Pregnancy and Birth, Remembered

It's no secret. I loved being pregnant with Connor. I loved my appointments with my midwife that allowed for time to talk about how the baby had grown, how my life was going, and anything else that seemed to come up. I especially loved when my belly started getting big enough for people to notice and then later, when I was so enormous I almost felt like a cartoon.

I also loved being pregnant with Helen, though it was a completely different experience. For starters, I wasn't as well rested, I wasn't in as good of shape, and for a reason that has never been fully explained, pregnancy with Helen was accompanied with a lot of bleeding - which was just stressful, even after a sonogram confirmed it was nothing to worry about with respect to Helen.

But most of all, I loved the moments that each of my children were first put on my chest. In Connor's case, my midwife performed this crazy move where she flipped him onto my chest seemingly the moment he emerged from my body. That's the convenience of being in a mostly horizontal position while giving birth. Helen was more handed up to me, since I was nowhere close to a bed when she emerged.

Magical. Just Magical.

A few nights ago, I was heading back from a trip to Tahoe. The whole time I was in the car coming from the airport, I just knew my friend HelenD was in labor. I actually tried to sleep a little in the car, in preparation for what could be a long night ahead. And when I got home, I was not disappointed. On my answering machine was a message that she was in pretty intense labor asking if I would come over. But, because HelenD is the nicest person in the world, she of course said "but I know you're just getting back from vacation, and it might be too much...". But what I was thinking is, OMG, she waited to have the baby for me. (See how nice she is?) So then, I had to do a bit of detective work because I never bothered to set my answering machine to the current day and time, so my machine noted the call came in on Thursday at 2:13 AM. It was Saturday around 11:00 PM. Ed (he's so smart), noted that I could simply push the clock button on the machine to see what time the machine thought it was now, to determine whether it was likely HelenD was still in labor or not. So I did. And Holy Cow! The machine said Thursday at 4:31 so I looked at Ed and said "I want to go? Do you mind?" and he said "Let me empty the car" and so it was that I was running around looking for HelenD's address, Ed was throwing out a week's worth of vacation gear onto our driveway, and then I dashed into the night.

And I made it.

And it was incredible.

HelenD's home birth was memorable in a million ways, but these are my two favorites. When HelenD hit a bit of a wall (apparently labor had been in full swing and stalled sometime between when she placed the call to me and when I arrived and that was really depressing) her husband looked at her with the confidence that can only come from true love. One look from him assured me at least that everyone was going to get through this.

And the second moment I want to remember is when Dahlia was coughing like crazy and placed onto HelenD's chest. Again, Helen's husband looked at the two of them as if life were perfect in that moment. Perfect.

This all made me think - that while I spend a lot of time thinking about how everyone who wants it should have access to a home birth, not that many years ago, hospitals did not even allow dads to be in the room when babies were born. And the lesson? Birth practices can change radically, and in my mind, for the better relatively quickly.

So I remain completely hopeful about the state of home birth. And I am so impressed that the birthing community has come so far that dads are now included. Because that birth on Friday night? It wouldn't have been nearly the same without the dad there.

Thank you for letting me be there HelenD. You rock!

Elaine

Disclosure: I was given a free copy of the book Exploiting My Baby, by Teresa Strasser as a member if the From Left to Write Book Club, which inspired this post. I read the book in one evening, as I sat in the ER waiting for my kidney stone to be diagnosed. It's not my style of book, because I loved being pregnant, and this author felt otherwise.