Giving Birth Is Super Glamorous And Other Lies I Won't Tell You

Warning: This is going to be a very open description of giving birth with all the love, gore and humor involved. So, if you don’t want details about the rearranging of my lady parts, back quickly away…you pansy.

Before giving birth I thought I was very wise. I was educated. We’d done our reading, our classes and a lot of talking to people who have been down this road before.  I was very “I know better than to think I can plan for this, things happen, go with the flow. I’m cool and mellow.”

At the same time, I was also a pretentious know-it-all who thought I could “handle the pain” and wanted to “do it naturally”, but in the hospital to be safe. One of my sisters didn’t need anything for her three kids and we share genetics, so I was gonna put those birthing hips to use…blah, blah, blah.

 I am an asshole and I ate all of my words.

We’ll get there, but just know that when you spend ten months (pregnancy is not nine months it is ten and everything you know is a LIE) saying, “Anything but an epidural. I will never have an epidural”…there is a very good chance you will end up praying at the almighty altar of the epidural who died for the sins of your uterus.  All hail Epidural forever and ever, amen.

But let’s start at the beginning, which, in the most Los Angeles way imaginable, was a ridiculous salad.

Well, actually, the beginning was a week before, when our doctor told us that things were moving along quickly and I would probably deliver earlier than my January 21^st due date. We called Cat’s mom and gave her the update and she rescheduled her flight to come a week earlier. Then, the following Wednesday (the 14^th) we went back for a check up and things had barely moved…I’d gone from one centimeter dilated to “almost two.” Boo and boring and maybe all this rearranging of plans was for nothing. So the next day, we decided to go out and walk around to help things along. In the morning we went to the Hollywood Costume Exhibit.

Side note: If you are in Los Angeles, go check it out. Beyond the gorgeous costumes and craftsmanship, it is probably the best use of multimedia in an exhibit I have ever seen, the way it has been curated is beyond amazing and very, very worth your time.

After the exhibit, we went home, grabbed the dog and went to Echo Park Lake where we walked some more laps. Then came “the” salad.

It is actually called “’the’ salad”. A famed dish at Cafe Caioti  in Studio City, which apparently has been helping women go into labor for years and years. I heard about it at my friend Meghan’s party a month earlier and thought it would be fun and funny to go eat it while we waited for the baby. So we went. I ordered “the” salad while my wife and her mom got “normal” food and we filled out one of the many notebooks they had where people put their stories and due dates while trying to get this very basic, “magical” salad to open their vaginas.  

 This salad is BASIC. If it was a white girl, it would be wearing Uggs and drinking a PSL, while co-opting the twerk and listening to Iggy Izaela. It’s seriously just lettuce and balsamic, but…

I ate “the” salad at 5pm Thursday night an entire week before I was due, a day after the doctor told me my lady parts were holding fast. It is the last thing I ate before becoming a mother.

I went to bed and did not get to sleep. I was having what I thought might be contractions, but maybe Braxton Hicks? They were irregular and not super painful, so I waited…at 1am they were getting more intense. I got Cat up and told her if they started getting more regular we would start timing them. At 2:30am they were making me PAY ATTENTION. Cat started timing them. Her mom woke up to use the restroom and saw our bedroom light on.

“Is something happening?”

“Maybe.”

A few minutes later she came to check on us again…I was on all fours on the bed panting. She said, “Yeah, that looks real.”

At 3:30am, January 16^th we were in the car headed to Cedar-Sinai.

At the hospital things slowed down. I was “only” dilated about 4 centimeters and they were considering sending me home for a few hours until things progressed, but my blood pressure had risen a bit and they decided to keep me to monitor.  

Blah, Blah, Blah…. hours of boring early labor…Cat helping me go to the bathroom while hooked to an IV…pain…breathing….

The nurses were nice. The first nurse asked,  “Do you want to hear about pain management options?”

“No, I’ve researched them and gone to the classes, but I know I do not want any. Thank you.”

 “Are you sure? It’s easier to talk about them now than later.”

“Nope. I am so good.”

Smile. Deep breathing through a contraction. I totally had this.

Cat and I walked around the halls of the hospital. I used the exercise ball in the room to help relieve contraction pain…the contractions got gradually more intense.

At about 10am they got HOLY SHIT levels of intense. Suddenly, deep breaths weren’t cutting it and neither was the ball. Cat’s poor arm was getting squeezed to the point I am surprised it still works, while I just did my best to breathe.

My very dear friend/family in my heart,  McKerrin, arrived at the hospital at about 11am. I was ten hours from when my contractions had first begun and way, way into being in a lot of pain every 3 minutes. For the next hour, I fought tears, and sometimes cried them, while crawling around my hospital bed and just trying to do anything to make the pain stop.

Also, there is uncontrollable shaking. My entire body just convulses and convulses nonstop…a nurse tells me this is totally normal and due to a surge of hormones and also fatigue. It sucks ass. I’m already in pain and now I am flailing about.

At about noon, Cat asked me if I wanted to reconsider pain management. Yeah. Maybe I did.

The nurse came in again. I asked about options. The nurse and I discussed them. I was unsure. This felt like cheating or letting myself down. I was a warrior woman, earth mother or some shit, right? She sensed my hesitation.

“Should I come back in half an hour?”

 “Umm..”

“15 minutes?”

“How about ten?”

 “Okay.”

 She left so I could think about it.

The second she left a very intense contraction hit. I turned to Cat.

“Go out into the hall. Find the nurse. Tell her I want an epidural right now.”

She did. For sanitation reasons, my mother-in-law and friend were asked to leave for a few minutes while a team of two god-like beings descended from the heavens with their suddenly not so scary needles.

They numbed my back. Cat and the nurse held my hands while I had contractions and held myself still as they inserted the hollow needle with the tube into my spine. I only felt pressure.  Although, when you think about a tube going into your spinal cord…bleh…

Then came pretty quick relief. Not all at once, but the next contractions were much mellower. The angels of mercy told me I did a great job. I professed my undying love and allegiance to them.  They may be my favorite people alive. And then the pain pretty much stopped.

The arc-angels left and the nurse and Cat helped me, and my now dead legs, into bed.

As soon as I got situated something crazy happened.

 The only way I can describe it is if a tampon was shot out of my vagina Nerf gun style, followed by a stream of water at high velocity.

For a split second I panicked. Oh my god, something went terribly wrong with the epidural!

Then I realized and said to the nurse, “My water just broke.” She lifted the sheet. “It sure did.” She gave me a glamorous wipe down and Cat’s mom and McKerrin came back into the room.

Things got a lot happier after the epidural. We all cracked jokes and had a lovely time, while I was only aware of the contractions as an intense pressure and because of the monitor tracking them. Let me just pause to say that the three women I had with me for support were the best, most lovely people I could have asked for.

Everyone got to watch as the nurse inserted a catheter, thanks to my legs no longer working.

Super sexy stuff, but as the night would end with all these people staring into my vagina, it would have been kind of silly to be bothered by it.

There is no dignity in the birthing process…or at least no modesty.

Hours and hours of contractions and nurses sticking their fingers up in my cervix finally yielded the long awaited (about 18 hours into labor)  “You are fully dilated, now we just have to wait for the baby to drop a little further into position. The doctor will be here in an hour.”  Yay! Almost done.  The next hour was WEIRD. With every contraction I could feel her head moving down and water would gush out of me. It was gross and it made me feel like I needed to push even though it wasn’t time yet. Lots of fighting my own urges and being really glad that I was surrounded by interesting and funny women who were distracting me with jokes, anecdotes and book ideas that we still probably should write…

Then the doctor came in. She threw my legs into the stirrups and they turned on the overhead spotlights.

Hello, mother-in-law, hello close friend!…my vagina is now on display and lit up brighter than a Beyoncé concert.  (I like to pretend that is always how it appears in my wife’s mind…well, just the exciting Beyoncé part…not the stirrup part..)

We get down to business and I start to push. We are midway through the first push when the intercom comes on.

 “Is it a good time for visitors?”

We all scream “NO”…I scream it the loudest as I am also pushing.

My long time BFF has just arrived and will now be waiting…but not long. It only takes me nine pushes. Apparently that is super fast. I don’t know because I’ve never done this before, but my doctor is like “woah, that is some kind of record.” The last push sends the baby flying out. The doctor has to catch her fast…I later find out this is because the last push ripped me WIDE OPEN.

I have third degree lacerations. This means my perineum is ripped all the way through to the muscle. Later this will hurt quite a bit…but with the blessed, holy epidural, I feel nothing. Our daughter cries immediately and it such a reassuring sound. She is alive, her lungs work.

They place her on my stomach and I get to look at her little face. They wipe her down with towels. She pees on me immediately. They wipe me down with towels. She pees on me again.

 The doctor spends about 15 minutes stitching me up. I do not care. I have no idea what is going on because I am too busy being madly in love with this perfect little creature and staring in happiness at her, and my wife, and my mother in law and my dear friend. The people I love most meeting this new little person that I get to love most. I feel like I am going to burst.

McKerrin goes to get Alex who comes in to meet the little one as well. Vivienne Diane Staggs is finally here. I’ll spend the next two days in a hospital getting poked and prodded, unable to sleep and needing help to use the bathroom with all my stitches…they will be the best two days of my life so far.  

The One Time I Was Really Happy My Kid Spread Their Legs

I never thought the sight of a labia would cause me to burst into tears.  

But two weeks ago, on a Wednesday morning, there I was, with my own lady bits covered in an over-sized paper towel, staring at tiny genitals on a screen and crying.  

We’re having a little girl. 

Of course, I'm sure my reaction would have been pretty similar if we'd been told we were having a son. 

Finding out the sex of your kid is the one time a doctor's answer is a total a win/win situation.

At least, unless the doctor had turned to me and said, “Well, Halle Berry/Sigourney Weaver, it looks like you are going to be birthing our new alien overlords.” And that did not happen. At least not yet. 

I also want to take a moment to say that, of course, I understand that sex and gender are not always linked. If later she tells us she identifies as a he, we’ll be fine with that.  But for now I am just so, so excited about the prospect of raising a daughter. 

Daughter. 

I am  obsessed with the word.  I roll it around in my head all day.   I say it to my wife ad nauseam. That and her name. We aren't sharing it publicly yet, but Cat and I use it daily and it just fills me with delight to be able to talk to her by name.  It makes her feel more real.

 

Well, that and the fact that about the time we found out which name we would be using, she got strong enough to REALLY KICK.

Have you ever been kicked in the vagina from the inside?  

Or had someone used your bladder as a spring board?  

The miracle of life contains a shocking amount of someone else trying to force pee to unexpectedly shoot out of you while you are driving. 

But I love being a private bounce house.  I know not everyone enjoys being pregnant, and there are elements of it that I could live without (the indigestion, the swelling, the giant stomach) but for the most part being pregnant feels a lot like falling in love. 

When I first met Cat I couldn’t eat or sleep or do anything that didn’t cause me to think about her, to fantasize about her, to feel an excited rush about when we would see or even just speak to each other again.  Being pregnant with our daughter feels a lot like that. 

I think about her all day, I wonder what she’s going to be like, look like, sound like. I fantasize about holding her and tickling her and talking to her and what all the stages of life will be like, about how heart melting it will be to watch Cat with her. I dream about her. 

I even fantasize about what it will be like when she is a pre-teen and screaming about how much she hates us because she can’t go do whatever ridiculous thing we’ve just said “no” to her doing.

  Everything else in life is lost in a haze that just doesn’t matter as much as my excitement to have her in our life.  I’m smitten already.

 

And now that she has a name and a pronoun, my mind is really honing in on these fantasies. Where before there were scenarios in my mind with a daughter or a son, now it is all our daughter and the very special excitement that comes with raising a girl. 

I feel especially excited that she will grow up around so many empowered women. Both of her mothers work in male-dominated professions (and are pretty awesome). Her Mimi (Cat’s mom) is smart, wonderful and managed to run her own business while raising children: jumping on flights to Houston and back to Denver for meetings before her kids got home from school that day. 

And then there are the adorable pets who will live with her...all of which are also female.

This lady-centric origin story led someone to ask me the question, “Will you bring men over from time to time, to like, let her know that they exist?”

This comes from a nice and very well-intentioned place of concern about the well-being of my child. So I will answer it with care in two parts.

Number One: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sorry, but nope.  No one is going to be invited over to my home as some sort of token cultural exchange educational program. I can’t even with this question. 

Look, our household is way female. I get it.  

But guess what? Most families lack complete, all-encompassing diversity. For some reason, though, only single parents and same-sex parents seem to get bombarded with this kind of “concern” about balance.

Imagine if I said:  “Well, your family is all Caucasian, so did your parents invite over some people of color so you would know they exist? Or some gay people? Or handicapped people?  Do you regularly have people of the Ba’hai faith over for dinner to expose your kid to a variety of religious beliefs? And by that I mean, for the express purpose of “exposing” you to them. Not because, you know, your family actually was friends with or cared about them."

Do not take this to mean that Baby Staggs will not have men in her life. Of course she will. We live on earth.

We have many male friends and Cat has a brother who is pretty much the epitome of masculinity. We’re talking world traveler, bearded, former military, outdoors man who hikes,  and runs marathons in his sleep. He’s also extremely sweet and loving and will be a fantastic and adored uncle, as will my sister’s husbands and many of our friends, with all of their varied genders and backgrounds and ethnicities.   

But these people won’t be around our kid because we want to “expose” baby Staggs to anything.  They will be around her because we love them and they are her family and our friends.

 Yes, I want my kid to have a diverse and full life and to be exposed to all kinds of people and cultures and places and, yes,  we will go out of our way to give her those experiences whenever we can, but a question like that isn’t actually about giving baby Staggs all that life’s banquet has to offer…it’s about pointing out a perceived lack in our family.  A family where she is much loved, much planned for, and much desired by two adoring parents.

This perceived lack brings me to point number two: we live in a patriarchy. Sure, things are way, way better and Cat and I actually both excel in male dominated industries just fine. But Men still rule this world. That is fact.  So, while our daughter may live in a  bubble where the house is controlled by her two mommies, that isn’t going to change the fact that she lives in society as a whole and more often than not she will be taught very subtly that men are the ONLY people who truly matter. Even if I wanted to, I can’t keep her away from that reality, and honestly, maybe a household full of women might slightly tilt the scales to an ALMOST even balance. My hope is that she’ll be a bit more oblivious to the limitations society wants to throw on her. If she can come at the world with all the entitlement that a boy gets, I will feel like I have succeeded as a parent. 

I want to teach her that she can do anything she puts her mind to, as long as she is willing to put in the hard work.

We have amazing and inspiring friends, both male and female, who truly embody the ideals, time and effort that go with doing what you love for the living when settling would be easier. I hope some of that is instilled.

I want to teach her that no one has a right to look down on her for anything beyond her own behavior.  And I especially want to teach her that her girlhood and her womanhood is something to be celebrated and revered. 

I hope that one day, instead of looking at herself the way we teach women to look at themselves,  she will look on her own body in the mirror the same way her Mama and I looked at it in that ultrasound monitor two weeks ago: with awe, admiration and love…but also without being some sort of narcissist. We have enough of those in LA.

All The Answers to the Extremely Personal and Borderline Inappropriate Questions We’ve Gotten Regarding My Pregnancy

When you’re a lesbian and you have children, or you’re pregnant, or you’ve ever even mentioned the word “baby” in a public place… you've inevitably been hit with an onslaught of extremely personal questions.

 These are questions no straight couple would ever be asked. I mean can you imagine going up to a man and wife at their baby shower and asking, “So, how does this work?  Was your wife on top when you conceived, or were you hitting that from behind?” 

No. 

You wouldn’t do that because you probably have some level of social awareness and decency. 

For some reason all of that goes out the window when it comes to the “exotic" world of same-sex parenting.

For years before I was ever pregnant, perfect strangers have asked me questions ranging from the normal “Do you want kids?” “Which of you would carry?” to the very invasive:  “Who would the donor be?” “Do you know him?” “How would that work?” “Do you actually use a turkey baster?” 

And the answer to that, of course, is “Yes, this November our Thanksgiving dinner will be tinged with the slight hint of baby juice.” 

But I know that education and understanding help break down stigmas, which is why I am personally going to take a moment to answer some of these questions since I'm an open and sharing kinda gal.

Here’s our journey so far:

I’ve always wanted to be a mom.  My own mother died when I was 14, but in just those few years, she gave me an example of the kind of closeness that a parent and child can have. The lessons she taught me, and the love that she gave are still with me 17 years later and I’ve always hoped to pass that legacy of love on to my own kid. 

Even the time that I spent way-too-young helping to care for my sisters during my mother’s illness and then later having one of them live with me after her death didn't discourage me…and believe me, if you’ve ever had a teenage sister live with you while you were a college student…you know it’s a miracle that we’re both still alive, much less that I still want kids someday.

Or at least "someday" is what I told myself while I stayed busy "building my career" and waiting for everything to be “perfect”…yeah, I know, rookie mistake, thinking the word “perfect” has any place in parenthood. This is something my wife and I have both finally realized.

And, I know I’m still pretty young, but I come from the south, where people start hounding a girl about when she’s gonna have babies about five minutes after she first starts her period.  Most of my childhood friends started families at least ten years ago and now have their own softball teams, while here I am starting the process at 31, or as I like to call it living in L.A., “Hollywood 20”.  

Not to say I have't been a little bit traditional about it. I DID wait until I met a lovely woman online, dated her for three years, married her in a state where it was legally recognized (yay, NY!), domestically partnered her here in California, then got legally recognized here in California with the overturn of Prop 8.  

You know, just standard, super traditional stuff.

And my wife, Cat is exactly the kind of person I want to raise a kid with. She is most loving, kind and talented person I know. Seriously. I'm kind of jealous that our kid gets to have such an amazing person for a mother. 

So now, six years into our relationship, and three years after getting married: we are ready to expand our family…just like any other extremely boring couple who is really into family planning. 

For any lesbian couple wanting to conceive the first step is acquiring sperm. If you decide to chose an anonymous donor from a bank, as we did, and you live in Los Angeles, as we do, this means you get access to the Mecca of all sperm acquiring facilities: California Cryobank.

Cryobank is amazing.  It’s like Central Casting and crash course in genetics all rolled into one. You can search guys by height, weight, hair color, heritage, ethnicity, religion, blood type, GPA, or even occupation—although in L.A. that means either actor or musician. 

They also give you medical backgrounds on the donors’ entire families all the way out to cousins. I honestly know less about my own family’s medical history than I do about our Donor’s. And it doesn’t stop there. The dudes write essays about themselves: telling us their hobbies, hopes and dreams and even provide voice recordings, facial feature reports and childhood photos. 

Then in the most LA  move in the history of medical baby making, the female staff of cryobank compiles a list of the three celebrities they think the donor looks like, so that you can get the designer Ryan Gossling/George Clooney/Tay Diggs hybrid baby of your dreams.

Basically, my straight friends would consider it the world’s best dating site. Except it’s totally anonymous and they’d never get to actually meet the 6 foot tall actor who enjoys hiking, building his own canoes and cooking for your mom.  And yes, I’m already working on the screenplay for a sperm bank dating rom com, so don’t even think about it.

Since we’re using my uterus, my wife, Cat, and I chose a donor who is as close to her as possible: tall, reddish hair, blue eyes, and her ethnic background with even the hint of Native American ancestry.

We also made sure the staff said he was extremely good looking. Let’s face it: if love isn’t going to play a factor in your genetic baby-making, you’re allowed to be shallow.

After perusing “Sperm Tindr” for the prefect genetic specimen and making our fairly expensive purchase, we were ready to pop it up in me and make a baby!

Just kidding.

When we first showed up at the fertility clinic in Beverly Hills we thought we’d have a consultation, give them some sperm and get the show on the road. What actually happened, is that the doctor wanted to make sure it would be the best, healthiest pregnancy ever.  Hooray!

But what this meant was before anything from that little vial ever even went into my womb, I would apparently need to have 15 different blood tests and two vaginal ultrasounds over the course of several weeks just to quote “look around and see what the situation is.”

Good news, the blood tests said I was super fertile for a “woman my age.” Ew.

So great. Now my old womb and my ridiculously high egg count were ready for some babies.

 Just kidding again.

The doctor then tells me that while the other 97 blood tests came back great, my vitamin D levels are low and because this could potentially cause pregnancy complications, we need to wait a month and put me on a vitamin D supplement.

Okay, I am going to follow the doctor’s orders because I want a healthy baby, but I feel pretty sure there is a prom queen getting knocked up this very second who has no idea what her vitamin D levels are.

At this point, my wife and I had been planning for so long and were so ready that I contemplated just going to a bar, grabbing some dude and saying “Don’t worry, neither of us will enjoy this.”

Instead, I took all of my vitamin D, got blood tested AGAIN and was finally told that I could start peeing on ovulation sticks to find out when I’ve hit the 36 hour window that women can get pregnant. Did you know that it’s only 36 hours? I have no idea how anyone was ever born.

Anyway, the day finally came for that special romantic moment where I laid back in stirrups and stared up at the florescent lights covered with a fake painting of the sky while my beautiful wife held my hand and my doctor and her nurse squirted a vial of donation into my uterus via a cathader…

I’m sorry to say that no turkey basters were involved, but I do think it’s still pretty lesbian that the only time semen has ever been inside me, it was placed there by a woman.

Then came the world’s longest two week wait. There’s only a 20% chance that an IUI (Inter-uterine insemination) will work on the first time, so we knew our odds weren’t great, but still you hope. You hope because every single time you do this, it is sooo freaking expensive ---Any dudes reading this, I want you to take a moment and realize that you’ve thrown thousands of dollars away in dirty tissues over the years. 

But mostly we were hoping because we are just so excited to be moms.

And I am happy to say that as of a little over five months ago, we found out that our kid was ready to get here on the first try and now all of that time and all of those blood tests don’t matter, because we’ve gotten to see adorable ultrasounds of a big-headed fetus with little t-rex arms dancing around and have experienced the magic that is the first time you hear your baby’s heartbeat.

Later this week we are hoping to find out the baby's sex. We're excited either way, but are mostly just looking forward to being able to call the baby by name. So, please join us, for the first and probably the last time as a parents that we encourage our little one to spread their legs and show off their junk.