Seven weeks early

I was planning a homebirth. I had two wonderful midwives, no doctor at all. I had even heard Ina May Gaskin speak in person!

But my son decided that he wanted to be born around my extended family rather than in the privacy of my home. I lived in NYC, but that Fourth of July weekend we were in RI, four hours away. My water broke in the backyard on a lawn chair. He chose that moment to come seven weeks early.

I didn’t have the homebirth I planned. Everyone, except me, was scared. I was in the ER, hooked up to machinery; all that. And yet my mind was on the baby about to arrive. The point is that all the reading I had done, all the mental and emotional preparation, made me ready for the big picture, and I did not have to worry about all those little details you just can’t control.

It was a beautiful birth. Maybe not the candles and bath and the walk in the park (literally!) I had imagined, but something beautiful that was truly beyond my imagination.

For any woman who births in a hospital, it is a challenge to keep your peaceful, internal state of mind, to not pay attention to mechanical beeps and the buzz of the fluorescent lights and to strangers coming into the room in a hurry and to focus with a smile on the baby and you.

So do this: Sit up. Walk within the limits of the tubes and wires. Straddle the bed and sway like a bellydancer (figure eights worked so well). Ask for a full-length mirror to be put right in front of you (just a little to the side of whoever is there to catch the baby) and just focus on seeing that head come out.

The only thing more beautiful than the birth experience is my son walking around the world, growing on the outside now. That's a shared joy with him and my family.

Jenn, NYC