For a brief moment in 2010, I was a two-headed, roaring goddess. Ella Orion’s head finally met the outside air, twenty hours after her primordial soup had started to drain, and still shy of her shoulders, she roared. The room, ripe with the earthy scent of birth and anticipation, erupted with laughter.
And for a brief moment in 2015, the midwife was worried about Oliver Lev. We didn’t know he was an Oliver yet. Just moments before he was still our beloved Schmitchik, and when I picked him out of the pool, slippery and warm, Haffy and I looked at him and then at each other and thought, “Ella, we meet again”. But his cry was not Ella’s roar, it was a little contented yelp that did not quite convince our midwife. She pulled him out of my arms for a short second, and he was no longer content, and the yelp was no longer little.
Both my babies arrived on the early side of normal: Ella on week 37, and Oliver on 38. Both births began with a pop and a slow oozing at 1am, in bed. Both were OP, meaning with the less optimal positioning of their backs to my back, and turned only at the very end, in the birth canal. And both followed an atypical pattern of labor—the same atypical pattern, which turns out to be typical for me.
With neither did I get the dreamy latent phase I had so pined for; no chili was eaten or brownies baked with aesthetic pauses for well-spaced contractions. Instead I had nothing, a pop, and then frequent, demanding contractions from start to end. Instead of transitioning in the end, my self doubt crept in right in the beginning: If this is what it’s like now, can I do this? I could. Once for 18 hours more, and once for six. In both I passed through fire to get to the other side, to get them earthside, priming me for the bottomless, excruciating, scorching love of motherhood.
Ella was born on a mattress in the living room of our Hahashmonaim apartment, following a harrowing two and a half hours of peekaboo pushing. Oliver slipped out in the pool in our Ramat Gan apartment, a scant 45 minutes after we had realized I was fully dilated.
They were both born at home, their home, surrounded by loving, skilled care—the only way I know to birth, and the only way my babies know to be born.
June 2017
All of the Worlds 