Was it planned?

In a galaxy all her own | Photo by Jeremy Thomas on Unsplash

[A note to readers: This post is about how sometimes—or perhaps, most of the time—birth doesn’t go according to plan. If that topic is not for you today, I hope you’ll be kind to yourself and skip reading this.]

There are two questions people often ask you when you’re pregnant. One is: Was it planned? The other, which begins to come up as your bump gets bumpier, is: How do you plan to give birth? 

In addition to being excessively personal to pass for appropriate small talk, both of these questions are also, to my ear, absurd. They are like asking: What week in the next five years do you plan to fall in love? Or, in what precise way would you like your untimely death to unfold? 

When it comes to birth plans, the phrase itself has fallen out of favor, at least under the NHS’s midwife-led maternity care. The new language is “birth preferences”—a subtle acknowledgement that we can only control so much. But in my case, that was all irrelevant, because my pregnancy did not make it to the 36 week appointment where you calmly discuss your preferences with your midwife, anyway. My nearly four-week old son, I’m happy to report, is doing very well regardless.

It’s not that I was avoidant or dismissive about learning about what birth might have in store for me. As detailed in my interview with antenatal educator and doula Samantha Rae last month (now un-paywalled), I took the birth classes, learned about the lovely concept of matrescence, navigated the various online camps (cults?) of free birth versus medicated birth, and spent way too much time scrolling pregnancy and birth subreddits.

But the more I learned, the more I began to feel that clinging to any preferences, plans, or notions about how birth might play out is just a comforting delusion. There are so many variables, so much that is not yours to decide, and so much damn luck—whether you acknowledge it or not. And besides, the moment you hear the midwife say “spontaneous labor at 33 weeks and 2 days; no prior risk factors in an otherwise healthy pregnancy,” your plan—or more specifically, your attachment to it—actually becomes a hindrance. At that point, what you need to get to the other side is something altogether different.

Despite this willful attitude of non-attachment, it was still a shock when I realized I would be having a baby under circumstances that even my brain—with its advanced degree in catastrophizing—had never imagined. It was terrifying, upsetting, and heartbreaking. I saw the fear on my partner’s face and how he deftly tried to hide it from me. I imagined my tiny baby being taken away from me the moment he entered the world, rather than being placed on my skin. That moment was the one thing in the whole mystery of birth that had felt non-negotiable to me.

And plus, this was so unfair! I may not have had a birth plan, but I had been characteristically ahead of schedule. I was ready for things to go awry, just not this awry. The hospital bag and newborn supplies were packed and organized by 32 weeks. My maternity allowance application was going to the post office the very next day. I had planned to have everything done by week 36, and to spend those last agonizing weeks of pregnancy doing nothing except carefully wading into the sea and taking long exhales. I would have a stocked freezer, a fresh haircut, an email auto-responder switched on—all so that the day I gave birth I could slip into a cocoon away from the world. 

None of that happened. 

At about 11 pm on Monday, June 27, six hours after arriving at the hospital for unexplained yet suspiciously regular contractions, I realized that I was being given a choice. I could obsess over the seven-week gap between 33 weeks and 40, thereby diverting my energy and presence away from the actual birth that lay ahead of me. Or I could accept that this was how things were going to happen. That everything I had imagined prior to that moment was now irrelevant. That was then, this is now: What do we do now that we’re here? 

Once I made that switch, I went to a different place. I thought of how when I was a kid, our tabby cat Pixie had two tiny kittens in the back of our garage. She had ignored the space that had been carefully prepared for her and instead retreated to a dark void amidst old suitcases, unreachable by everyone and everything, in a galaxy all her own. Each time I went into a contraction on all fours, moving through a cat-cow position, I felt like I was visiting a similar, other-worldly place. A place where plans don’t exist, only presence. I liked it there.

In the end—or rather, the beginning—Rafe Dylan Spinks was born at 14:23 on Tuesday June 28. His 33 week-old lungs started working right away, thanks to some handy steroids administered during labor. Before he embarked on his 11 day stay in the Special Care Baby Unit at Queen Elizabeth Queen Mother Hospital, he was able to spend his first moments of consciousness skin to skin, beginning to come to terms with this chaotic and heartbreaking thing we call life. 

I’ve thought a lot about what it means that Rafe’s entry into the world was so far from ideal. Those first 11 days—connected 24/7 to tiny wires, exposed regularly to blaring alarms and fluorescent lights, being pricked and prodded with seemingly endless blood draws, all while on a ward next to babies that were, sadly, much sicker and smaller than he was—were the exact opposite of the cozy oxytocin den I had planned for at home. If I let myself, I can spend way too much time wondering why it happened. Where it, or I, all went wrong.

Obviously, I have asked no fewer than a dozen NHS doctors and midwives for some explanation. They can provide no more satisfying answer than “sometimes this just happens and we don’t know why.” Annoyingly, this more or less confirms the hunch I had about birth I had all along—and maybe even about life itself. That is, the world we bring new people into is profoundly imperfect. It’s one where things go terribly wrong, often for no discernible reason. One where there are no guarantees, and only an illusion of control. And the thing is, the more we pretend the world isn’t like this, the more suffering we create for ourselves. 

Rafe had to learn that lesson much sooner than I’d hoped, but he seems to be taking it in stride. He was cleared to come home with us one day before he would’ve been 35 weeks, outpacing the initial best case scenario we were given by one day. Indeed he seems eager to prove that his early arrival was down to a matter of personal preference; he was simply ready to get this show on the road. 

I keep telling him he doesn’t have to rush, though. All he has to do is just be here. 

Hitting pause

Another thing I had carefully planned was how I was going to wind down the paid version of this newsletter for a few months. Obviously, that did not happen. But I’m still putting the paid version on pause for a bit. I still intend to write here and send the regular monthly edition, but without the promise of interviews and a schedule.

If you’re a paid subscriber (first of all, thank you!) here’s how this affects you:

• Monthly: You will simply not be charged until I restart subscriptions. No action is required on your part, and I’ll give you a head’s up before I start up again so you can can decide if you’d like to keep paying.

• Yearly subscription or founding member: The amount of time you have left on your subscription will be frozen. For example, if you subscribed in August 2021 and had one month left before your yearly subscription renews, you will still have one month left before renewal whenever I restart subscriptions. I’ll give you a head’s up before I do.

All paywalled content will remain available to subscribers in the meantime.

The project of this newsletter—to examine how to live a meaningful life when everything is falling apart—is very much alive and well in my heart and brain and life, now more than ever. I plan to write some bigger pieces tying together some of the themes from the interviews I’ve done so far. I’ll hope you’ll stick around for more on the topic when I have more time and headspace. But no hard feelings if you don’t.

A quick list of links I enjoyed recently

• “The simple truth is that you cannot simultaneously dedicate yourself to making untold fortunes for a giant corporation and to championing a social good.” Amen! [The Atlantic]

• The best idea I’ve heard in a while: A revival of the mid-aughts AOL Instant Messenger “away message,” which would help fight the scourge of constantly needing to text people back. [WIRED]

• An inside look at the infighting of progressive organizations trying to stay progressive. [The Intercept]

• A stunning piece of writing about the tragedy that has become San Francisco. [The Atlantic]

• It definitely seems like more literary/media dudes are writing and talking publicly about parenthood and I think that’s a good thing. [The New Yorker]

• What if the life that comes after writing a one-in-a-million bestselling book actually kind of sucks? [NY Mag]

• On the paradox of watering plants as the world gets warmer. [Earthworm]

That’s all I can manage for now. The usual link recommendation format will return next time.

Thanks for reading the free monthly version of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here? If you enjoy this newsletter, it helps a surprising amount if you forward it to a friend or two, or share it on social media using the button below. I also love hearing from readers, so don’t be shy! Hit reply or email rosiespinks@gmail.com.