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 :) 

Birthing Choices

Just as a lawyer can be excused for believing that most people sort out their problems with litigation, and a police person could be excused for believing that most people have criminal motivations, a hospital midwife or medical body can be excused for believing that most women and babies are safer if birthed in a hospital. As the British Obstetrician and father of the 'natural childbirth' movement, Dr Grantly Dick-Read eloquently argued, it's often our fear in general and fear of pain that causes the most constrictions in childbirth, and fear is often present in hospital births. People within this system often come across the worst case scenarios on a regular basis. But what they often don't come into contact with is the silent but usually incredibly happy and empowered body of women and families that have birthed safely and without fear at home, with trusted fellow travellers. Just as police folk don't often come into contact with the peacefull and law abiding community members, and lawyers don't often come across the peacemakers who work with hard situations in compromise and compassion, taking personal responsibility.

How do we avoid fear in childbirth? As Dr Sarah J. Buckley M.D from Queensland has extensively researched, the best way to avoid fear and pain is to let go into our mammalian instincts, (there's a lot of mammals on the planet, and we all birth very successfully, and usually outdoors...) and allow the natural rollercoaster of internal oxytocins, adrenalins, and other hormones take us on an age old journey. A large part of creating a successful mammalian birth is to ensure the birthing mother is talked to little, and in a gentle manner, left unobserved as much as possible, and given dim lighting. And Dr Grantly Dick-Read's conclusions on joyous birthing was to understand the way the body and the womb in particular works, and relax into contractions, rather than tense against them. Keeping your mouth open and muscles relaxed is a proven technique to transcend a potentially painfull experience. Not to mention ancient practices and cultural diversities presently and in the past, of a variety of different ways to treat the pregnant woman, the birthing woman, the umbilical cord and placenta, the post natal period, healing afterwards, breastfeeding, and early childhood techniques. Sometimes us western colonialists forget to honour the wisdom of the ages and different cultures. But even now, there are many advocates of gentle home and water births, from Deepak Chopra and Ina May Gaskin to Michel Odent and birthing practices in Holland.

As a mother of five children, I've experienced a beautifully diverse range of births, all of which have taught me more about myself and my body, and my place in the world. For my 4th birth I had the penultimate homebirth, water birth, and lotus birth in a remote northern town, where my homebirthing midwife travelled 250 kilometers to be with our family and the birth of my daughter, providing all the safety and expertise of a registered midwife of over 30 years, in the candlelit, sweetly smelling birthing room in our own house, with photo's of all my other births, children and extended family on the walls around me. In transition, I was reclined in the birthing pool, holding onto my partners arms , staring into his eyes and telling him I loved him. I sung, hummed, and toned her out of my body, with my awestruck family welcoming her in the dawns gentle light. We performed a lotus birth, had a 'baby moon' of 4 weeks where we didn't leave the house, had a real 'birth' day party for her within a couple of days of being born, where we all ate pink cake representing the placenta, and the other kids got presents from their new baby sister, to honour the fact that they were moving over to give her the room to be at my breast. We also got post natal visits from my long distance midwife, and advice and support with all and any of our needs.

And for my 5th birth I had the penultimate ceasarean. I must admit that transferring to hospital, dry birthing, having a spinal and a ceasarean were my personal worst birthing fears before the experience, but having faced my fears, I can highly recommend the journey to anyone, especially if your baby is 10 pound 7, with a cord around his neck, and sure to die by any other birthing method.

After preparing for a potential breech birth or birth of twins at home, ( I'd chosen to be surprised after past experiences and ensuing trust in my body), my treasured midwife from the previous birth brought another valued and registered homebirthing midwife along just in case it was twins, to provide back up, and for added safety. After labouring long and sweetly during the night in the birthing pool, getting to a point and realizing I couldn't go any further, getting out of the pool and walking the labyrinth out the back, I realised that the birth wasn't going to happen at home, and we had to transfer to hospital. Both midwifes checked me and the baby regularly to ensure we were both healthy at all times,and I'm greatful to them both that they let me make up my own mind, in my own time, within safe boundaries. Transferring from home to hospital was the worst bit, as I was travelling into my fears and the unknown. At no point were I or my baby in any danger whatsoever.

And from the moment I got there, everyone smiled at me. The medical staff were gentle and efficient, streamlining me through the hospital process to ease my pain as quickly as possible. They informed me fully of all my options and respected my choices. They also honoured and respected my homebirthing midwife and partner as they attended me, and she provided a valued continuum of midwifery care. The head obstetrician headed straight to the computer in the room where he googled lotus birth and placenta, so he could respect my wish for a lotus birth. The pediatrician introduced himself and his colleague, and said if everything went well, he wouldn't be touching me or my baby at all, respecting my desire for as much of a hands off approach as possible in the eventuality of a hospital birth, as I'd stated in my orange book on the suggestion of my midwife. They'd all read my birthing plan in the very short time between me getting there, and having my pain and fear relieved by their professional, gentle, and respectful conduct. I thanked them all to the point that I think they might have been a bit surprised, that this earth mother homebirthing type was so effusively greatfull...

After this major surgery, my partner and I stayed in hospital for 2 nights, holding our new baby constantly in a 'Continuum Concept' inspired approach to early childhood. We also performed a lotus birth, and many of the hospital midwives commented on how peacefull and quiet he was. This period was also the first time our other children had ever been away from us, so bonding didn't happen as beautifully as with my previous birth. But because I had a registered midwife as my carer, I got to rejoin the rest of my family a lot quicker than usual, and was enabled to convalesce at home, attended by daily visits from our midwife, to help with healing my scar and body. All illusions that caesareans were an 'easy option' were completely dispelled. It took over 6 weeks before I felt physically able again, compared to the relatively quick bounce back from my previous vaginal births.

But even the best care in the world can't prevent post natal depression when it comes, and a couple of months down the track I started to feel it's tendrils. And during my time of dealing with this hormonally and spiritually bleak process, I've discovered some interesting things. For example the caesarean scar directly cuts a major energy meridian in your body (no blame intended, it's the only place to cut) and a registered accupuncturist can attend you in hospital to mend the meridian and help with scar tissue now that they are accepted by the board of health. An ayuvedic masseuse can also help mend the meridian that's been severed, and Body Talk also assists beautifully in healing. As well, my visits with a psychologist have shown me the triggers within me and helpful areas on which to focus, when it comes to the depression side of PND.

And through this whole process I'm joined by family and two beautiful midwives, who might soon be made to face serious litigation if they continue their ancient craft, and provide other women with the invaluable assistance of the bodies of information and knowledge they hold around birthing, and specifically birthing at home. It seems surreal and ridiculous that if the current issues around homebirthing don't resolve positively, that I could have access to an accupuncturist in hospital, but not a homebirthing midwife!!

As my eldest daughter rapidly approaches her birthing years, my deepest hope and wish for her and all our future daughters, is that she too has access to all the birthing choices that I have had. And like the example set by Holland whereby the first option is homebirthing with hospitals as a valued backup, we can all experience the transformation available from all sorts of births, with a wholistic and wide range of options whithin which to perform them, and health proffessionals with which to work.

Regardless of law, a previous caesarean and the current debate around homebirthing, my family and I will have a homebirth if we get pregnant again. I have full and complete faith in my intuition, body, and the health proffessionals I've collected around me to take that journey if it happens in good faith and with joy. Knowing that I'm fortunate to live in a country where so many birthing options are possible and supported.