My Pregnancy Journey Part 2
My son has changed my life in more ways than I can even describe. It started well before he was born. Coming off the heels of a miscarriage experience, which you can read about here, I was slightly more prepared for this pregnancy, but I had miles to go before I would become the woman my son needed to be his mother.
I had been introduced to the Free Birth Society, and was devouring stories of women birthing their babies outside the system in their podcast, but I wasn’t convinced that I could be one of these women. I wasn’t cool enough, tough enough, brave enough, whatever enough. I was just a regular person. But I also knew that going to the hospital wasn’t an option for me. So I settled on what I saw as the middle option and hired home birth midwives.
At the time I didn’t know a single woman who had given birth outside of a hospital. I had a cousin who had planned to birth at home but had an emergency transfer and ended up with a C-section, what I now know to be a common refrain. I only told a few friends that I wasn’t planning to give birth at a hospital, and was extremely protective of my energy during my pregnancy. I had recently moved across the country so I had no family or friends nearby, which was kind of nice because I didn’t have anyone else’s energy in my birth field, but it was also extremely lonely.
I found out that I was pregnant in February of 2020. I was working at a museum in Boston, and when the pandemic hit in March, I was thrilled to be furloughed. My first trimester was rough and I was always throwing up or trying not to throw up or recovering from throwing up. I was more than happy to be at home collecting unemployment for as long as that lasted, and then the stimulus checks actually made it possible for us to move.
My husband and I were living with our three dogs in a duplex in Watertown, MA that was depressing at best. Our landlord and her adult sons lived upstairs and we shared 20 square feet of fenced in concrete as a “backyard.” We also shared a single driveway so any time we wanted to leave we had to get someone to move their car. I was desperate for trees and grass and space, so when I was 6 months pregnant, we packed up and moved to South Glastonbury, CT.
Having 3 dogs made our rental options extremely limited, and this one property was the only one Zillow had to offer in the entire northeast that fit our budget and would allow our dogs. It was the last house at the end of dead end street of an extremely small town full of berry orchards, and down the hill across the street was a flowing creek that ended up being one of my most potent medicines of early motherhood. The house was very small and 2 stories, but there was only one bathroom and it was downstairs in the kitchen. The stairs were crazy narrow and so steep I was afraid of falling every time I went down them. But it had a stone fireplace and land and trees and grass and a creek, so it was where our son would be born.
Moving states meant I had to find new midwives. I called around and did phone interviews, but everyone’s rates were so high and no one seemed to really believe in birth. Everyone wanted to bring a whole team of people and medical supplies and none of it felt right to me. I ended up settling on the midwife who had the lowest rate. By that point, I was completely convinced that I didn’t want any interference whatsoever in my birth process, but I did want someone to help my husband with the logistics while I was in labor. I wanted him to have help filling the birth pool, keeping the fire going, keeping me fed and hydrated, and just making sure I was taken care of. That seemed like a lot of work for one person, so hiring a midwife for not too much money seemed like the best bet, since we didn’t have any friends or family for hundreds of miles. I hired her with many caveats, like asking her to stay in her car or in a small room off the living room and only to enter my birth space if I directly asked her to. Of course, once the paperwork was signed and the deposit made, she immediately started talking about testing and Pitocin and all the things I had told her I wasn’t interested in. I regretted hiring her pretty much immediately and dreaded her visits.
When I was 8 months pregnant, I finally decided to join the Free Birth Society private membership. During my screening interview with Emilee, I told her about the midwife, who I was on the verge of firing. While we were on the call, she asked a recent graduate of the Radical Birthkeeper program if she would be willing to attend me on my budget, and she said yes! I will forever be grateful for that call, and for the amazing woman who came into my life to witness my son’s birth. I fired the midwife the next day with zero regrets.
In the last few weeks leading up to my son’s birth, I nested and settled and hunkered down. His guess date was Halloween, which was a Saturday on a blue moon that year. The days got shorter and colder and I prepared to retreat into my birth and postpartum nest. I wrote and spoke my birth vision in village prenatal calls through the Free Birth membership. I organized a virtual mother blessing ceremony for myself with my dearest friends across the country and shared my vision and my journey with them. I wrote and repeated affirmations to help deepen my trust in myself and my body. I built a birth altar to contain the wisdom and the visions I was holding for my son’s entrance into this world. I finally trusted birth, I finally believed in myself, I finally knew that the best and safest option was to just surrender. I painted the words “surrender” and “trust” and placed them on my altar, along with “bloom” and most importantly, “I am willing to let this be easy.” I watched videos of animals giving birth in the wild and found them so fascinating and inspiring. I reminded myself daily that I am a mammal.
Stay tuned for the third and final part of this journey, the simple and beautiful story of my son’s sovereign entrance into this world.