Ásta Marteinsdóttir – birth story

My birth story begins in a yoga class with Auður on Saturday 24 August 2024. For this particular class Auður had decided to make it a dance class. Quite a few of us had been around or past 40 weeks the week before, and Auður asked us to come in a dress and have a little fun. I suspect the others had already met their little ones before that class, because I was the only one past my due date that day (though only by one day). I had actually wanted to go past my date, because I have always found it so beautiful and fun to take part in honoring the women of honor before me through my pregnancies, as I was a regular at pregnancy yoga through my two later pregnancies, and I quietly wanted a little boost of women's strength and sisterhood in my system before the birth. There's something so empowering and beautiful about it. It fills you with anticipation and excitement and pushes away the fear and anxiety I think all women feel to some degree. I know I often did, even though this was my third birth.

After the class I was floating on a pink cloud and felt so ready to set off on the journey that birth is. Which day I would give birth had been a big topic in the family, because my first child was born on 17 June and my second on 1 January. Being due in August with no big holiday nearby made it all very exciting, but I was due 5 days after my husband's birthday and 5 days before my own, so many guessed she'd arrive on one of them. That Saturday, though, I had forgotten it was Culture Night, which usually ends with fireworks. So after class I thought that maybe the fireworks would be my sign that birth was near, as I clearly remember fireworks outside the window of my birth room when I had my eldest girl, and obviously there were plenty of explosions the night I had my son.

And what do you know, we decided to watch the fireworks on TV that year, and less than two hours later I felt the first real contraction! The night was going to be long, though, and the next day too, because just like with my other two children I slowly simmered into labor, with contractions 10-15 minutes apart that barely grew stronger. I was grateful for the experience and tried not to let it get to me. I knew this process and knew the best thing I could do was to sleep as much as possible while the time between contractions allowed. So I had a little stubbornness contest with myself and told myself I would lie there and "sleep" until I absolutely couldn't lie still any longer. The sleep I got through the night was actually quite good, and I got up just before noon the next day. Even though I still had contractions 10 minutes apart, my energy felt good and I felt physically ready for what lay ahead. I decided to take a bath, both to ease the pain a little and just to wash one last time and get ready while I could still mostly ignore the contractions. My son was at home and of course insisted on joining me in the bath, so it's a rather beautiful memory, there in the bath with him, while in labor. The oxytocin boost my boy gave me in the bath really got things going, and as soon as I got out, the contractions started coming about every 4 minutes and I felt my body shift gear. (I should say that I wasn't tracking the contractions or the time between them myself, as I'd found that very distracting in my first two births, so I had asked my husband to keep an eye on it now and then and only tell me if I asked. That helped me so much to keep my focus inwards.)

I messaged my home birth midwife to say it had properly started, but that the contractions still felt very manageable and I would call her as soon as I felt I needed her. I had fully expected yet another loooong birth and didn't really want her hovering over me for hours, and we were both happy with the plan that I would follow my intuition and ask her to come when the time felt right. 2 hours later everything stopped! The contractions went back to 10 and even up to 20 minutes apart! I lay down for half an hour, woke up and couldn't understand what had happened. Where did the labor go? Why did it leave?

My intuition told me something wasn't quite as it should be, so I called Kristbjörg, my midwife, told her what was going on and asked her to come and check me. She came around 4:30 pm and examined me, and we found that the baby was in a so-called posterior position, on her side, trying to squeeze into the pelvis. Ideally babies face with their back to the front and their face towards the mother's back, so they can tuck their head well into their chest and lead with the smallest part of the head, and so mold better into the pelvis. This had to be the reason the labor stopped. My body sensed something wasn't right and wanted to give the baby a chance to correct her position. I was still 3-4 cm dilated, which I thought was quite good given how things had gone. I recommend always being positive about any progress of the cervix, because usually the second half is much faster than the first. We are not clocks or machines that open one centimeter an hour. Kristbjörg advised us to try a few Spinning Babies exercises to get things going again, and gave me a lovely pep talk to keep me positive, because I had started slipping into the gloomy thought that "I could never just have a fast and easy birth".

This was the plan:

One contraction in a forward-leaning inversion (kneeling on the sofa and leaning down with my elbows on the floor, so I'm almost upside down) – We did this to lift the baby higher out of the pelvis.

10 contractions with abdominal lift and tuck (my husband stands behind me and holds up my belly through the contraction while I lean back against him)

And finally one more contraction upside down on the sofa. In between I was to lift my right leg and roll my hips to encourage the little one to turn the right way – we didn't want her trying to go round the other way.

After this workout I was to eat and drink well and lie down on my side with my right leg raised high.

During the 7th contraction of the lift and tuck, something incredible happened! Both my husband and I felt the baby suddenly turn half a circle and drop lower into the pelvis! And most amazing of all, we caught it on video, where you can actually see the bump jolt, drop lower and become completely soft at the top! As soon as that happened, a real contraction poured over me! It lasted 2 minutes and had two peaks! That was the first time I really had to reach for my coping tools to keep going. I used the ocean breath to stay relaxed through the contractions, and when that wasn't enough I blew raspberries to keep from clenching my jaw. Now and then I felt I needed to let go a little and screamed with all my heart and soul into the nearest pillow. I also squeezed combs to confuse the pain signals in my body a little, which helped with the peak of the contractions, and I had my affirmations taped to the wall in front of me. Every time I felt my mind drift to a negative thought or doubt about whether I could do this, I turned to them and thought of some of my favorites instead, like: "You can do anything for 60 seconds." It's really amazing that even though this is hard and sometimes really painful, the pain itself lasts 60 seconds at most, and really not even that, because maybe only about 20 of those seconds are truly challenging. In between I tried to remind myself how good my body was at giving me breaks, and to enjoy every minute when I felt nothing at all, and that those minutes were many times more than the minutes when I felt pain.

So it was around 6 pm that the exercises worked, and I would say real active labor began. I still finished the exercises to be safe and to try to speed things up. I actually found it very helpful to be given a task like this by the midwife, a task with an end point, and counting down how many contractions I had left helped me stay focused. Then I lay down on the sofa on my side and tried to rest, and it went better than I had dared hope given the strength of the contractions. I managed to relax really well between them, even though I sometimes had to let out a scream during them. For some reason I wasn't thinking about calling the midwife at all. I was just so focused on doing the work and stayed completely within myself for the next 2 hours. Sometime in those two hours my younger child (two and a half) came home, as my mother-in-law had taken him for the day so we could do the exercises in peace. The plan was to try to put him to bed in the evening, and we expected the baby sometime during the night and hoped he would just sleep through it. At 8 pm I woke up feeling I needed to pee, so I got up and walked to the bathroom, where a contraction came that was so powerful it brought me down to my knees, and I thought, "oh shit, I'm on my knees, I give birth to my babies on my knees!" So, terribly calmly, I told my husband: I think you should fill the pool and call Kristbjörg, I have the urge to push. I don't quite know why I wasn't taking it more seriously. Probably because my other two births had been so long and demanding that I somehow didn't expect this to be happening, as it still didn't feel unbearable. But in both earlier births I had the urge to push early and had a big lip on my cervix that needed to be held back to finish dilating, and I suspected it might be the same again. My husband called Kristbjörg at 8:13 pm.

But I couldn't possibly wait for the pool to fill, so I first ran my own bathtub and jumped in. Kristbjörg, however, took it all more seriously than we did, drove straight over and came almost running in at 8:30 pm. I couldn't understand it when I saw her running back and forth to the kitchen with pots to fill the pool faster so I would make it in. I was sitting calmly in my bathtub, completely sure I had many hours left. I even told my husband, it's all fine, go put the little one to bed and come out when you're done, there's surely plenty of time left. Kristbjörg then came for me and helped me into the living room to the pool, which was almost full. I said to her, with no joke at all, "Don't you want to leave a little room in case we need to warm it up, this is going to be a long night." She didn't even answer, and she told me afterwards that she could hear the baby was coming. I did ask her to check my cervix again, as I suspected I had a lip again like in my first two births. She did, I was about 7-8 cm dilated, and I was right that there was a lip. She offered to hold it back during the next contraction, which I accepted, but as the contraction began I sensed the baby would come quickly after that, so I asked her to stop, because I was afraid my husband wouldn't make it to me before the baby arrived. So I asked her to go into the bedroom and get him, it was fine if the boy wasn't asleep yet, he could just come out too. My husband had no idea what I was on about but came anyway, and my 14-year-old daughter too. 5 minutes later I asked Kristbjörg to hold back the lip again, which she did. The lip slipped away easily and straight away the bulging bag of waters came down. The bag cushioned things well, so I didn't feel right away that the lip had moved, but with my first two, where the waters had been broken before this point, I had felt the babies drop quite hard onto the pelvic floor. I got a little confused and called to Kristbjörg, "So what do I do now!?" because I thought it hadn't worked. But she answered calmly, "Now you listen to your body, it will tell you what to do." I moved onto all fours, as I had found best for pushing last time, and felt the head gently sink down onto the pelvic floor, and it was true, I knew exactly what to do. I don't think anyone else at that point realized what was happening in my body, because when I said to my husband "get in now", he was a bit confused but did as he was told. We had agreed that he would catch the baby, but as I said, he still thought there were many hours to go.

I went completely inward and said nothing more, focusing entirely on the amazing feeling that my baby was on her way. It was actually rather lovely to have that moment just for myself. It's hard to really describe the feeling, because while it was the most powerful and intense feeling I have ever experienced, I felt no pain at all, just a huge pressure that somehow took over all of me, and it was as if time stood still and moved super fast at the same time. With the next contraction the bag and the head came out without me having to work very hard. I pushed a little, but when it felt too fast I panted like a dog and focused on relaxing and opening, simply doing exactly what felt most right and comfortable in each moment, sometimes a little push and sometimes relaxing. I was on all fours with one hand on the bag / the baby's head to help me feel whether to push or relax, and in the middle of the crowning contraction the bag burst in my hands. It was so amazing to feel that, and suddenly I felt a little head with hair and finished birthing the head. My husband got the shock of his life when he looked into the pool and suddenly saw a little ear peeking out, and only then finally realized what was going on! It was an indescribably good feeling and a huge relief that washed over me as soon as the head was fully out. I wouldn't compare it to an orgasm, but I can understand that some women might experience it that way, because it was a little like the relief and sigh after a good orgasm. With the next contraction the body was born, and my husband caught her and passed her to me between my legs. That moment, seeing her in both our hands floating up out of the water and into my arms, is beyond words, and with the song Ég anda inn ást (I breathe in love) playing as well, the moment was like a dream. My daughter was born at 21:07 on 25 August 2024, after about 3 hours of active labor, 37 minutes after the midwife arrived, 15 minutes after I got into the pool and a whole 10 minutes after my husband was fetched from the bedroom with our half-asleep older child. It was a fast and easy birth after all, and one of the first things I said afterwards was, "I can't believe how easy that was!" Loveliest of all was all the time we had afterwards in peace and quiet. Kristbjörg undressed my boy, popped him into the pool with us and started taking the most precious photos of it all while our family admired our newest member together. Half an hour later we all moved to the sofa, where I birthed the placenta, and all 5 of us lay cuddled up admiring the little one late into the evening. It was nothing less than a true dream birth, and I felt I had received everything I wished for and that my family was now complete.