We are called not merely to do something new but to restore our internal balance and fulfill our soul’s fundamental needs. Answering your call is more than making a silent promise to yourself or a proclamation of intent. Infused with fierce and unswerving determination, you begin by taking small, practical, necessary steps toward realizing what you are called to do. In the process, a maturation and reorientation of the mind and soul inevitably take place.
—Pam England, Ancient Map for Modern Birth
Though I was pretty certain I wanted more children—six seems to be the number that I keep coming back to—after Nora’s birth, I did not know if I would be born a mother again. My husband and I tried to get pregnant for about 18 months, but our attempts were not resulting in a viable pregnancy. Then, a series of family disasters made us stop trying and pretty much think we were done-there was too much on our plates to adequately take care of the four children we had or ourselves, let alone make and take care of an additional human.
Then, at probably the most stressful season in our life, I found I was once again pregnant. I was in denial (or super angry) about this pregnancy for a long time. About halfway through though, I realized this baby was coming and I needed to prepare, so I started going to birth related meet-ups at least every other week. I knew I needed a strong tribe of women who were passionate about birth to lean on as I prepared for this journey. One of the most important aspects of birth preparation this time around was location-where would our birth take place? We knew we did not want to have a hospital birth.
After my magical VBA3C birth, I knew if I had any other babies, I wanted to birth them at home. This was far-fetched, as I have had three cesarean births. In spite of what we were up against, our family did everything possible to prepare for our newest to “accidentally” be born at home.
My body is not a democracy. I say what is okay and what is not. No medical provider, medical machine, politician, political party, religious leader, no person or God has a say. My body is not a democracy. I am the dictator. I am in charge of me.
I don’t really believe in due dates, because babies come when they come and a due date is a made up estimate of when a baby might come based on old data. However, that being said, I did not plan on my baby coming until the end of September at the earliest. As such, I planned my last teaching day to be the middle of September, so I could have a buffer to “nest”/get some things done. My last day for work was a Tuesday in mid September. That night, I headed to a mammas meet-up. While there, the ladies in attendance blessed my birth, writing words of encouragement on a picture frame for my birth space. We talked about common issues with pregnancy. I am not sure I was really listening to any of it though, because I was pretty tired and was breathing through some discomfort/contractions. After the meet-up, I went home and tried to clean the kitchen, but I fell asleep wiping the countertop, so I texted my husband, that I could not pick him up and he needed to get a ride home from work (we are a one car family and he got off at 1:30 AM). Then, I went to bed. When my husband got home, he finished the henna tattoo on my stomach (while I slept).
You are not separate from the whole. You are one with the sun, the earth, the air. You don’t have a life. You are life.
--ekjeart tolle
The next morning, I went to my OBGYN appointment. I was really uncomfortable during the appointment, because I was having contractions the entire time while there. They hooked me up to do a non-stress test and I read from the Birthing from Within book I had brought with me. When a contraction would come, I would stop reading and breathe through it. This went on for over an hour. Eventually, the doctor came in and looked at the paper print out of my test and said, she needed me to have a contraction or she needed to perform an ultrasound, so she could see how my baby was responding. It was an eye-opening moment for me, because it was clear to me that I had been experiencing consistent contractions throughout the entire duration of my appointment-much of which had been monitored by a machine AND that the almighty machine was not registering that contractions were, in fact, happening. My doctor, a good doctor, was paying more attention to a machine’s read out than she was to her patient. It made me think once again about our broken medical system that trains doctors to treat their patients as objects rather than humans and trust machines and technology more than women and their intuition. Though I knew I was at least in early stages of labor, I thought this could last for days or weeks, and I did not want to alarm anyone or put myself on any kind of timeline. So eventually, I just asked to have the ultrasound, so I could leave the doctor’s office. I had the ultrasound. Everything was normal/baby was not in distress (all things I knew). I went home and picked up my husband and we headed to a birth preparation class.
The class was two hours long and the topic was pain coping techniques. This was perfect, since I was in labor anyway, we practiced a bunch of pain coping that helped me progress through laborland. By the end of the class, I was pretty much in a trance-like state with one goal in mind-I wanted to take a nap. My body needed to rest for what was to come. Wednesdays are pretty busy days for us, and I was not planning on having a baby. I needed to be ready to take my husband to work and pick up my girls from school, then take my oldest to ballet class, then the two oldest had church youth group activities they participate in. I needed that nap.
On the way home, my husband decided to stop at the wholesale bread store. He was also feeling a need to nest. About 40 loaves of bread later, we were headed home. I went directly into my bedroom, turned on Hypnobabies and laid down to rest.
After about 15 minutes, at about 3:30 PM my husband came in to tell me he needed a ride to work. I let him know that I would not be driving anyone anywhere today/tonight. He read the room and made a phone call. He would not be going to work tonight. He headed out to pick up our middle children. Shortly after that, he took our oldest to ballet. I stayed in our bedroom-sometimes on the physio-ball, sometimes on the bed, sometimes on the floor moving and breathing-doing the work to bring our baby earthside.
I think I went around the house, trying to tidy up/clean a bit/yelling at the three youngest children to clean up/help momma/get their bags packed right after my husband left, but decided pretty quickly that this was a futile endeavor. I sent a text to my best friend, to let her know I was in labor and there was a possibility the kids would go to her house (the plan only if things got too intense/scary for them or if I needed to transfer to a hospital) tonight.
Sometime around 5:30 PM, I texted my husband telling him to get home quickly/now; what he thought I meant was come home after running some errands AFTER our daughter’s ballet class. I was starting to realize that I could not do what needed to be done-namely contact the birth team and photographer, prepare the bed for labor and delivery and set up the birth tub (and feed our kids). He promptly texted back that he was on it, so I thought people would be arriving in the next 30 minutes or so.
I turned my focus to those who were in the space with me-my youngest three children. I wanted to do something with them that could help normalize birth, that I could actually do while laboring. While in labor with my fourth child, I tried to cook, but that was too much for me. So, while baking cookies with them crossed my mind, I settled on a game I coined Color and Scream. The rules are pretty basic, while mom is coloring, everyone colors and when mom stops coloring and starts screaming, everyone screams. The goal is to scream-make sounds-the most like mom. We colored a picture of a sun and moon-much like the mandala on my belly. We played for a while-probably an hour. It was fun.
Sometimes the fear won’t go away, so you’ll have to do it afraid.
My husband and oldest child arrived home around 7. By then, I was definitely done with Color and Scream. The little ones left our bedroom (and started watching movies). Throughout the laboring process, the chidden would run into the birthing space to support me or check things out. My oldest fed herself and her little siblings dinner and found herself a ride to her church activity. My husband started trying to make the bed and set up the birthing tub. I threw up. My husband was putting the wrong size sheet protector on the bed. I could not talk coherently enough to tell him where the right sheet protector was, so I just helped him put the wrong sheet protector on the bed. The pump my husband was using to blow up the tub was making a lot of noise/was annoying, so he tried to do it manually. This was not really working. I was laboring in downward dog (Yoga pose). My legs were shaking a lot. I was feeling both out of control and pathetic-like I could not keep doing this thing that I was doing because it was too hard and no one was there to support me yet. So, I decided that I needed to be my own doula.
They whispered to [me], “You cannot withstand the storm.”[I] roared back, “I am the storm!”
I reminded myself out loud that shaking while laboring is normal and natural and good that my body was doing what it needed to do to bring my baby to me. While I was notably anxious to meet my little one, I reminded myself that the terra incognita of laborland is a magical, sacred place. I knew that there are a finite amount of times in my life (this time and maybe one more) that I was going to get to experience my reproductive organs (and the rest of my body) pushed to these physical (and emotional and spiritual) limits and I wanted to slow things down, so I could process what was happening. I slowed my breath. I went super internal. I began to really ride and enjoy the waves of labor. I randomly became aware that the children were watching Phantom of the Opera in the living room and that the volume was turned up really loud. I thought to myself, “Of course they would choose something super, over-the-top dramatic to watch while I am in labor. Thanks kids.” It was about at this time that the birth photographer arrived. She helped my husband finish making the bed-with a flat sheet, because no one could find the right sized fitted sheet and I could not tell them where to find larger sheets. They also tried to (and eventually gave up on) fill the birth tub with water. This was not going to be a water birth.
My midwife and her assistant arrived at 7:50 PM. My husband got really involved in supporting me/quit trying to do extra things and accepted what was not done would not happen. I moved from laboring on the floor to the bed at 8:05 PM. I was in transition at this point. My sacrum was moving downward and my pelvis widening. My husband went to get my second child, so she could see her brother’s birth. My water broke at 8:30 PM. I reached down and felt baby crown at 8:32 PM. I focused on pushing him out slowly. I wanted to feel the “ring of fire;” more than that, I didn’t want to tear. My baby was born at 8:36 PM.
My husband caught our baby and assisted him as he slid out of my body. I reached to take my son. I held him on my chest and my husband and I both laughed and cried. The older kiddos came in and crawled on the bed and then on top of us. My oldest got home from her activity at 8:40 PM and met her new brother. At 8:53 I birthed the placenta-baby’s tree of life and likely the last or second to last placenta my body will make (this realization is still bittersweet/weird/surreal). It sat in a bowl by my side as we all enjoyed a snack. At 8:55 baby felt ready to eat and latched on to my right breast. The rest of us ate strawberries.
I clamped my son’s umbilical chord at 9:27 PM and my oldest cut it. The girls all gloved up and examined the placenta. After the placenta was sufficiently examined, everyone (except baby boy and I) changed into pajamas. I passed our baby to my husband and I went on a walk to the bathroom for necessary postpartum care. Baby was weighed and measured and the midwife checked for other brain and body functionality. The midwife gave baby the hat she made for him and she and the girls sang Happy Birthday to him. I cried-the happiest of tears.
We all piled back into bed and snuggled a bit. The midwife and photographer left. My husband put the (older) babies to bed. I marveled in the wonder that is the birthing experience-grateful, so grateful for my insistence on manifesting the birth I knew my body was capable of. I have said it before and I will say it again, birth is a natural event that sometimes needs medical attention, not a medical event that sometimes occurs naturally. Birth is sacred. Birth is individual. The way we birth matters. The way we are treated while both pregnant and birthing matters. It matters for babies and it matters for mammas. Cesarean mothers are not broken. All mothers deserve empowering birthing experiences. I am on a mission to make a tangible, quantifiable difference in the birth world through talking about birth as well as supporting birthing moms and fighting for my own empowered birthing experiences.
Some people may be upset because you did things your way and they really thought it wasn’t going to work out for you, but it did, even better than expected. Don’t be afraid to own that because you followed your intuition instead of convention and created a new model of success.
—Maryam Hasnaa
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