I, for one, am shocked that I am actually had a home birth! Not because I haven’t always wanted one, but because my first hospital birth was so perfect – everything I wanted and nothing I didn’t – and I just assumed all my other births would be done the same way. I wrote a whole E-guide on how to have a wonderful hospital birth and I fully intended to do things that same way again.
Even my second birth, with Miles, was as wonderful as I could have hoped considering I was giving birth to my dead son. Everyone in the hospital was empathetic and there in a way that I needed. My OB, who couldn’t be in attendance, called me on the weekend to cry with me over Miles’s death. I felt loved and supported. In fact, I had hoped to go back and find the amazing nurse who was at my bedside and ask her to attend the birth of my rainbow, whenever that would have been, or at least meet him.
But with this pregnancy, things just didn’t turn out that way. For one, I had a new OB as mine had stopped practicing. My new OB was fine at first. He was what I needed early in pregnancy after a loss. He was casual and laid back. He was also the medical director of the practice and because of that he liked to bend the rules for his patients. That worked in my favor as Jon was able to come to my appointments despite the no-visitor policy still in place. I needed that.
Around 32 weeks, however, things just started to change. It began with the glucose test (which I always decline) and while he seemed to support me declining the testing, I felt like he was subtly trying to convince me otherwise. He would say, “Ultimately it’s up to you…” but then proceed to explain WHY he recommends it even after I clearly stated, “I’m not interested in that.” A few times Jon had to place a calming hand on my shoulder reminding me that getting heated was not the appropriate response at the time. I’d leave each appointment feeling emotionally fragile, and worked up. I’d have to have a decompression session in the car and maybe a good cry from every interaction!
At 35 weeks this OB started recommending weekly non-stress tests along with the usual weekly appointments. Weekly appointments have always been something I dreaded, even with my first pregnancy. It always takes longer to schedule and arrive than the appointments last. I always leave feeling stressed over something or another. I always feel like I’m in fight mode. Even the receptionist who schedules the appointments seemed to want to press me into things I don’t want to do. Multiple times I told her I wasn’t interested in seeing the doctor weekly and she’d respond with, “Well that’s what he said.” Or “But if he wants you seen, you need to be seen.” as if the doctor had ultimate control over both of us.
So when this OB recommended weekly non-stress tests (NSTs), which I know are non-evasive and safe for the baby but still not without risks, I felt uneasy with that. I had never been offered one before, not in a full 39 week pregnancy with my first or a 20 week pregnancy with my second. Yet suddenly he wanted them weekly? While NSTs can show you how baby is moving right now, they do nothing to predict the health of your baby. They simply count movements right now. They can also be performed in a time when baby is sleeping or less active and lead to worry, fear, or even talk of induction simply based on a pattern of movement in the moment. It just wasn’t something I was into. When I told my doctor as much, his response was the very familiar, “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” but despite the fact that I was sitting there saying I didn’t want to, the conversation didn’t seem to end there. He continued to tell me why they were a good idea.
Finally I asked him why he was recommending this test at all. His response made me bristle. “Because of the unfavorable outcome of your last pregnancy.” By which, of course, he meant the death of Miles. Jon said in that moment, he knew I was done with this doctor. I explained to the OB that my last pregnancy was completely separate and different from this one and that I didn’t have any fear or worries about this baby. He pressed the issue saying if we didn’t look for issues, we wouldn’t find them. This, to me, sounded more like, ‘You find issues when you look.’ And that’s exactly what I was trying to avoid – finding “issues.” Of course if something had been terribly wrong, something we could save this baby from, I would want to know. But more likely than not a NST would have yielded nothing or it would have lead us to believe baby was not moving well which would lead to more tests and a false alarm. Maybe even an induction that I always would have wondered if it was truly necessary. It just wasn’t a path I was willing to take myself down. Babies are born healthy without all these tests and medical interventions all the time. Mine would be no different this time. I can’t explain it or make it make sense to everyone, but I just couldn’t let that fear over shadow this pregnancy. I trusted this baby.
The next day, on a whim, I called a midwife. I’d been given her name by a friend and neighbor who used her for her last two births and had nothing but positive things to say. I had looked up this midwife before and saw her prices on her website. They were more than twice what I had paid for my first hospital birth (after insurance). I really thought I couldn’t justify the extra cost because of how beautiful my first birth had been. If it had been full of trauma, I would quickly have reconsidered, but it wasn’t. It was everything to me. In fact, I have a desire to show other first time mamas or just more worried mothers that such a beautiful, natural, physiological birth is possible in the hospital. So many natural-birth advocates declare that going to a hospital is your first intervention and will almost certainly doom you to a cascade of interventions and rob you of your birth desires. But that does not have to be the case. I am proof of that! I want to champion that for all moms who choose a hospital, regardless of their reasoning. Some may feel safer there. I did. For some it might be cheaper. For me it was. There are a lot of valid reasons to birth in a hospital and yet hospital births do not have to all look the same. But back to my call with the midwife…
My husband had left the house for a few hours and I decided to call the midwife, just to double check her prices and see how I felt when talking to her. She answered my call right away and I think she said she was in the grocery store. Our phone call was nearly an hour. We discussed her rates, what she offers, her qualifications. She shared some birth stories with me including her most recent transferred birth and the circumstances around it. We bonded over our mutual disappointment in the medicalization of modern birth. Somewhere in the middle of this conversation, my husband came home. I was hoping to gather all the information and present it to him later but, as he tells it, as soon as he knew I was on the phone with a midwife (which he pieced together from my end of the conversation) he knew we were already having a home birth. He could see it on my face that my mind was made up.
It took me a few more days to realize my mind was made up. I reached out to some friends who were planning to or had already had home births of their own. I needed reassurance that I was making the right choice for the right reasons rather than jumping on a fad because of how beautiful it looks on Instagram. I needed to make sure I felt safe with my decision as feeling safe is the number one criteria for having a physiological birth. During this time, I actually realized my own mother had four of her seven children at home with her first being in a birthing center and her last two being in the hospital as they were breech twins. I was in awe of that! The more people I told, the more I expected them to respond with shock or their own fear or even caution, but I seemed to be the only one surprised by my decision.
From the very first visit with the midwife, where she came to my home and sat on my couch as my four year old slept, I felt peace. I felt safe and heard and respected. There wasn’t any sense of fighting for my own rights or advocating for my peace of mind. It was exactly how prenatal care should feel. I realized then it wasn’t that I was opposed to seeing my care provider every week this late in pregnancy. It was that the energy suck that visits to the OB clinic had become just felt like too much. I couldn’t afford that amount of stress every single week as delivery drew closer.
Each week, one of my two wonderful midwives came to my home, talked to me about how I was feeling, took my blood pressure and allowed me to test my own urine for proteins and sugars. They even allowed me to do my own group B strep test! They gave me so much information on GBS and how to treat it homeopathically as well as medically if I did have it (I didn’t). Not once did I feel like I was being pushed into accepting treatment or care I didn’t want. They don’t use language like, “You have to” or “The state requires.” They checked baby’s position through my belly and measured my fundal hight. They recorded my weight and listened to baby’s heartbeat. It was all slow and nurturing and felt like a visit with friends. I actually looked forward to them every single week.
A week after establishing care with this midwife team, in fact, the reason my son was sleeping at home instead of school during that first visit, was because we both came down with the Coronavirus. It was miserable. I was very concerned about what this would mean for my home care, who I should call if I felt I needed help, and how this would affect the baby. For a second, I thought perhaps I had made the wrong choice by transferring out of my OB’s care. Now I couldn’t just call the clinic and ask them where to go if I felt I needed immediate medical attention. The hype around this virus had me so worried about my own well-being as well as my baby’s. I texted my midwives to tell them what was going on, thinking they would want to avoid my house. They didn’t. They gave me an extensive list of homeopathic things to do (vitamins, sunshine, tea, elderberry, etc.) to treat the virus and kept their regularly scheduled appointment with me. They were caring but casual. It made me wonder if my OB clinic would have seen me at all during that time knowing I was testing positive for the virus. Then I started to realize what being covid positive could actually mean if I were planning to deliver in the hospital.
The week before I transferred care, and one of the reason I resolved to just call the midwife, was because our hospital tightened up its visitor policy regarding Covid once again. The specifics didn’t affect me and my desires (they were only allowing one guest with laboring mothers and I only wanted one, my husband) but I became increasingly worried that, over the next two months, if cases continued to rise, they would go a step farther and no longer allow visitors at all! Or what if I was made to labor in a mask? It might seem like a small deal but it certainly wasn’t something I was wanting to have pushed on me while trying to push a baby from my body. They were also, once again, requiring covid tests upon admission (which included labor and delivery) regardless of vaccination status. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that I realized, despite feeling recovered from Covid, I could, and probably WOULD still be testing positive when this baby decided to make his appearance as the virus can stay dormant in my system for up to 90 days. Had I not made the choice to have this baby right here at home, I can only imagine what being covid+ in the maternity ward would have looked like for baby and me. Would they force me to wear a mask? Would I be allowed visitors or a support person? Would I have access to the midwives I so desperately wanted? Would they take the baby from me after birth? Honestly, I don’t know. But now more than ever, I was thankful I did not have to find out.
Instead of watching for early signs of labor and calculating a trip to the hospital, I hung affirmation cards in my bathroom and bedroom. Jon no longer had to worry about delivering his son in the truck on the highway. Instead of worrying about what was in my hospital bag, I organized the space where I will spend the golden hour with my newborn son. I knew that I would be able to move about freely, without monitors or IVs. I would be allowed to eat and drink anything I wanted. And, the best part of all, C was able to be present at the birth of his long awaited brother. He ended up sleeping through the entire birth and met him only hours after birth rather than days. I didn’t have nurses coming in to my postpartum nest every two hours to check vitals, reminding me not to sleep with my own child. I didn’t have to wait for someone else’s permission to get up and take my family home.
We already were home, settling in as a family of five.
XO Beka
Here We Grow 
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