Home Birth Story: Welcome Maia
My first two children were born in hospitals, with conventional care, and since I had gestational diabetes with both, I had a lot of interventions. When my husband and I decided to have a third baby, I wanted to do things differently. I Wanted the information I needed to take great care of myself. I wanted to make decisions for myself based on my own good reasoning. So before we tried to get pregnant, we sought out a friend and lay midwife in our area, who puts women fully in charge of their prenatal care, labor, births, and aftercare.
I had a great pregnancy, and managed gestational diabetes at home, without shots and without putting my body through the GD test, which is more sugar than I would ever pour down my throat for any other purpose. Through monitoring with a glucose meter, good diet and exercise, I birthed a healthy, normal sized baby. Maia was born on April 5 of 2005, very early in the morning. I had been having pre-labor contractions every night after dinner for nearly two weeks, but each evening around bed time, the contractions would ease up and I was starting to get really irritable. I wasn’t overdue, but the off and on contractions were wearing on my spirit. I wanted so badly to be one of those patient, it will happen when it happens kind of expectant moms, but it just wasn’t so. Every night contractions would get close to five minutes apart and then slowly taper off. My hopes would get high and then crash.
I have a lot of fear surrounding exams, and I really didn’t want to have even my midwife, whom I trusted and loved, check my cervix. But, my hands are too small to do it myself and finally in desperation I called her to come check me out. I was making good progress. All those pre-labor contractions were doing a lot of work. That helped me relax for a while, but then a few days later, my blood pressure started to rise.
I asked my midwife about natural induction methods, not including breaking my water and she agreed to come sit with me while I tried some herbs, castor oil and bad Chinese food. I have mixed feelings about the effectiveness of herbs and potions for inducement, but it felt good to be proactive. Contractions came and went, but my blood pressure was steadily rising. After about eight hours of slow, mild contractions that just weren’t progressing, my blood pressure was high enough to concern me. However, my birth pool was warm and ready, and being in the water immediately brought me down to reasonable levels, so I spent a couple hours in the pool waiting for things to pick up.
Finally I asked my midwife to break my water, something I was fearful about, but I knew that if I had to head to the hospital because of my blood pressure, breaking my water would be the first thing they would do. It took me almost forty five minutes to work up the bravery to allow my water to be broken, but just a moment later labor was well under way. In fact, I was working so hard that I started to panic. I knew that I couldn’t maintain that level of effort for hours on end. But the midwife reassured me that I wouldn’t have to. She said that I was in transition already, which was hard for me to believe, since I had only been in “serious” labor for about a half hour.
My midwife had respected my need for space and stayed in another room while my husband held my hand through the contractions, but after another fifteen minutes of intense work, I called for her to come in and talk to me through it. Just a few minutes later I felt the urge to push at the end of a contraction. I felt confused because it seemed labor had just begun, but she reassured me that I needed to trust myself. So during the next contraction, I pushed when it felt right and my baby’s head was born, just short of an hour after breaking my water. On the next contraction, her body came and my husband gently pulled her to the surface of the water.
She seemed so small, and perfectly formed. I stayed in the water to birth the placenta, which was much more painful than I had experienced before and it didn’t help that the water was starting to cool off. Thankfully I had a healthy little baby to distract me.
We woke my older daughter and son to come meet their sister, and my son cut the umbilical cord. We got dried off just in time for friends to arrive with snacks and congratulations. Baby started nursing right away, and we decided to forgo most of the normal interventions after birth, like vitamin k, eye drops, and the pku.
At one point an hour or so after the baby was born, I felt that I was bleeding more than I should be and I started to get worried. My midwife checked the bleeding and agreed that it was a bit heavy. Her apprentice administered a dropperful of cinnamon tincture and the bleeding slowed withing a minute or so.
Then an amazing thing happened. I laid down with my baby and fell asleep. We slept for hours, warm and comfortable in our own bed, with no interruptions. To me, that was the most valuable gift of birthing at home!
