Ordinary Magic: A Homebirth in Lockdown
April is warm, and brighter than usual, each morning bringing clear skies and bare limbs. My belly like a beachball, Rose lends me a pink kaftan from a long-ago trip east, and I sit outside the Bamford’s flat eating picnic lunches, waiting for our baby to come. I crave elderflower cordial and anything fizzy. We are staying here while the dust sheets cover our building site home. My partner Jake joins us to eat every day, but we go six weeks barely seeing him, as he plasters walls, contemplates water pipes, installs our bathtub; labouring against the clock of a growing baby. All shops and builders-merchants close around us, making it hard to get essential supplies. Nobody is allowed inside our house to help him.
The Bamfords give me pumpkin and melon seedlings to plant, and show me photos of their 1970s A-frame cabin. We see no-one else except our mothers; this is the first Welsh lockdown since the pandemic has hit, and I’m nine months pregnant in a completely unknown landscape. Whether I’ll get maternity allowance, whether a midwife will come to my birth, whether there’ll be food in the supermarket all feel like great anxious unknowns to me.
Rose buys a sack of potatoes and leaves it out in the wooden trough by our door. I bake bread and cakes, spend afternoons on end playing games alone with Forrest, who is now two-and-a-half and bouncing off the lockdown walls. Our days as a duo are numbered. I try to describe what a new brother will be like. We wander up the Clatterbrook stream often, watch the water-caterpillar chrysalises floating under the bridge. His candy-floss hair gleams silky white in the sunlight.
At night I sleep in a French linen smock, listening to hypno-birthing affirmations, a magic powerlessness to my waiting. I’m exhausted by the adrenalin of having to be ready. The mornings are fresh though. Yoga. By lunch I am exhausted once more, and cannot sustain the weight of pregnancy, anxiety, a curious toddler, my surging hormones, without drifting away for an hour again.
On May 3rd, our baby’s ‘due date’, we decide to move home. There is still no hot-water, no hose-to-tap connector to fill the birth-pool... but the walls are white and the floor is clean. Jake asks the baby to give us a few more days, and a few days are granted. Soon, hot water in the taps! A working cooker and fridge! And even a drawer full of washed baby clothes. The birthing pool sits deflating in the living room, unused but for Forrest reading his storybooks in there.
More days pass, and I’ve paced all over the hills, and up and down the Frith. Through the night I feel soft surges, almost too faint to notice. By 5.30am I’m wide awake, another bright spring day dawning. Jake brings me buttered toast to eat in bed. I stay lying down, counting the gaps between surges on an app for as long as I can. At 11am I admit there’s no way around it, and tentatively clamber downstairs, to lie on the floor in agony and then peace, then agony and then peace. It’s stronger than last time. We’re slow to fill the pool and slow to call Liz the midwife, and by the time I fold my body into the warm water and smell of sterilised rubber, the baby is well on his way. My waters break like a water-bomb, bursting into the pool, and I grip Jake’s hands too tightly, unsure if everything is ok. It’s just us two, and the bright blue pool in our half-finished living room.
Liz arrives at the very end, and as she struggles to get her PPE on I am shouting out her name so I can crush her hands too. I had imagined candles and incense, dim lighting, the woodburner crackling. But I am oblivious to the external, having transported to that deep distant realm within. Holden is born into the stark 1.30pm world, and the water in the pool turns crimson. Outside in the street people take their daily lockdown walk, oblivious to a new life birthed, just a few feet away.
I hold him and convulse with full-body relief, to feel tiny pink limbs at last, and suckling lips hunting for my nipple. Forrest gapes at him. I down two cups of sugary tea and eat the fizzy sweets so thoughtfully left on the door handle. The placenta slips out onto the floor. I shake until the following morning.
For the next three months Holden and I barely leave the faded green armchair in our cocoon. Feeding, sleeping, nuzzling, like newlyweds. The house fills up with flowers and cards and meals and cakes, dropped off silently outside our door by invisible people. Nobody can meet the new baby. I read magazines and books, scribble down passing thoughts about nothing, and the summer stumbles into autumn. I feel utter grief for Forrest, like I’ve betrayed him. He suddenly looks so tall, and like he’s fading away from me. I miss him with an ache that’s only just beginning to normalise, eight months on, now Holden can be without me for moments, and I’m free to play goodies and baddies, uninterrupted.
These days Forrest likes to chastise his baby brother, usually by throwing cushions at his head. But, he also likes to boast about him to passersby, and they seem to think each other the funniest thing in the world.
