Just before we moved out to Abu Dhabi, I had a conversation with my younger sister about birth. It was May 2008, and I was seven months pregnant at the time. I sought her advice because she had seen more births than anyone I knew. She had worked on a cattle ranch for three years, and then a dairy goat farm, and then a weed-eating goat operation where she trucked around a thousand goats to cattle ranches in the Mmid-west. She knew I wanted to do everything naturally for my baby’s birth, so it was with caution when she said, “I think a c-section might not be a bad option for you.”

She proceeded to tell me that the practice at her cattle ranch had been to breed first-time heifer mothers to small “easy-calver” bulls, and to put pregnant cows on a strict diet in the last month to keep the fetus from fattening. Then we both laughed about John, my husband: not an easy-calver. Six feet two inches now, he was ten and a half pounds at birth, also by cesarean.

I don’t normally talk about my husband like that. In general I think of him and myself as sensitive, rational, pretty smart humans. But pregnancy makes you feel like an animal, and suddenly I started thinking about humans as sensitive, rational, pretty smart animals. Your body takes over in a strange, cumulatively advancing way. You feel powerless over it. The changes—swelling belly, mammaries, cravings, irrational emotions, nausea—remind you of your genus-family-order-class-phylum-kingdom roots. Especially the class: Mammal. We’re in a class that gives birth to live young and feeds the babies with milk from our own bodies.

Plus there’s the frame of reference: human births are so private that I think about animals when I think about labor and delivery. The only births I’d seen were those of domesticated animals: six kittens born on a sweaty Texas afternoon in June 1989, and a foal born at 5am in July 2000 in California. The kittens were blind and helpless; the foal learned to walk within 45 minutes. She was born to a mare that had been given to me by a neighbor. The day before her labor, I watched her gallop down a steep mountain; her double-wide belly practically flapping. The grass was great that year, so she was incredibly fat, but I had bred her to a small “easy-calver” stallion, just by luck.

I found myself reliving these memories more and more as my pregnancy progressed. And I was glad I had these memories to revisit, because otherwise, feeling so much like an animal can be an utterly alienating experience. Some women feel a kind of self-estrangement—an identity crisis that is as much about being an animal as it is about imagining yourself as a mother—especially in those first queasy months.

It was true what my sister surmised. I did want a natural birth. I prefer a lot of natural things to their artificial alternatives: I prefer hiking to going to the mall; henna to hair dye; bicycling to driving. I like homemade jam and free-range eggs and woodstoves. A lot of people I know are like this, more or less. So: why do I like the idea of naturalness so much, but then feel unnerved at the recognition that I am a mammal?

On the day my mare went into labor, I put her in a make-shift birthing corral and slept right by it on the bed of a pick-up truck. I woke early. It was foggy, and she was lying on her side at the edge of the corral. She was in the middle of contractions. Her whole body seemed pushed by them, she was groaning and so focused that she didn’t notice me as I approached. Her eyes were glazed over. The baby came out feet first, covered in amniotic slime; the mare rested for just a few seconds, her chin on the ground. Surprised at the tiny movements behind her, she lurched to her feet and broke the umbilical cord. I had read a book on horse birthing; that was the extent of my knowledge. If anything had gone wrong, I would not have been able to help. The veterinarian was over an hour away. She and the baby would have died. She herself had been born on the range, discovered only when her mother came out of hiding and brought her baby three-day-old foal back to the herd. The only comfort I had for her safety was that she had good birthing genes.

On the day of my own labor, August 6th 2008, I was also incredibly large. I had gained 53 pounds by that last day. I was fed up with my immobility and woke up early to walk. I started sweating heavily within five minutes, but I kept pushing myself until I had very slowly walked for 45 minutes. I was trying to emulate my mare’s gallop down the hill. I drove home and slept most of the day. I started feeling cramps in the evening, and by 8pm they were one to two minutes apart.

At the hospital the contractions were intense, but labor progressed slowly., Sstill it was ferocious and feral. There were no windows in our delivery room, so we spent those hours with no real concept of time. Our only way to tell time was by the changing shifts of the midwives, who work 12 hours at a stretch. I used minimal pain relief, breathing nitrous oxide and oxygen through difficult contractions and counting my breaths in Hindi, a language that I’d learned in graduate school. I knew when I counted to twenty the pain would lessen, and a different language helped occupy my mind. Sometimes a team of doctors in headscarves dropped in to examine my progress.

At hour thirty-four my cervix had begun to shrink, and the doctor said I needed an emergency c-section. My husband and I consented; it was a huge relief in fact.

Within minutes I was being wheeled away, getting the spinal block, watching all the activity around me, and talking with the nurses. The pain relief was almost instantaneous and total, and the lack of pain was a flood of relief. All the endorphins accumulated from the pain of labor—without the pain of labor. Our eight and a half pound baby girl was born on August 8th, on her due date.

Maybe we romanticize naturalness because it is not as tinged with mortality as animal-ness is. Everything dies. Animals are fragile, driven by compulsions and at the mercy of events that can be unstoppable, like labor and delivery. Medical intervention in this animal’s life stopped the process, and gave me a little girl.

Rose Dakin is a writer living in Abu Dhabi with her husband, John Gravois, and five-month old daughter Iola. She has a weekly column in The National, has been published in Slate, and has co-authored guidance reports on extractive industries’ community participation. She administers a small artists and writers residency program in northern California, called Old Growth Arts, from afar.

Copyright Last Exit 2009