Labor is hard. It is painful. It can be scary. 

So is life.

A few weeks ago, I gave birth to my second child. Both Labor and delivery with our daughter were easy, so I assumed everything would be even easier with Baby #2; it didn’t take long for me to realize this would not be the case. After breathing and pushing and pushing and breathing and pushing some more, all of my effort was met with encouragement from my doctor and the team to “Push harder.” Let me tell you, I was pushing absolutely as hard as I could. With each set of pushes, I was growing more and more discouraged. What was I doing wrong? I’d done this before. I thought I knew how it was supposed to work. You breathe when they tell you to breathe, then you push when they tell you to push. Then the baby comes out. Seeing the confusion and discouragement on my face, my sweet doctor began to explain what was going on. It turned out that our baby was facing up, which makes for a much more difficult and painful delivery, and could ultimately require the use of some tools (vacuum, forceps, etc.) to get the baby out, or even possibly a C-Section if things got serious. I was relieved to understand what was happening, but now we had to decide what to do in a relatively short amount of time, because the baby was starting to show signs of distress. We decided that during the next pushes we would hope for some movement further down by the baby, and then the doctor would go in and attempt to manually flip the baby over. After the next set of pushes, the doctor was able to successfully flip the baby over. Now I could see my pushing was starting to work! Soon the team could see the head. After just a few more pushes, the doctor wiggled the shoulders free and we welcomed our son into the world.