Click. Click. Click. I’m vaguely aware of the sound of a camera shutter coming from somewhere above me. I push deep into my bottom, a dull, rising ache reverberating around my stomach and back. Click. Click. The noise is now in front of me, I think, but I can’t focus on it, so great is the effort of pushing. I take a deep breath in and heave again, cheered on by two midwives and my partner holding my hand, bearing down to squeeze away the pain. Click. The sound comes again but, still, it’s easy to tune out as another wave of pain begins to rise, along with a mild panic that my pushes are achieving nothing. And then, suddenly, I feel something beginning to descend within me, the weight of my baby moving down through the birth canal. Everything in the room fades away as I’m consumed by the primal sensation of my baby preparing to leave my body. The feeling overwhelms me. It and I become tangled; elementally intertwined. I am nothing but this feeling.
I know, now, my birth photographer, the person behind the “clicks”, managed to capture this transcendental moment. In the images, my eyes are screwed up with effort, my chin is doubled on my neck, and my fingers are gripping my partner’s hand so tightly they’ve turned white. At the top of the taut hump of my stomach, a slight shadow appears to reveal the vague shape of a baby about to be born. The stills are strikingly visceral.
