Yes, I Showed Up To My Induction With A Document Called “Birth Vibes”

I was flat on my back under fluorescent lights, bellowing. The epidural had failed. The nitrous oxide had made me puke. Nurses in training had given me rough cervix checks. Labor was dragging me under, unmedicated and unstoppable.

A couple months earlier, I’d detailed my birth plan in a Canva template bursting with pastels. Something about my advanced maternal age made me feel I felt obligated to show up prepared. Every line was wavy and every corner was rounded. Across the top, suspended in a fluffy cloud, danced the words “BIRTH VIBES.” Suffice it to say, a failed epidural hadn’t made the mood board.

Birth is portal work, my friend Julia had told me over Vietnamese food months earlier, back when I was pregnant and just starting to draft my birth plan. I thought I knew what she meant — the birth canal as sacred, pregnant people as all-powerful beings creating life, the usual. She encouraged me to think outside the box of peace and calm. I could channel my ramped-up adrenaline and listen to wild screamy songs during labor; I could allow myself to feel indignant about the pain and use my anger and hurt as a source of power.

At 40, I believed myself to be naturally more prepared than most for the intensity and pain of labor. I had a high pain tolerance. I had tattoos, after all — I didn’t even keep a count anymore; that’s how many tattoos I had! And I had been devastated by trauma more than lots of other people I knew. I had lived through my little brother’s sudden death. Through the end of my 10-year marriage. Through a series of spinal surgeries, starting when I was a kid. And even then, roiling with preteen hormones and acne, I had said please and thank you! With a fresh titanium rod screwed into my vertebrae! The doctors and nurses had marveled.

When I tried to envision my ideal labor: as peaceful as possible, in a dim room with strummy music flowing from a nearby Bluetooth speaker. Folksy vibes. Or perhaps me, eyes closed, chanting along under my breath to a meditation piped through the headphones strapped to my ears as I circle on a birth ball, serene and composed. Zen vibes. Little lights flickering from trays and tables, casting a comforting glow, the air lavender-scented from puffs from a diffuser humming nearby. Spa vibes.

I pictured my partner at my side, weeping but also gazing at me wide-eyed, experiencing my admirable resilience, his capacity to be annoyed by me ever again evaporating. I pictured the nurses standing in similar unspoken awe of my mental strength and quiet fortitude.

As I pored over the floaty template, detailing what I wanted to happen during my first and likely only birth, I started every “Good Vibes” request with “please” and ended the “Bad Vibes” list with a smiley face. I molded myself into a shape I knew well: the chill patient. The cool girl. The easygoing optimist, down for whatever.

In the About Me section (there was room for a headshot), I wrote: “I am prepared for birth to be unpredictable.”

You know what they say: If you want to make God laugh, tell her your vibes.

I wasn’t the pastel template version of myself during birth, wise and composed. Instead, I was bellowing and writhing, sh*tting and scared.

The reality was that my induction took two days to take, and we spent most of it watching marathons of Swamp People. I never even got the tea lights out of the duffel.

Between all the Pitocin adjustments and beeping monitors and stops and starts, I kept telling myself there was still time to curate the vibe. Labor hadn’t even started yet.

But when contractions started, they ramped up fast. Instead of meditating and riding the waves of my labor, I writhed flat on my back in the bed, kicking my legs like I could jostle the pain off of me. The nitrous, the only pain management that had been on my Good Vibes list since the beginning, took an hour for the nurses to set up and then made me vomit generously into a barf bag I pressed to my face. Armageddon was playing on cable. Diffusers weren’t allowed because of asthma concerns. At some point the midwife quoted Jack Sparrow.

In short, the vibes were off.

The anesthesiologist was both nice and tall, just as the nurse on duty had promised. He had me hunch over the side of the bed while he prodded my spine. I felt my nerves light up as he pricked at my skin. I tried to stay still through the contractions, through my partner pressing his arms down on my shoulders as instructed so I wouldn’t move. “Ow, ow, ow,” I said as each contraction passed, and then “ow, ow, ow, keep going, keep going, ow, ow,” to make it clear that I didn’t want the nice, tall anesthesiologist to stop. Communicative vibes!

He finally placed the epidural and left, proud of himself, promising to check back in 10 minutes. I sank into the bed, clutching the sheets. When the next contraction hit, it tore through me as strong as ever.

“I have a gut feeling this didn’t work,” I said aloud. The nurse didn’t contradict me.

“Did that contraction feel any different?” she asked. I told her it hadn’t. Another one came, even sharper and longer, wringing my uterus like a dishrag.

Any vibe I’d imagined collapsed under the weight of reality. The contractions tearing through my body, the relentless march of labor. There was only one vibe now, and it wasn’t mine: I was about to raw dog birth.

For an hour, I pushed and roared and chewed on my chapped lips. I kicked and whimpered. They placed a mirror at the end of the bed and as soon as I raised my head to glimpse my baby’s head, I instead noticed a delicate turd resting between my legs. Later, the midwife said I was only a push or two away and I froze, knowing I was going to tear when I pushed again.

I wasn’t the pastel template version of myself during birth, wise and composed. Instead, I was bellowing and writhing, sh*tting and scared.

The “Birth Vibes” didn’t save me from pain. But the pain was beside the point, a means to an end. I felt the pain so I could birth my baby and also because I didn’t have a choice. My body and her body were working together for her to be born. I had to submit to the shape of my birth, not the other way around.

I felt a pop as the baby’s head came out, but no pain as my skin tore, as the midwife gave her a quarter-turn and guided her shoulders out, the rest of her body slipping out of me, the warm liquid of blood and amniotic fluid pouring out — the greatest feeling I’d ever experienced. Like taking the biggest sh*t of my life, plus having an orgasm, plus emptying a full bladder. A shock of pleasure and relief flooded my chest.

A nurse placed my daughter on my chest. I wish I could tell you that time slowed and I can recall every crisp second of first meeting her, but that time is a blur. In the photos, she’s wailing and purple, wrinkly and damp, and I’m looking into the phone lens agog and smiling, as if all of this took me by surprise. My fingertips barely rest on one of her flushed cheeks.

Just a couple minutes later, the timestamps tell me, I pulled her close, pressed our faces together, closed my eyes, and breathed her in for the first time. This moment I do remember. I felt alien to myself, leaking and ripped, but I was also beginning to soar on endorphins. I’d grown our daughter in my body for 10 months and then birthed her and felt it all, down to the seams getting stitched up in my torn body. My Pisces baby, crashing through my self-important vibes, delivered on a tide of rain and tears.

Holding her, I knew what it felt like to be remade.

Of course you step into the void clutching your pastel printout. What else is there to do?

Around 4 a.m., hours after I gave birth, the three of us were settling into our postpartum room, alone together for the first time. My partner opened the box of tea lights and placed them around the room — the ones I had envisioned and proudly packed. They’d sat untouched in the box, forgotten by the whiplash of labor kicking in.

He took out one light at a time, held it in his hands and turned it over to switch it on. Then he placed them around the room, beneath the television, on the tops of cabinets, amidst the monitors. The little wicks glowed, softening the edges of all the corners, embracing the plastic sides of the bassinet where our baby slept, swaddled and calm.

We knew the first nights with our newborn could easily take a turn. But the tea lights made the room feel peaceful and warm, exactly the vibe I had imagined for birth. We agreed: such a good plan, to bring them.

I would ruminate on my birth for weeks after, the scenes replaying in my head as I nursed her on the couch at 3 a.m. or stared out the window as she napped in the bedside bassinet. I thought I understood what Julia had meant when she’d called it portal work, but after I gave birth, the truth of it was alive and undeniable, in my body and in my life. The portal of birth transported my child from not-being to being. Transformed me from someone imagining motherhood to someone doing it. It wasn’t a feel-good metaphor. It was a portal as real as death, a force I’d been obliterated by before, when I lost my brother.

I should have known then that you can’t curate a portal. You can only get wrecked by it, and then try to live in what comes after. There’s no choice but to show up unprepared for the unknown. Of course you step into the void clutching your pastel printout. What else is there to do?

Lindsey Markel lives in Illinois and has been oversharing online since dial-up. She publishes zines and essays on Substack.