Trust birth? Well mostly..........

A little while ago on Facebook, when I was talking about the search for a home, a midwife, and a doula, a woman asked me why I wasn’t considering freebirthing.  As she pointed out, I’ve got more experience in birthing than a lot of other folks around, and have thought very deeply about it all, so why do I feel the need to have a midwife?  The question really sat with me, and I wondered why myself.  I’ve always had a tremendous respect for women and families that freebirth, and for the last 4 births Currawong and I have tossed around the possibility of freebirthing……..but it never really materialised into a realistic proposition for me.  But I’m really glad the question was asked, as ever since it’s been sitting at the back of my brain pan, tumbling around with all my other thoughts, and it’s been an interesting journey following all the threads that come from it. 

In my toolkit of experiences, I’ve had a few run in’s with homebirthing midwives that were less than empowering, and a few with doctors and hospitals as well.  I’ve read books from the Christian fundamentalist right wing about unassisted birth, and how midwives, doctors and all other birth workers just get in the way of what should naturally be a magical experience shared by the mum and dad alone.  And I really related to what was written.  When the books drew attention to the observation that many women focused their oxytocic love, thanks and bonding on the midwife, rather than their mate, I could really see what they were talking about.  There’s so many birth stories I’ve read, where women talk in loving and glowing terms about their midwives, and all their other family members kinda take a back seat to the show.  And there’s a lot of intervention that some midwives get into that is totally unnecessary and just gets in the way, like giving internals, and cutting cords quickly, and catching the baby and ‘giving’ it to the mamma.  And after having a less than positive experience with homebirthing midwives, I really got into this way of looking at midwife led births for a while…….only to get pregnant again, cleanse a lot of my negative juju about midwives by meeting one who listened to me rant and agreed with me, and then was present at our birth in the most unobtrusive way possible, and gave me the gift of ‘catching’ my own baby.  I then went on to become a bit of a homebirthing and midwife advocate, till Balthazar came a long and introduced me to the blessings of western medicine.  And of course in my most recent and publicised birth of twins, Lisa was an integral, necessary, and much loved part of the process, and I definitely had a lot to say about her in my writings.

And while I know the statistics of caesareans in hospitals is incredibly alarming, and I get the whole interventionist dance that often leads to caesareans, as well as the scare mongering that happens from doctor folks when homebirth or natural birth is suggested…..I’ve had some really empowering, respectful, and peaceful births in hospitals too.  My main beef with hospitals has been their overwhelming attitude that birth is fraught with danger, and that birth belongs in the same corridors as deathly illnesses, physical trauma, great sickness and slow death.  I’ve got a bit of a problem too, with how the trend in hospitals at the moment is to separate mamma’s and babies, and that whole invasive separation they do with cleaning, testing, jabbing needles etc.  Kinda doesn’t really aid in a gentle welcome, compassion for a little being who’s been living in a controlled, peaceful and watery womb, and bonding.  Also, how it’s really hard to feel safe and cave like, and tap into a woman’s mammalian brain, in the sterile and bright environment of a hospital ward.   But then again, if a woman is really afraid of birth and what might happen, maybe for her a hospital is the safe place that she needs to be able to fully relax into the birthing process?  Afterall, even though much ado is made of interventionist practices in hospital, there are still a huge amount of women who birth naturally and without drugs in them.

To be brutally honest, I don’t think either camp has all the answers, or even all the questions, and I think that both homebirthing midwives and their supporters, and hospital birth workers and their supporters are two halves of the same whole.  Very antagonistic and despising of each other halves, but halves nonetheless.  And while they’re stuck in this anti each other and polarising dance for the soul of birth, a lot of women, children, families and individuals on both sides of the track are being overlooked, seriously neglected, and damaged in the process.  On the one side we have the birth trusting, all women have been beautifully designed to birth naturally, and by the way we’ve been doing it for thousands of years, so hospitals and doctors should just get back in their boxes, and take their hands off birth, and leave us all to do it peacefully at home approach, that also makes a fair deal about the scaremongering of doctors and obstetricians, and how a lot of their ‘facts’ are lies.  And then on the other side we have the medical approach that points to the harm that can come to unprepared women and families facing an emergency situation at home, and perhaps a long way from a hospital, as well as some of the dangers that can be faced when there’s an un-regulated body of birth workers attending births at home.  There’s also the body of information they hold about the dangers of birth, and how fraught birth HAS been in our history.  Yes many women pushed out babes on the fields and kept going, but a lot of them experienced babies getting stuck, and dying, and cords around necks stopping them from being born, and a hundred other possibilities that can and do happen even in these days of improved diet and hygiene and birth trusting.  But unfortunately, it’s the mainstream medical model that has the weight of the government and legal practitioners behind them, willing to send the horses of the apocalypse after homebirthers, and resulting in an unfairly balanced war effort on behalf of the hospital birthing scene.    

And the result of this antagonistic polarising dance in my opinion anyway, is causing many a casualty in the self esteem and bonding of families and birthing women across the board.  Unsuprisingly, with the amount of kids bounding around us every time we’re in public, a lot of my conversations with people we come across revolve around birth and kids.  And I’m really saddened that a lot of women respond to my stories with half ashamed accounts of how they weren’t brave enough to try birthing at home, or they tried and just couldn’t cut it, or they used every drug they possibly could because they were so afraid, or they didn’t have any option because their pelvis was too small, or they had health complications, or they had a natural birth and it traumatised them, or they suffered post natal depression, or a million other reasons why they didn’t give birth in either the wholistic, alternative accepted manner, or the hospital, mainstream accepted manner.  And these women all take it onto themselves, as their own fault, as their own body failing them in birth, as their inability to birth ‘properly’ being all their own doing, as an experience that happened to them that was less than they hoped, the result of which, can put some serious bricks in the wall of their lack of self esteem and body confidence, which then leeches from their parenting confidence, and sense of connection with their families, and becomes part of the general body of stories around birth that go unacknowledged from either side of the polarised fence, as it doesn’t fit appropriately into their accepted picture of what birth is.

I see so many women and families in pain around their birthing experiences, that I’ve taken to saying something like this to them….. 

“Ya know what darlin?  There is no ‘perfect’ birth, birth just is what it is.  Every one is different, and every birth is perfect if you let it be, no matter whether it was at home or in the hospital.  And we haven’t been designed perfectly to give birth, cause we CHANGED OUR DESIGN!!  When we decided to grow our frontal lobes and walk upright we changed our design from the less problematic mammalian birth canals that were straight, and we turned them into this twisty birth canal that can really cause problems.    And babies had to be born a year premature, which meant they couldn’t walk like all the other mammal babies, so mother nature had to create a tricksy system of oxytocic rewards if we held them to us and fed them when they were hungry, so they weren’t eaten by dogs or stolen by other tribes.  You just need to be true to yourself and do what feels good for you, cause that’s all that counts really.  Trying to birth or parent in any kind of way because that’s what you’ve been told is ‘right’ is never gonna work, cause it doesn’t carry the weight of your belief and life experience.  Don’t let anyone tell you what to do, and listen to yourself and your new baby whose instincts haven’t been convinced otherwise yet, and all will be fine…”

Or something like that anyway. 

Cause the biggest casualty in the war over birth is birth itself.  And it is a war, and quite a vicious one at times.  Nastiness and personal attacks are hurled by both sides, personalities especially associated with either camp singled out for horrific attention, and it seems that no-one’s getting the law of attraction proven by quantum physics, that you get more of what you focus on!  And my own personal experience that you become what you hate is also coming into this equation.  No one is winning anything, except for long drawn out battle plans being enacted, and a lot of energy being spent on the fight.  And a whole lot of people are losing, their integrity, their passions, their experiences being validated, and their sense of self worth.  Sometimes it seems to me that the fight just takes up too much space.

In an ideal world, both halves of birth would come together and hold hands instead.  Doctors and obstetricians would study their own sciences, especially that of Ethnopaediatrics and the beautiful works of Dr Sarah Buckley, Leboyer, Michel Odent, and all the others who’ve championed gentle and welcoming births, and provide birthing centres all over the world that allowed lesser and greater influences of homebirth and hospital birth depending on the blend required by the families that use them.  And homebirthing midwives who feel drawn to the trade, will work co-operatively with them in partnership and backup, so that all the potentialities of birth can be dealt with effectively and cohesively.  And the women and families entering the mysterious world of birth will have equal access to all the different perspectives and possibilities available, and have free access to whatever option works for them, based on their life experience and deeply held beliefs.  And imagine what we could do with all the energy focused on this war if the war dissolved!!  If the polarity that exists melted into a whole, there would be no ‘taboo’ subjects left anymore, so women walking into birth for the first time could explore the possibilities of natural caesareans for example, and alternative forms of pain relief, and maybe, just maybe, we could also focus our attention on what happens AFTER birth, a largely ignored realm in many birthing circles.  We focus on the conception, the pregnancy, the hormones, the birth and all it’s possibilities, but what happens after?  What about the importance of bonding?  The exhaustion many women feel after entertaining family hours after birthing? How to fold cloth nappies?  How to deal with sibling rivalry?  How to deal with the issues of step parenting?  How to address problems that occurred during the birth and set up patterns that aren’t life enhancing?  How to ‘unlearn’ survival skills that we’ve been taught by our parents that don’t help us survive, and in fact may be really stuffing us up?  I can think of worlds that we could be spending our collective energy on that would be far more rewarding than the argy bargy between hospital and home birthing.

So to get back to the original question, I guess that on deep contemplation, I’d have to say that I trust birth implicitly metaphysically, but not completely physically.  I’m aware of the things that can go wrong, and that HAVE gone sideways for me in my experiences, and when I’m in that intensely vulnerable and ‘elsewhere’ state of engaging in the age old dance of birth, I really like someone around to hold my hand, and who I know will cover my back.  Someone who isn’t Currawong and my family, who are caught up with their own experience, but who is there to just focus on me and the baby inside me coming out safely.  Someone who knows enough about the intricacies of birth to be able to fix any solvable problems at home, and also to get us the hell out of there and to a hospital on time if that’s what is needed.  And I’m so greatful for the folk that spend years in university learning how to help me and others when we really need them in hospitals, as well as the midwives who dig into the past to find old ways of birthing, as well as making alternative information available as well.  I’m greatful for all birthworkers really, and see the value in all their work and ideas.  I just wish it was something that they and others could see mutually and in themselves as well.

But that’s just my perception of birth, and the best way to do it, and when it comes down to it, I’d argue for anyone else’s perceptions till I’m blue in the face, cause that’s what it’s all about to me.  The combination of all our experiences and perceptions are equally valid and enhancing if taken that way, to the whole.  And if we put em all together and respect them all, we have a really healthy blueprint for the evolution of us all and our consciousness so we can USE those frontal lobes we traded easier births for, to help our planet and ourselves move beyond this warring and fighting over who’s right and wrong that happens in every sector, and move into an evolution of love, respect, peace and freedom for every single thing in the universe.  I’ll keep dreaming it up………

The left out bits......

Surprisingly.........ha........with the event of twins in my life, not to mention leaving the community we were living on and witnessing our crushed dreams laying in the mud..........I've neglected to mention some things that have happened in the last year or so.  And I figure that now that I'm pregnant again, and we're about to set off into the wild blue yonder with who knows what adventures on the way, I should tell you about some of those left out bits before I create too much of a backlog.  

The first and most impressive (I think) is that I'm going to be part of a book called Positive Birth Journeys, edited by a really groovy woman with huge dedication and integrity, Leonie MacDonald.  If I'd had the twins before I got accepted in this book, I bet she would have wanted that story, but as it was, she wanted the story of my caesarean with Balthazar....which by all accounts is a pretty groovy one.  Not many people talk about how good their caesarean was.  If you want to know more about the book, you can visit  http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/birthjourneys  I'm really looking forward to seeing my name in a real book that people can buy in a bookshop!  Bit of a lifelong dream thata one. 

Another thing that happened about 2 months or so before the babies were born, was that I was part of an exhibition called 'Unravelled' at Red Poles in McLaren Vale.  The trip was that we had to find a jumper in an op shop or somewhere, pull it apart, and make a tea cosy out of it.  I wish I could find the picture of the jumper I bought and pulled apart, but for the life of me I can't!  And of course, me being me, the tea cosy ended up being rather sculptural, and you'd definitely be excused for wondering what the hell it really was, but I liked it:) 

As I made it I thought it looked a lot like one of the trees in The Magic Roundabout - ever watched that as a kid?  So I made 7 flowers to hang around the base of it, and called it Ermintrude's (she was the Friesian cow) Trea Cosy.  I thought I was very clever.  The staff at Red Poles were awesome, and there was one woman who'd had twins herself, and she was incredibly sweet and understanding with me.  And she asked me to just bring everything I'd made and all my clothes along too, and made room for it all, and it looked really groovy. 

And you wanna know the funny thing?  The big irony??  I had a teddy bear that was stuffed with the same fleece it was spun and crocheted from, and a hat on a triangular stand, and another hat called the Tree Hat on a magic puddingesque stand (they're all on the stand on the left), and a big 7 ft stand with sleeves on it that folk call The Uterus, with a big spray of emu feathers off finger like appendages on the top (that one's on the right), and a bird cape with raw fleece needle felted on the bottom, and belly dancing outfits and skirts, and hugs, and all sorts of other designer innovations....all things that I'd put a huge amount of work and inspiration and creativity into......and those three hanging wool bags in the middle on the wall, that I'd made for decorations for Tribal Fibres, that had as much inspiration as...well.....as a decoration that I'd just run off because there was a gap on the stage that needed to be filled......and guess what I sold?  Of all my designer creations, and sculptures, and not to mention the trea cosy.......I sold the wool bags.  I'd thrown them on in with everything else as a last minute thought, called them 'Pendulous', and they did look great, but it made me laugh.  A kinda almost sad wry laugh, but laugh I did.  I think I'll just have to be content with being ahead of my time, and stop expecting so much from my woolly creations from now on:)

And meanwhile, back on the community, the kids were having all sorts of fun, roaming around the gorgeous red gum treed acres, swimming in the dam, playing with the chooks.....

  

Running all sorts of experiments about what happens when you chip rocks and crystals apart, and what happens when you rub mud all over yourself, and what different colours of mud look like dried, and a million other things that I can't remember now, but I'm always suprised and amazed with what they come up with for fun......

And then there were our excursions out and about.....

 



We went on lots of trips to the botanic gardens and spent hours upon hours upon hours wandering round with our nature delighted kids.  They took a lot of these photos.  We spent almost a day just in the cactus garden, and then another whole day sniffing the roses in their huge rose garden. 

If we're ever stuck for something to do, the Museum, Art Gallery, State Library or the Botanic Gardens are alway sure to please everyone.  It's such a blissfull thing to walk amongst such huge, eccentric and amazing living creatures as the plants that reside there.....

And onetime we found an amazing tree that was an awesome backdrop for my incredibly photogenic family... 

And then there was the day when they were all fighting and yelling at each other, and there were heaps of people around on the community, and I was aware that one of the community members thought that the amount of noise they made meant they had no 'internal furniture'.....still can't work out what that meant...so they had no internal lounges and wardrobes??  Do they need them??  Anyway, I wanted them to be a bit quieter, so I called them all to me and asked them what we could make on the property, from things that we could find on the ground........it took them a bit of conjecture to work out what they wanted to do, which was another part of the collective problem solving to yelling at each other, and before they all knew it, they'd hatched a plan, and we spent a blissfull day in the sun creating a village.

First off, the ever pragmatic Lilly made a garden right in the centre, and Griff started making roads and creating dwellings, while Spiral-Moon got a plastic plant pot and sunk it in the ground for the water tank.  Then she made a composting toilet, while Lilly moved onto making tee pee like structures from bark.

There's a bit of Spiral-Moon near one of them......



And Griff behind the same one.  I was so incredibly impressed with their creativity, and the sensibleness of their village plan!  Garden, then water, then a toilet, THEN the houses....love it.  And it was so groovy for all of us to be involved in the creativity.....Griff in particular took a big part in creating awesome buildings.  And the challenge of making it from what we could find on the ground was awesome. 

Here's Griff making a roof on sticks, a house without walls, and off to the right was a big half circle of stone that he'd used to make the front of a house for the elders and the magicians to live in.

And I know it's not showing a house or anything, but I loved this photo of Lilly, in her inimitable Lilly style of skirt wearing.....

Here's an overview of the town, with the garden in the middle, two tee pees on either side, and the stone is the elders house, and above the garden and to the left is a sunken house with a bark roof that Griff created, and actually became a real idea for a design of building a house into a hill....he was so wrapped that an idea he'd had was picked up by us adults as a 'legitimate' idea for a dwelling.

Here's a clearer picture of that elders house I was telling you about....on the right....

And here's the bay that was made later, and a little boat that Griff made and sailed on the dam, resting on the plank....bit hard to see.....and it's a shame we didn't get a proper photo of it, but way over behind the village was a bush with a small hole at the bottom, and we decided a bunyip lived there, and Griff made a sign that said 'Please respect the Bunyip', and we also built it a pool......
 

 And here's me sitting in the general site, with twins in my belly, in love with my beautiful creative children, and generally pleased with myself that I'd turned yelling into such an amazingly productive and learning filled day:)

So that's just a snippet of some of the things that were happening around my twin pregnancy, and that didn't quite make it to my blog.  Next up I'm gonna try and make a video to put on here and give you all a tour of the van that I've been busily redecorating.  And the swags that I've made.  Or something like that anyway.......



 Oh!  And I just remembered!  I also played cello on a cd that was produced by a friend of mine!!   Got my name on that one too:)  Might start getting addicted to this sort of thing......

After Birth - But that's not all.......

So.

Last post I was talking about how I've learnt about the evolutionary adaptations our bodies have gone through to create the baby/adult experience and relationships we have today, and how in my experience, we live out the patterns we learn in our wombs, birth, and infancy, with the survival imperative that all the other animals follow.  A very scientific, instinctual, evolutionary, and behavioural approach.

But that's not all there is to it, is it?

There's also the soul, fate, destiny, spirit, consciousness, collective soul, and all other things spiritual that come into it, isn't there.  Not to mention all the 'scientific' examples of thought creating reality that Quantum Physics has highlighted, that are surprisingly similar to the wisdom of Lao Tsu and Chief Seattle.  Not to mention the discoveries in genetic science, that tell us that we share the same DNA as every other living thing in our world - about 11,000 libraries worth of information contained within every strand of DNA - and the blueprints for creating every single living thing on the planet.

I've always tried to treat my babies as I would want to be treated if I was in a helpless body, with my consciousness intact.   And I've had a lot of reason to be supported in that belief.  When I was pregnant with mine and Currawong's first son, my 9 year old daughter from a previous life was not too impressed about his choice of birthday.  He was due on the same day as her.  She vowed to hate him forever if he was born on her birthday...so he wasn't.  But that wasn't all, she also had 10 days after her birthday of special events that she didn't want to miss due to birthing, and vowed to hate him equally for all of them. So he wasn't born on any of them.  In fact he waited till the morning of the very next day after her last 'special' day, to gently start his journey to the world.  In the evening when the expansions were 5 minutes apart and I started contemplating leaving the bath at home and travelling to the hospital, I rang my mother to come and be part of the birth.  She was an hour away.  From the moment I got off the phone, my expansions went back to 10 minutes apart, and as soon as she walked through the door they went back to 5 minutes......  I spent a gentle, musical, laughing, and peopled birth journey in the spa bath at the hospital, telling everyone how very considerate this little baby was.

Our second child's birth was no less special in teaching us very different lessons about bonding and it's importance, and the whole experience kinda suited Lilly's nature and personality in a way that made the whole thing make sense in retrospect. Spiral-Moon's birth created a mad dash by us up north to buy a house that we basically birthed in and then left, and was perfect in every way for her in particular.  And with Balthazar, we were going to freebirth in another state, and were living in a isolated house that was to be ravaged by the terrible fires in Victoria.  Just before he was born, we changed round completely, came back home to family support, and were living on a community to have our caesarean baby in the best possible way, and with the best possible support, instead of living through a hellish fire.  And with the recent birth of my twins, not only did they choose to be born on different days, but these boys are completely different.  One's eating hand over fist, and the other is still purely breastfed.  They sleep at different times, and in all ways are two separate babies, with separate needs, happening at the same time.  In fact, funnily enough considering my last post, these two babies have completely rolled all over all my smug judgements about how 'continuum' and 'attachment' babies perform.  They don't sleep....EVER....day or night, and they scream their guts out for no particular reason, even while they're being held, fed, and co-slept with day and night.  In many ways they fit completely within the framework of my last post, and in many other ways they don't at all.

There's been a spiritual, conscious, 'fatefull', and destined element in all of our experiences, and birthing, and children.  Which is contradictory to the perspectives of my recent post about the evolutionary and behavioural elements of birthing right??

Well maybe to some folk yes indeed, but to me.....no, not at all.

I've come to the realisation that there really aren't any 'truths' at all, just an infinite universe of possibilities.  And a whole heap of people with differing experiences, 'truths', perspectives and opinions, that they base on their own experience, and argue with others versions of 'truth', with all the born again zeal of a mammal trying to apply the survival skills they got from their parents. And there's also their spirit, or collective consciousness that is leading them down a merry path that may be not at all what they expect, and may even challenge their 'truths' regularly.

And I've developed this concept of 'composite truths'.  Or a truth, that contains more than one perspective, science or whatever, and maybe even many - some of which can be completely diametrically opposed - that are all equally true.

To explain a bit more......when I look at Ethnopaediatrics, evolution, attachment and continuum parenting, and our survival skills that we learn from our parents, it all makes complete sense to me, and I can see the relevance to it in my life.  And when I look at us mob as a collection of souls, here to learn our own particular trips, and all the delightfully magic little episodes that have occured throughout my life, that bring me to the belief that I'm always in the right place at the right time, doing the right thing.......that also makes complete sense and is relevant to my life also.  I tried for ages to decide on ONE approach or the other, and couldn't quite do it.  I swung from one perspective to the other, and there was always something that didn't quite fit completely into the picture.  But put them both together, (and don't sweat the contradictions or paradoxes, cause they're the nature of the universe), and it's PERFECT!!!  Room for both perspectives with a huge potential to expand in any direction.

I reckon there's a lot of areas in our lives that get swamped or avoided or stressed about forever because we try so hard to fit our experience into a pre-packaged box of belief.  Whether that's 'science' or 'religion', or 'evolution' or 'creationism' or 'right' or 'wrong' or 'good' or 'bad'.....  The dualistic arguments go on for ever.  But what if there was no box?  What if you could just mash em all together to get the particular colour of the rainbow that matches the colour of your experience?

The first time I really experienced this was when I was about 17, sitting in the back yard of my sister's friends house, having left home under police escort a year beforehand due to an abusive step-father.  Since I'd left, I couldn't quite settle on what I thought about him.  I hated him for what he'd done to my family, what he'd done to my sister, what he'd done to my life, but I also loved him, for the patience and care he'd shown me, and the protection he gave me from my rough older brothers.  He  noticed my sensitivity and creativity before anyone else.  And I just couldn't decide on how to look at him, how to deal with the situation, and whether I should love or hate him.  And I still remember to this day, and it was like trying to swim through glue, but as I sat out on the lawn in the sun it crystalised in my head.  I could do both.  I could love and hate him all at the same time.  And in finding that middle road I also found peace.

 I've applied this approach of 'composite truths' to many area's and decisions in my life, and it's always resulted in a delicious middle road, peace, and some very interesting theorising and philosophising.

It's an approach I can highly reccomend. 

The story continues…..

So. A brief recap. We’d all got a bit stressed about the lateness of the second twin, then decided to sleep on it for a bit. I couldn’t sleep, and lay in bed listening to the sounds of Currawong clearing out the birthing pool, clearing the energy of the first birth, and making way for the second….

By the time I realized that no sleep was going to happen, I came out to a cleared and cleaned space, and a Currawong with a mission. He set about making food and starting to deal with the kids that were waking up. “Is there another baby yet?”…..”No, not yet”. Everyone slowly woke and we all hung out on the lounges chatting about what to do now. It’s amazing how a little bit of sleep can turn a desperate situation into one more manageable. Lisa decided to go off and do a bit of research on twin births and ring some old and trusted midwife friends, and we decided to give Russell Smith the Ayurvedic masseur a ring and see if he could help.

I consider myself extremely honoured to call Russell and Alison friends, he drums with Currawong and they inspire the hell out of each other, and is what I call a real healer. He swears, doesn’t read, smokes cigarettes, and doesn’t pull any of the ‘my shit don’t stink’ crap that so many ‘healers’ and ‘gurus’ I’ve known in my past push. He’s real, and honest, and calls a spade a spade, and has people come to him from all over the world, cause what he does really works. Alison is one of those women who makes you just wanna crawl into her lap and get lashings of mother love. She creates beautiful spaces and foods and moods, and giggles and laughs all the while. A more generous couple are hard to find. And bless their hearts, and may love and beauty rain on their heads forever more, within half an hour they were here. They just came. Russell straight away got to work on me, and Alison lay next to me chatting, spreading ease of mind like a balm. Russell started reading my body and telling me what was going on. It turns out my body had decided that it’s job was done! That was birth wasn’t it? Push one baby out and it’s over! My womb had blockages, and my uterus hadn’t contracted down, so even though baby number 2 was head down and ready to go, there was no punch from my uterus to help him out. A whole stack of fear had also locked itself in with the blocked womb, and it was all just stuck. He was massaging my feet and it HURT! And then he did all sorts of other work on my legs and by the time he got back to the bit that had hurt, it didn’t hurt anymore.

Meanwhile Lisa had come back from her research trip, Alison was pottering around cleaning the house, doing dishes and the like, and Russell got Currawong down to give him a work over too. We were all gobsmacked when Lisa reported that she’d found a statistic about the average amount of days between twins being born as 47 days….. It seems that many twins are born prematurely, and when one comes out early, they do their best to keep the second one in for as long as possible. She’d also bounced what was happening off some trusted advisors, and they all agreed that while I was healthy, and the baby  inside was healthy, there was no ‘normal’ time for twins to be born. In fact, in the days before hospital births became the norm, it was not uncommon at all for twins to be born days or even weeks apart. It’s only since birth has entered the treadmill of a hospital schedule that the second twin has only been allowed half an hour to make their own entry, before the birthing woman is induced to bring them on.

Peri-natal psychologists and midwives I’ve talked to have all found that quite often babies who are dragged into life by their legs and arms as in the case of caesareans, or induced to be born at more convenient times, set up life patterns of feeling like they’re being dragged through life against their will. Like they’re never on time to do the right thing, and that people around them are always overshadowing them and making decisions for them against their will. It seems quite stunning to me in the light of such logical conclusions about how birth sets us up for life, that we do anything apart from gentle welcomes to the world, with the mother, baby and family all being respectfully honoured in their journey.

But back to the story. I reckon I’m fortunate to be one of the few women in a western world at this point in our history, to experience the reality of having just given birth to a baby, but needing to put that baby to the side with other people holding it in the hours following the birth, because I had another baby inside me that needed to be birthed as well. I kept looking at Max and realizing that if he was a ‘singleton’ (a rather dubious term in my opinion((sounds to me like ‘simpleton’)), coined by mothers of ‘multiples’, to describe single baby’s…), I’d be holding him and staring at him and RESTING!! But it wasn’t to be. During the time that Currawong was getting a massage, my uterus started contracting. It was like the after pains you get after birthing that get more intense the more babies you have. I thought it was birthing contractions at first, till I tried moving like I did with contractions and it hurt more….I had to stay completely still for uterine contractions it seemed. Before Russell left he told me that “it would go like a bullet now..” I liked his metaphor. We were all relieved and felt like the whole experience was a lot more ‘normal’. We told Lisa she should head home and get some supplies and have a rest…none of us had expected it would be going this long! Not long after the blessed couple left, Lisa headed home for a while too. We all agreed that we were part of 2 separate births, and all was totally normal and fine.

There was a gentle and graceful pause in events for a bit of a breather. We hung out with Max and the other kids, and Currawong and I went walking round the property to walk through the contractions moving the uterus down, that slowly morphed into starting to contract a baby out. We stopped off to have a chat with some fellow community dwellers on the way, keeping them up to date with what was going on. It’s all a bit of a haze to me now, and was even receding quickly at the time, as I was still in that intense timeless space you go to in birthing. Come to mention that space, I was really into goddess chants for the sound track of these births, and had about 6 on repeat throughout the whole 49 hours…. Except for when Currawong created diversions around the fact that other music was on. For me in that timeless space it was wonderful…repetitive…. meditative…. reassuring. For everyone else it was mind numbingly annoying, but bless them all, nobody said anything to me till days after it was all over. Just ask Lisa how she likes goddess chants now……

And like Russell predicted, it did indeed progress like a bullet. Steady strong contractions that moved rhythmically in a mathematical dance through time scales to really close together. Around 9 that night I rang Lisa again, and told her that it was all on again. She got here quickly and the birth journey continued steadily till 12 that night.

When Balthazar woke up crying and wanting to jump in the pool, and Max also woke up for a feed.

It would have to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life – to be in the middle of intense birthing, contractions about 3 minutes apart, and have a crying toddler, as well as a newborn baby wanting a feed……. It totally threw me. I slipped into sergeant major mode, instructing Currawong, mum and Lisa to “take Max from me now!”, as I was about to have a contraction, and then “bring him to me now!”, as I quickly fed him before the next wave hit. Poor mum almost tripped while holding him, I had her running round so much.

Once the worst of the crisis was over, Max back asleep and the decision made to let Balthazar just hang out, I found myself at that time and intensity just before the body gets ready to push, and got scared again. I was feeling washes of memory from when I was birthing Balthazar, and he was held up so high by the cord round his neck that he could only lower his bum so far, which was lucky, cause if he had engaged he would have been strangled. But during the time of trying to bring a breech baby on, I’d stuck my fingers inside myself and been able to feel his soft squishy skin, but he never came out that way, he was cut out by caesarean instead. So I was having flash backs, and exhausted, and awake for two days previous, and at that full on time in birth when I knew it was almost over, and it wasn’t happening. My body had birthed Max so beautifully and easily on it’s own, I just had to step back and let it happen. But my body wasn’t effortlessly pushing this baby out. I started getting full of fear again. What if this was as far as we could get on our own and had to transfer our whole show on the road and to the hospital? What would they say to a baby that had been born two days before and another inside me? Had we come so far only to end up in another emergency caesarean experience? Were all my fears about not being able to perform coming to fruition?

Everyone else was equally tired, and trying their best to keep my flagging spirits up, but I started to get stalked by fear again. My body wasn’t taking over the show and letting me sit back in the directors seat anymore. I could feel that everything was in place, but rather than just submit to strong contractions to hug my second baby out, I found I had to physically push and grunt and yell and scream and WORK to get the second baby down the birth passage. After about 12 at night, when Max and Balthazar woke, I felt like the whole process flagged. Then the fear hit, and at about 1 in the morning I realized that my fears were actually having a physical impact on this part of the birth journey. I told Lisa to remind me to tell her what was happening for me around that time, because I didn’t want to speak it and give it power. But at about 2 in the morning I was still pushing hard, yelling and grunting, and we were still getting nowhere. I slipped down again. In this roller coaster of a birth story, this bit was the hardest and darkest.

Around this time everyone else was off doing stuff, and it was just Lisa by the side of me in the pool. She knew what was going on. I broke my promise to myself to not tell her about the fear again until after the baby was born, and told her what was happening for me. She looked me in the eye and said in a voice full of compassion and feeling, that she was really sorry that the whole caesarean experience had happened to me. And it was really good to hear. Made me cry….. 

After all the working out and about and around and through my caesarean experience, this felt like a final let go. I surprised myself, and maybe her too, with coming right back with all the reasons why I was glad that it had happened, and how many of my birthing fears I’d faced through that time that I’d survived, and the compassion and  understanding I now felt for other women who had caesareans, instead of the smug homebirthcentric perception I’d had before, and how much I’d learnt about myself and my body, and all of a sudden the show seemed to be back on the road! There was nothing left to fear I remembered! I’d dealt with what I’d been given before and only gained learning and insight, so no matter what happened now, I knew I had the skills and the ability to gracefully travel through it. This little moment didn’t miraculously change the whole situation into a movie like dream ending, but it certainly gave me the ‘oomph’ I needed to keep grunting, and yelling, and pushing my second baby out. No beat-poet, hippy birth this time! I reckon from about 12 at night till 4.05am when my second baby was born were the hardest, longest, scariest and most physically and emotionally intense hours of my life. It seemed to take forever. And then some. 

And then just a little bit more. 

And not to forget the last bit. 

And the bit in the middle.

I think you get the point.

And then at 4.05 in the morning of Monday the 23rd of August, 49 hours after my waters broke to begin the entry of Maxamillion, a little baby was born in the sac. Which burst just before coming out. It was like opening the most amazingly soft, velvety present I’ve ever been given, pulling the membranes from the head and trying to work out which gender we’d been gifted with. Like I said before, all the odds were on a girl baby being the second one out of my womb. Through the birth I’d been mentioning fairly solidly how my ‘little witch girl’ was on her way, and wondering what she’d look like, and telling ‘her’ to hurry up………..the first thing I said was, “It’s not a boy is it!?!?!”

It was.

Hale, healthy and hearty, a big sized boy with a round head from being born in the sac, and the largest baby I’ve ever pushed through my birth canal. At the end of a long birthing and previous baby born. Born in the water and at home, without any need to disrupt the bubble and go anywhere after they were born. After pulling off his sac, and holding him to my breast like I always do, I got some time to look at him. He looked like Burt bloody Newton. It took me a little while to get over that one.

Griffyn had woken up just before he was born, and came out as he was being caught. Balthazar was watching, wrapped up completely in the experience, Jess, Oma and Lisa were all around the pool, and Currawong was standing behind me. I was on such a high, it was OVER! And had been ultimately allright…. The end of my birthing career was a roaring success. Now it was done I started to feel quite euphoric. Tired, but euphoric. I went to sit on the lounge with him, (the name Merlin Radbod didn’t quite make it till a few days later), and did that staring thing I do after a baby is born. The placenta was born, and it was finally and completely over. We had a homebirth, waterbirth of twins, a VBAC (Vaginal Birth After Caesarean), grand multiparous, epic, that had a happy ending.

And here’s the weird thing. Lisa hadn’t been able to work out why the first umbilical cord of Max’s had kept pumping blood, and had gone to a serious amount of effort to ensure it was kept clamped. And the reason why was that there was only one placenta. Non identical twins are meant to have separate placenta’s, and if they do join up, you can see where they’ve merged. No fusion line or connection of two separate placenta’s was evident, it was just one enormous placenta with two umbilical cords and a membrane between the two boys. And had kept pumping through Max’s detached cord. How bizarre is that……

Now at this point you may be tempted to say that no wonder it worked out so well, as I was an experienced mother of 5, and Lisa was an experienced midwife of decades, and of course we were trusting birth and being zen with the whole situation, but you’d be mistaken. We both had serious limits being tested and boundaries being pushed. And were worried until the very end. But maybe both a little prone also, to hoping for the best. And it paid off for us all.

So. Successful outcome of two healthy babies, happy family and midwife, and a homebirth to boot, and Lisa sweeps through the house like a spring morning breeze and makes sure that everyone’s settled and covered and warm and fed and happy and packed and headed off home, and JUST as she left, the other girls started to wake and I looked around in despair, suddenly completely and thoroughly exhausted, and completely daunted by the beginning of another noisy day in our home. My big 17 year old Jess walked up and demanded Merlin, told Griffyn to take Max, instructed mum to take the three other kids to her house for the day, and told us we could sleep while her and Griffyn looked after the babies. And through serendipity and providence, we all got some well earned sleep.

And it was really good.

The Natural Birthing of Twins

I walked into this birth knowing that I occupied many high risk categories – being 39 years of age, having had a caesarean 21 months beforehand, being a ‘grand multiparous’ woman, (or a woman who has birthed more than 5 times), as this birth would be of my 6th and 7th children, and high risk just because I was having twins. I also knew that if I went anywhere near a doctor or hospital, a great and negative deal would be made of all these factors, and I would be experiencing a totally medicalised birth, not allowed anywhere near the water that I love and need to birth in, monitored the whole time, and induced if the second twin took longer than half an hour to be born after the first twin. I also knew that I’d have to struggle to be able to hold my twins after they were born, work hard to keep them out of the nursery, and fight strongly to be able to keep my 21 month old Balthazar with us in hospital, as he was not ready to be separated from us at night yet.

And I realized straight away that to avoid all this, and be able to stay at home and follow birth’s ancient journey, I’d need to employ the services of an experienced, groovy, birth trusting midwife. And that midwife was Lisa Barrett. I’d wager that if I’d gone with anyone else, the outcome to this story would have been very different indeed……

My last birth taught me a lot. Not least being a deep respect for fear, and a respect for the experiences of many many women in our culture who experience medical births. I found that almost every week, another layer of my most recent caesarean birth experience peeled away to be closer examined, worked through, and cleared, to make way for my upcoming birth of twins. And I had 4 other natural birthing experiences to call on! What courage must women have, who have had a caesarean as their first birthing experience, and go on to face their fear and strive for a natural birth afterwards!?!? I was more nervous coming up to this birth than I’d ever been before, and more aware of all the things that could go wrong. The normal birthing fears (will they be stillborn? Disabled? Need intervention?) seemed magnified, not to mention a big fear that my body wouldn’t be able to travel birth’s path gracefully, and that my fear would disable my ability to cope with what happened. I was also well aware that I was entering the twilight zone, with a whole heap of wierd seven things going on.....  Being the seventh child of two seventh children, about to have my sixth and seventh children, and almost a pure Friesian, Currawong part Friesian, a country with a flag that has 7 blue and red stripes with 7 red love hearts.....  And the biggest thing that messed with my head was how I’d ‘positive thought’ my way through my previous pregnancy – focusing on an ECO or Easy Comfortable Orgasmic birth, sure I was having a girl, and we’d already named her too – Faye Wildcat. Needless to say, I got it wrong on all points, and have come to realize for myself that our thoughts really do create our reality……except for the random factor, where things happen that maybe you need rather than want. Apart from my head wounds, my body was capably and beautifully carrying twins, and I astounded my alternative health practitioners with how healthy, robust, and well my body was operating. The twins spent the entire pregnancy in Yin and Yang position – one with it’s head down, and one in breech position. From the different heart rates, Lisa predicted that one would be a boy and one a girl, which was a prediction that many people, us included, favoured. She also predicted that the baby in breech position would nicely turn over to be head down once the first twin was out. Lisa came to visit regularly, and proved a wise midwife indeed, as nearly every time she came she offered me a different way to approach my fears, or a nugget of information that helped my journey.

Late pregnancy was heavy, ponderous, and intensely inward, and a heavy case of thrush came in the last weeks making life itchy and sore. Coming up to 38 weeks I was in that weird inbetween place, where I was hoping for it to happen soon, but really glad that it wasn’t yet, all at the same time. Had a bit of a false start where I thought it was happening, and surprised myself at how well I coped when it came to it, which helped me feel better about the fears that had been plaguing me. And then came the night of the 20th, where we were both feeling ready as we could be, and I even felt well enough to indulge in some love making. Currawong reckons he knew exactly what we were doing that night, and what would be the result, but I didn’t have the same premonition. At 3am in the morning, I woke to my waters breaking, (which had never happened to me before…), got up and panicked for a minute, and then started shaking for an hour or so. Rang Lisa first thing and asked her to come straight away – I’d been worried that this birth would happen so quick that she wouldn’t have time to get here – as it was, she probably could have stayed home a bit longer…..

Currawong got the birthing pool happening, and Mum and Jess got here, and we gently labored till morning.

The kids all woke up and hung out in the birthing space, and some fellow community members were dropping in and out and keeping an eye on what was happening, and some older members even dropped in, as it was the community meeting day.

At 9.25, to chanting and humming and sounding, a baby boy was born, and he shot out like a cannon towards the side of the pool.

He was quickly passed to me and was quite blue and not making any noise, and Lisa told me to breathe in his face, which I did, and he spluttered and gave a cry.

First thing the name ‘Maxamillion’ came into my head, with the thought that having a million in your name must be a good omen. I said the name, and then Currawong said ‘Hercules’…..Lisa said “Maxamillion Hercules, what a great name!” and thus he was named.

Everything was wonderful, a successful birth had been achieved, and Max was totally perfect and calm.

Ever seen that birthing scene in Absolutely Fabulous? Where Adina’s friend was birthing in a room with people speaking beat poetry, playing music, and generally being very hippy?? Well I felt like Max’s birth was a lot like that.

He had an extremely short cord, and couldn’t reach my chest even, so Lisa cut it as soon as safe, and we hung out and blissed in the bath for a while.

As there was another baby still inside me, and the placenta’s weren’t likely to come out till the other babe came, it was clamped off and left hanging from me.

As the day wore on we started getting worried about when the next baby was going to come.

Max was gently held by my mother, and my 17 year old daughter also did me the huge favour of taking off her top and sitting with him skin to skin……making sure that Max was being held all the time as I tried every trick in the book to bring on labour.

Standing up, hanging from a rope from the ceiling, taking Currawong off into the back room for a quick fix of sex and semen, walking round the property, leaning all sorts of different ways……it wasn’t working. Max would wake occasionally and have a feed, and all the other kids were generally milling around with distractions being given to them, so we could focus on trying to bring the second baby earthbound.

As the day moved into evening, we were all getting progressively more worried. Contractions had eased off largely, and it seemed like nothing else was going to happen. I’d never in my wildest dreams anticipated such a prolonged gap between babies. Nothing had prepared me for this eventuality! I’d just assumed that the second baby would be born soon after the first, and was hoping that we’d all have time to deal with the first baby before the second one came. I’d thought I would have one birthing experience, with two babies coming for the price of one. 

I rang Andrea Hart the acupuncturist to come and see if she could do anything to bring the second baby on. We’d arranged that she would come along to the birth beforehand, but Max’s birth had progressed so quickly and neatly that I’d never got around to ringing her for it, but we thought maybe in this extended pause some acupuncture could speed the process up. She came around about 8 that night, gave me a few needles, and then had a prior engagement that she had to go to. She told me later that the moment she’d walked in the house she’d had the feeling that my seventh child had a very strong presence, and also a strong desire to have a different birth date and karma, and that nothing she could do would change that.

So on we went…..trying to bring on labour over ten hours after my first twin was born. The longest gap between twins that Lisa had ever experienced was 12 hours, and we were all starting to get worried. Around 12 that night everyone had a bit of a snooze – except me. I paced round the house, willing my second baby to be born safely, worrying, and trying to bring on labour. A quiet and lonely time on my own. Around 3am on Sunday morning the worry was turning to desperation. Lisa had said that we were leaving her comfort zone, and she was prepared to go till 9.30 on Sunday morning – 24 hours after the birth of Max, and after that we’d have to think about our options again. The cord that we’d detached from Max was filling with blood, which was puzzling Lisa, so she clamped it tight, which was a real distraction while I was trying to bring on labour – having a scissor clamp jutting through my legs was intensely uncomfortable, so she instead tied it very securely with about 5 cords. Funnily enough, before the birth, Lisa had dreamt regularly that she was at our birth, and that one would come out and the second would turn to be head down, and in her dream she’d forgotten to bring clamps for the first umbilical cord, so she was prepared for this eventuality!! But I was still hale and hearty, the second twin had very considerately gone from breech position to head down, engaged nicely in my cervix, and both our heart rates were normal and healthy.

Currawong and I went for a walk in the moonlight and I was really bummed out. Thinking that after coming so far it was all going to end in a hospital drama afterall. Tension was high, and we were both despondent on walking down the road towards the creek. On the way, Currawong started talking about how I was healthy, Max had been born successfully, and the second twin was healthy also, so we had to start looking at this experience as TWO separate births, instead of the one birth of two babies we’d assumed it would be. Two separate births. This seemingly subtle shift in perception actually made us both feel better. If it was two separate births, all of a sudden it seemed more doable. We got back to the house where mum and Lisa had been chatting about it all, and we both told Lisa that we wanted to let it go longer than the morning, and told her our altered perception, and both started crying when we said how much we didn’t want to go to hospital. We told her that we were aware that we were risking her reputation and practice, and that if the worst came to the worst and we had to go to hospital a day or so after our first twin was born, we’d tell them that we were freebirthing, and leave her out of it completely. And bless her heart, and to my total awe and respect forevermore, she said straight away that she’d rather go to jail than leave us during this birth, and that she was there for the ride. We all decided to get a bit of rest, as it had been a very long and testing day, and we’d talk more about it after a nap.

I layed down in bed for a while, but found it impossible to sleep, Lisa went into another room for a catnap, mum went off and slept for a bit with Max, and my strong birth warrior Currawong set about cleaning out the birthing pool water, disinfecting the pool, and clearing away all the other paraphernalia of the first birth, making way for the second birth to take place..............

To be continued.....

(Don't you love a cliffhanger?)

P.S.  It's been nearly two years now since my baby twins were born, and I thought it might be a thoughtful thing to do, to provide new readers with a link so they can go straight from here to the next part of the story.....  So here it is.  To read the next installment go to the link below….

The Story Continues

P.P.S.  If you're one of the hater minions, come to get titillated about the sentence "taking Currawong off into the back room for a quick fix of sex and semen", after having visited the anti-life, anti-diversity, anti-everything pages that are so fixated on their smutty assumptions that Currawong and I were having sex whilst I had 'an umbilical cord hanging out of me'………I was trying to be polite by putting it like I did above, but if you really want the graphic details………me and Currawong went into the back room and I gave him a blow job, because as midwives have known for a very long time, there's an agent in sperm that brings on labour.  Hence the advice since time immemorial to have sex to bring on birth.  In fact, this sperm trick is so potent, that Picotin, which they give you in hospitals to induce labour, contains pig sperm for the very same reason.  Now if you're gonna call me a freak because I preferred my lovers sperm (and it doesn't matter how it's ingested, hence the blow job) to that of a pig that I hadn't even made the acquaintance of……..then I'm happy for you to think me a freak, cause I think anyone that prefers pig sperm to their partners is a bit freaky myself.

How about you go out and get yourself a life that you love instead of spending your energy trying to let people know all about your secrets and shadows and how in denial of it you are? 

P.P.P.S.  And if you're not a hater minion…..hope you're enjoying the story :)