I’ve put off writing because I felt I needed time to process what has been going on in my life before I tried to write about it, but eventually I realized that writing may be the only/best way for me to process and work through it.
To start, I had a baby! She’s beautiful, I love her, and I’m so happy that she is now home and healthy. She had a bit of a rough start, and I think this is a big part of me putting off writing about it, because not only is is difficult to think back on the beginning of her life, but also because it may be a bit controversial, and I have a really hard time worrying about people judging me.
You see, we had a home birth, and some people may think that because of that choice, my child ended up in the NICU for four and a half days. However, it is my honest opinion that her hospitalization would have happened had she been born at home or in the hospital.
I had a wonderful labor, and I believe a big part of that was due to the fact that I spent all seven hours of my labor at home, with my husband by my side, in a place that was comfortable and peaceful for me, and with a midwife with so much experience she provided truly the best coaching I could have received. The simple fact is that when baby girl was born, the umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck twice, and the second wrap was pretty tight. My experienced midwife quickly got her untangled- so quickly I only knew it had happened later because someone told me.
The trauma of the tight cord prevented her from getting the first breath she needed, the one that helps clear all the fluid and mucus out of their little lungs, and so for the next few hours she struggled to breathe. Oh, and did I mention that she was born the night we got the worst snowstorm of the year? We carefully drove to the hospital, and because of my wonderful midwife communicating with a doctor there we got to skip the Emergency Room and went straight up to the special care nursery, where her status was clearly communicated to the doctor on call and she quickly received the care she needed.
I won’t go into the full story just now, that’s an entire post in and of itself, but I bring this all up to express that I truly believe everything happened just as it should have, and I am actually extremely satisfied with my entire experience, both with my home birth and with the hospital stay we had. Our doctors and nurses were very informative and treated us like any other patient, for which I am extremely grateful.
I had to go through a lot of self-blame and “what could we have done differently?” to get to this point where I am comfortable sharing a lot of this. I hope that maybe it can help others understand what happened and why home birth isn’t a totally backwoods idea. I was a low risk pregnancy, so it was safe for me. Baby girl never once showed any signs of distress my entire labor, her heart rate was fine the entire time, there was no way we could have known that the cord was going to cause a problem. We never denied her the care she needed in the hospital either though, because we are rational thinking people, and the entire time we were doing what we thought was best for our child.
I think this is the biggest struggle we all find with these types of debates in parenting- in general, everyone is always trying to do what they think is best for their child, but that looks like very different things to different people. Sometimes it’s because of how we were raised, sometimes it’s because of things we’ve read or heard from others, and sometimes it’s purely instinctual.
I really got to see both sides of this particular debate (home or hospital birth), and it has opened my eyes in a lot of ways. I can see aspects of both that I respect and appreciate, and I think it’s helped me to understand others’ decisions on both sides.
Life throws lots of different experiences at us, and I feel the most important thing we can do with those experiences is to grow and use them to be more understanding of others. Hopefully, this post can help you understand me, as my experience has helped me to understand and respect all mothers, no matter how they chose to bring their children into the world.
Notes from a Handmaiden 