful, more effective. It also makes them much more violent and much more painful. Lorean had to endure about 20 minutes of these newer, souped up contractions. And then came the epidural. Oh sweet, sweet music in Lorean’s ears, the epidural. The doctor didn’t push it on her. He didn’t force her to get it. He offered it as an option, and before he could finish his sentence, Lorean had asked for it, stat. She had told me in the car, as we zipped around 485, that she was going to get one if it was a possibility. I had told her, “Good. If they say it’s OK, I think you should. You’ve earned it.”

SWEET RELIEF
The guy came in and shot a cocktail of different things into Lorean’s back while I watched from her front. Less than 30 seconds later, I asked Lorean how she felt. “I feel great” was her honest, relieved answer. The doctor came back in and recommended that Lorean sleep for a little while. So we slept.

About an hour later, they woke us up. The doctor came back in and checked her. She was now 10cm dilated! It was time, once again, to push. The nurse started coaching Lorean on the most effective way to hold her breath and use her lungs to push. She didn’t know that Lorean already had about five hours of experience pushing this way. But this time when the contractions came, she wasn’t feeling nearly unbearable pain; she was only feeling pressure. I silently, constantly prayed that this time the result would be different, that things would progress, and that we would finally meet our little Micah soon. Honestly, there were no thoughts of wanting a healthy baby with 10 fingers and 10 toes — there were only thoughts of getting this baby out so that it could all be over, and so that my wife could be done and get some real rest.

It was at this point that I saw fire in my beautiful bride’s eyes like I’ve never seen. She pushed for 2.5 hours after that, on every single contraction, never taking a single break — never sitting one out to catch her breath. On several contractions, when the nurses or doctor were saying, “Good, very good, that was a good one, ok good job,” she was starting one last, additional push, surprising all of them, but not me. Like I said, toughest person I know.

THE BEST FEELING IN THE WORLD
After 2.5 hours, I could see the top of Micah’s head, and then, just like that, in a few blurry minutes, Micah was born. A healthy cry filled the delivery room, and tears filled my eyes while I was laughing and squeezing Lorean’s arm. I kept saying, “You did it! There she is! You did it! She’s here.” I’ve never been so proud of Lorean, and I had never been so in love with her. The feeling that came over me at that point was the thickest, most palpable sense of relief I’ve ever experienced, mixed with even more love. Love for my wife, but also for this new tiny baby, that had somehow gotten lost in all the complexity and pain of the labor process. For the first time Lorean and I saw what all this had been leading up to, what all of it had been about. There really was a baby in there that whole time. And she was real. There was Micah.

I swear to you that the first time I looked at her, she looked right back at me. I saw her, and she saw me. The rest is history. Actually, I suppose the rest is future.

I’m now a man with added purpose to his life. I will love this little Micah with all that is in me until the day I die. I am undoubtedly wrapped around her little finger, and I’m proud to say that I’m her father. People always say that nothing worth anything is ever easy, and I guess they’re right with most things. A few hours after Micah’s birth, Lorean turned to me and said, “It was all so worth it. I’m already starting to forget what it took to get her here.”

Micah is five days old as I type this. Most of the time we just stare at her and talk about how perfect she is, how we can’t remember her not being around, how amazing and beautiful she is. We don’t think about contractions or hours without sleep or food, or any of that stuff. I do look at Micah and see my wife, and the amazing woman that she is, and the strength with which she brought Micah into this world.

NO REASON TO FEAR
To any who are about to have their first child, I have nothing in my heart but excitement for you. I have no regrets about anything, and I have no fear for you. If at any point in the process you get scared, angry, confused, or disheartened, don’t worry – it will all be worth it in the end, which as it turns out, comes a lot sooner than you think, even after 60+ hours. As it turns out, God knows what He’s doing. And He is always good.

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