The Obvious

I take it back, what I said the other day about not feeling a deep connection to something deep in my heart. I have a religion, it just doesn't have a name. I have a belief, and a cause, and you all know what it is, and so do I.
I went to this meeting on Sunday night, it was a meeting of a number of our local homebirth midwives and also some doulas. They invited me to come and talk about the services that we provide in the area. I was excited to go and formally meet these people (who all know my story because of the Mothering article).
As I'm writing this I'm realizing that maybe I've never really written about what I created here in the valley. When Charlotte died, there were no support groups, networks, no nothing for anyone whose babies died. There was a support group at the big, scary hospital down in the big city twenty miles south, and so we went there.
It saved us. Being in a room for two hours a month with these other people who had cradled their tiny little babies only in death, it was a rebirth. It gave us connection where before we had been stranded. I tried to find the people in my area who had lost babies: surely they were out there? But to no avail. I knew I had a calling, I knew this had to happen. So in the end, I started my own group. It took 3 1/2 years for me to have the energy and time and space to do it right, but it happened.
What I started is a group that meets every month, and then more, too. I sell us as being available all the time. Phone, email, whatever. When is your crisis moment? When do you need support? What if it's not between 7 and 9 on the 4th Wednesday of the month? Call me.
We are also available to consult with doctors/midwives/nurses/doulas about a birth, and even to come into a family's sacred space before, during, or just after a birth if that is what they deem helpful. We are available to counsel with families who have received a terminal diagnosis.
We are also working--trying--to work within hospitals and such to improve the care and experience of families experiencing loss. I have stocked the cabinets full of rolls of film, decent cameras, handprint kits, dental amalgamate for castings, beautiful clothing, wraps, blankets, etc. We have talked to nurses, docs, etc. about what should happen when this does happen.
This is the tip of the iceberg. I could literally, and would LOVE to, work on this full time. Of course the thing that gets in the way of this is that I am a full time mama, and I would never, ever sacrifice this sacred opportunity... so doing this full time must wait. This and the fact that I can't get paid for this work, which also gets in the way since I end up paying for child care to get my work done but then don't get paid. And we live on one teacher's salary. So anyway.
So I went to this meeting of midwives, and I talked to them about what we could do for them if they found themselves in this situation. I probably only spent maybe 45 minutes there. But I left feeling positively smart. I felt informed, I felt on top of things, I felt accomplished, I felt proud. I felt like I was making change happen. It made me feel swollen with life.
I felt passionate. I felt like this was it for me. It is slightly uncomfortable for me, because what I love to do is work with people in absolute crisis. I think it is because I know that I can do it. Just for the same reason why there are those nurses out there who ask for the stillbirths, because they know they have something to offer that mother that somebody else might not offer her. I know I am doing work that nobody else is doing, and whatever I do, if I put in one hour or one week of work, it is going to make somebody else's loss more tolerable.
So who was I to say I didn't have a cause? This is my cause, obviously.

The Middle Ground, and Regret

Here I am about 2 hours after yesterday's photo. Baby Aoife, how beautiful you are.

Rixa's comment from yesterday: "

I want to say...one thing, though, about birth advocacy is in the end, I want women to be able to make choices in true autonomy. That means that for some women, having all of the technology right there will be something they embrace and that is inherently right for them, and for others that will mean staying at home and having only their family members present. Or a multitude of other approaches somewhere in between those two."

Who is this woman who says it all so clearly?
This is so beautiful, because this comment in itself liberates me from the defensive place where I stand.
Why can't I believe, truly, from the bottom of my heart, that I had beautiful, gorgeous, perfect hospital births with really low interventions? That my births were not somehow lesser than somebody's beautiful homebirth because I had an elastic full of electrodes strapped around my belly? This monitor that brought me more peace than any other single piece of technology ever invented?
It's because there don't seem to be many people who I know who occupy the middle ground of believing that there are many, many things that fall inbetween a birth in the hospital which includes pitocin, an epidural, and a c-section and a birth in your own bed with your other kids gathered around to watch. I feel like the only people I ever hear speaking are the ones who say, "Oh, I love my epidurals, I get one as soon as I walk in the door", and those who say, "The tub is all filled up on the deck, and we're ready whenever she is. Thank god I don't have to worry about getting a staph infection at that dirty awful hospital place for sick people."


I guess one of the things that has also been inspiring about the great people that I have worked with at my local hospital and at my births is that I can see that there are people who believe in educating women about all of their choices and options, and who do listen to them when they're in the hospital, and I wish this could happen for more women. I feel so lucky.


It is ironic that I do feel I had great births even though one of my babies died.
And would you like to hear a confession? I did get an epidural when Charlotte died. I think about this in the way that I bet lots of other people wish away their c-sections, I wish I hadn't gotten it. I never wanted to get an epidural unless I really thought I couldn't be present for my birth. But when we found out Charlotte had died my midwife calmly suggested at one point that I might want to think about getting an epidural as a means of carving out some space for my emotional pain. She spoke of the difficult decisions to come and the great difficulty of the task I was about to embark upon. It wasn't so much a suggestion to get an epidural as it was a suggestion to consider it a possibility now that my circumstances had changed. I chose that route. I now know that I did this because I was afraid of what my threshhold would be. How much pain could I handle? Could anything trump what was in my heart at that moment? What would it feel like to wrestle with physical pain on top of what was searing through my soul? I chose the easy way out, the avoidance route, because I was afraid. I had never had a baby before, and I didn't know what it would be like. My regrets for having made this choice, if you could call them regrets, come only after I have had two more relatively effortless, unassisted labors without any drugs. I now realize that the grounding rhythm of labour might have drawn me into a thinking spot. I wish I could have felt the work of birthing her more than I did. What I will say is that luckily (from the perspective that I am looking at it from) the epidural didn't do too much, I didn't feel painful contractions but I did feel them, I could walk, and pee, and by the time I needed to push I was feeling them strong and hard. So this did allow me to be present for some.


But what I will also say, as the flip side of my "regret", is that I never fault myself for any decisions that were made on May 13, 2003. I know that I did the best that I could. I made choices that seemed to make sense to me at the time. I was blindsided, stunned, captivated by this upcoming event that would crush me like a bug. What was this, this no-mans land I occupied? This space where I had been told that my baby would be born dead, but she hadn't yet been born? The space where maybe they were wrong? The space where it was up to me to make this prediction come true, where it was up to me to push out this baby and see for myself that my life with her was about to end. It was a place I could not bear to be. So I trust that I made the best choice for me at that time. I am in no place to judge that woman who lay curled in that bed, her arms wrapped around her huge, beautiful belly, encasing her long wished-for daughter who would never take a breath. That would be unfair, and would cause me nothing but further pain. So I rest here, and trust she did what was right for her.

A Different kind of Pro-Life

Here I am laboring with Aoife. Greg is laughing because I sound exactly, EXACTLY, like one of the spirits in the Christmas story with Scrooge..."I am the ghost of Christmas past.." Moaning so low and loud, and loving every minute of it. My mantra: Let the soft animal of your body love what it loves (Mary Oliver) Please note the super (man) woman shirt, which is my traditional birthing shirt.


The other thing about me, regarding birth, which would have been different in a different life is that I know I would have been a more active normal birth advocate in another life. I am pretty outraged by the state of birth in this country (as a focal point, although I could extend this to the entire developed world). It is unfair to the mothers and it is unfair to the babies. I feel passionate and could really pour myself into working towards helping to change the ways our system pushes women through birth and creates different outcomes than would have happened if patience and respect for the birth process were at all near the top of the priority list for OB nurses and doctors.
Except.


Oh, this is huge.
Except that one of my babies died, and I just can't get past this. I can't get past this because I held my baby, my first born, beautiful, perfectly created baby in my arms, and then the nurse walked out of the room and I never, ever saw her again. I looked at her tiny little eyelashes and toenails and the softness of her shoulders and her hair and her nostrils and the perfection of her entire body and wept at the injustice that so much beauty and time and energy had gone into creating and sculpting this beautiful ball of glowing potential, who might have grown to be a nuclear physicist or a beet farmer or just a regular mom and was now just lying in my arms, lifeless, and we would never know. That happened to me.


So now only one thing really, really matters to me. Life.


It was a coincidence that I went back to one of my older posts, where I wrote about the birth of Liam. Somewhere in January, maybe near the beginning. There was a comment there, one which I hadn't seen before. It was a lovely comment from Leigh, who had been a homebirth transport because of a breech presentation and had delivered her first daughter by c-section. Leigh wrote beautifully to me about how emotionally difficult this birth had been for her, and how reading my perspective made her feel grateful and consider the alternatives.
Before I go on, I have to say that while I did not experience the regret over my own cesarean birth that many women do, I am very sympathetic because I know that had I delivered by cesarean under other circumstances, I would have had a very difficult time with it. When Liam was born by cesearean, my best friend from childhood said, "But you are not the type of person who gets a c-section!" We giggled together about that, but it's true. I am a drug-free squatter with long hair who bounces on a ball and moans, right? Right. So if my first had been born alive by c-section? I would have questioned it over and over, and mourned my loss of my vaginal birth. Admitted wholeheartedly.


So back to my story about Leigh, and I hope that Leigh (if she still reads this blog) won't take this as a criticism, which it is NOT. It is simply a perfect example of how where I sit is different, and so sorry, Leigh, I get to pick on your story as my comparison point. At the end of Leigh's post, she P.S.'s that her second daughter, also a frank breech, was born at home. She giggles that her babies like to be born upside down.


I scream inside, and here is why. I'll divide my scream into two categories and address them separately. One, I am jealous. Two, I am afraid.


I am jealous of Leigh because she still lives in the world where babies don't die. Leigh trusts that her second baby will be born alive. She knows that breech babies can be safely delivered and she trusts that hers will do just that. She is innocent and alive and vigorous. She believes in her body, and she believes in her baby.
It makes me feel so GUILTY to think that I wouldn't be able to have that trust in my baby! In my own body! I seethe with envy that she can live in that world of beauty where a birth cry follows every delivery, where her trauma of her c-section can be soothed by a beautiful homebirth of daughter number two. I want this for myself.


But more than my envy, I am afraid for her, because I can see the other side of the coin, the side that thankfully landed face down on the pavement for Leigh. This is the flip side where she makes the decision to have this baby at home, even though she is breech, and she trusts in her baby and her body, and something goes wrong, and her baby dies. Her baby dies. She dies, and Leigh knows that perhaps it was her choice to refuse the c-section and go forward with the home birth after cesarean that has caused her baby to die. I am so grateful that this is not what happened. But what if it had happened?
I can tell you that if I had been in that situation, where a conscious choice I had made had killed Charlotte, I would have killed myself. As it was, with no cause whatsoever being linked even remotely with my decision making, I could barely peel myself off of the nursery floor my grief was so heavy. My responsibilty for my baby's life weighed so heavily on me, and despite anything my midwife, or my husband, or anyone said to me, I knew this one thing inside: she was my child, she was my responsibility, I was supposed to keep her alive. Now what would that have been like if I knew that I could have made a choice to save her, but didn't? It would be suicide, plain and simple.


The other thing on the flip side of the coin is that I also know a mom who bled out and died last year three days after the birth of her son, her first child. So having a VBAC at home? Also something I scream about, because it means you are also lucky enough to live in a world where moms don't die. (I am sure that I have written before about this strange obsession all us moms whose babies have died have with our own mortality.) When I had my VBAC I did even question this decision, even though it was going to be in hospital, because I imagined that if there was a heaven somewhere I would kill myself in heaven if my dreams of having a beautiful birth that also included a crying newborn got in the way of the life with the child that would ensue. But I found solace in the thought that if I started to bleed out, maybe they could save me if I was already right there in the hospital, IV port in my hand (they did put this in for my VBAC just in case)
I guess I am all about the just in case, when it comes down to it. Nothing trumps my own desire to see my baby live. Nothing will ever stand in my way of that end goal, and I want to make sure I have all my bases covered along the way.
P.S. Thanks, Leigh. I am sorry I picked on your story. It was the only concrete example I had. The truth? I think you are badass, and you know I'm just jealous. But I'll still do things my way (and if you'd ask me I'd tell you to do your things my way, too).

Birth, in another life

I might have had a homebirth, in another life. When I lived in Vermont, many of the people I knew with children had their babies at home. Of course it seemed more natural and more right. I had always had in my mind that my body was made to give birth, and that this was something that seemed bizarre to do in a place for sick people. Then we moved to Massachusetts, and while the community that we now live in also has a relatively large population of homebirthers compared to national standards, I didn't really know any of them. I can remember when I was first pregnant with Charlotte, I got this book out that was a directory of all the birth services in our area. It just felt like the kind of thing I would do. But then, strangely, it never became what I did. As I became really pregnant, as being pregnant progressed from the little line on the stick to actually feeling sick and telling people, something began to pull at me. This is a direct quote from my brain, the same brain that once before had wanted to have a homebirth. "I want to have a baby at home, but if I have the baby at home and something happens, I could never forgive myself because I would always wonder if it would be different if I had the baby in the hospital."
A few thoughts about this quote. "Something happens". This is my favorite. What is something? I can remember thinking this in the car, on the way to the hospital, when Charlotte wasn't moving. "I hope something isn't wrong." What is something? What lies between everything's fine and the baby's dead? Sometimes it seems like the line is pretty fine. So when I say this, "Something happens," what I really mean is, the baby dies. Of course this is what ended up happening. So that's a little strange for me, this idea that I wondered if something might go terribly wrong. and how I would try to place blame on myself if that were possible. Of course even under the circumstances I did feel that it was my fault, somehow, of course. If anyone could have known her struggles, it would be her mother, no?

Back to my memory, my quote, of why I couldn't have a homebirth. Did I want someone else to blame? Did I just want to feel as if I had covered my bases? I don't know. I think I just didn't have anyone to trust outside of the medical community except for myself, I didn't have an excellent homebirth midwife recommended by 9 friends, I didn't have any trust in that community, so I felt like I had to "fall back" on the second choice.

And now, how different I feel for myself. For myself. I seethe with pure, unadultrated, envy for all those fortunate, lucky, fabulous, people out there who are blessed with the opportunity to push out their babies, their live, breathing babies, in their homes. What I would not give for this opportunity. To me, this would be the ultimate in beauty. To have my birth at home in my bed. I now know the sacred beauty of birth, and to have it in my own surroundings seems nothing but perfect. Sadly, I know that if I ever do get a homebirth, it will only be if I have already learned that my baby had died. The only thing I might change about Charlotte's birth? If I could do it all over again? I think once I learned she had died, I might get back in my car, drive home, and have her in my bed. I would bring my baby home. I would hold her in my arms in the bed where she lay with me for 9 months and where she was supposed to wake up and nurse and I would have her there with me.

But another baby? One that is alive, that needs to be RESCUED from my womb? Sad, but true. This is how it feels to be pregnant when you have lost a baby, I think particularly, maybe, one that has died unexplicably at term. You must get the baby out. Fast, now, and with as much monitoring as possible. Even though I knew with complete clarity that planning a hospital birth HAD NOT saved my daughter, who died while I was laboring at home, and even though I try to convince myself that even HAD I been in the hospital when her little heart stopped for good they never could have saved her, this does not change my quest for all possible technology in future births. And by this, I don't really mean drugs. I just mean monitoring, and easy access to anesthesia (if readily available) and scalpels. I just want to know that the baby can be saved. I need to know that the baby can be saved.

I remember a hormonal burst about two years ago this month. "You are not the one walking around with this ticking time bomb in your belly," I cried to Greg, envious that it might be possible for him to go to work and forget for 5 minutes that a second, living baby might be born to him soon, while I tiptoed around the house, adreniline rushing, searching for constant movement, perpetually afraid that this would be the day. With both of my subsequent children, I felt sure, absolutely sure, that this day would come.

It did not. They both emerged with life. This seemed like more of a miracle than I ever could have hoped for. I wonder what it will be like when I take this plunge again, in a year, or maybe half a year, and another life comes to me. Will it feel the same? Will I be so afraid? Will my two living, confident, so vibrantly alive children bring me more confidence?
Meanwhile, there are people right now, and I mean right this minute, at a birthing group, all preparing for their homebirths. There is a part of me that wants to burst into their meeting, to push apart the doors and shout, "Your baby could die, you know. Maybe you should consider some kind of backup plan? A rental home next door to the hospital?" But I know that this is silly. Not even the hospital can always save a baby that might die. What I really feel is sadness for myself, sadness that I could never experience this beauty of a birth at home, envy that they will birth a live baby and keep him or her forever, because that's usually what happens. I feel defeated and defensive. I would have loved to have a baby at home. But what I love more? Having a baby present in my home. That is so much more important to me. I want my babies to be here. In full form, living, pulsing creatures for me to hold and love. My images of birth in my own bed will gladly be cast aside for the hope that someday my body can do it again, that it will push out another crying baby, and that I won't care one bit about whether it took monitoring, or drugs, or c-sections, or what it took to get that baby out alive. What could be more important?

Hush Little Baby

We have this beautiful book by Sylvia Long, "Hush Little Baby". Perhaps you have it, too. To the tune of the familiar song, this sweet, soft bunny mother weaves a quilt of the natural world around her baby bunny... mama's going to show you a hummingbird, an evening sky, the cricket call, etc. It's a beautiful, sweet song, and the illustrations are dear. Today I read this book to Aoife 9 times in a row. Without one, single break. This was after we had read it twice in a row, and before we had lunch and then read it 3 more times.
This is the beautiful part about this experience. Each time she said, "Again", I was happy to. I turned back to page one, and just started again. Liam was playing campout with Phoebe, we were curled in a chair, why not? Why not again? Each run through takes about 3 minutes. The mesmerised look on her face, the soft, warm slump of her against my chest, why would I ever say no?
I know there are days that I would have. Where I would have thought 8 times was enough, and gently encouraged another book, and maybe even carefully chosen another singing book to appeal especially to her. But not today. Today I am grateful that I felt so grounded and so peaceful that I could just read this book to her, 14 times in total so far today, and feel really glad about making my baby happy.

I know that these days can be rare, where I can just be at the one year old level, and tune myself so completely into being settled at home doing "nothing". To resist the urge to go out and "do something", and to realize that on some days, reading the same book 14 times can make the best morning ever.

Today I found out something that might not seem like good news.
To be honest I don't know what to call it, but it warmed my heart fully.
A nurse that I know told me that Charlotte had changed her. She told me a story of a baby who had died, and she told me about how the hospital wanted to deal with it one way, and how she chose to advocate for another way. She told me about how she carefully took photographs of the tiny hands and feet, and how she tried the handprints and footprints again and again to get them just perfect. She told me about how she insisted, when a doctor thought it might "not be best" for the mother to see her baby, that the baby be brought to her mother anyway. And she was. And so this nurse, this wonderful woman with the hugest heart, has given this mother a gift that might not have been hers, the gift of memory.
What would I do without that gift? What would I do if I didn't remember my beautiful girl being lifted into my arms, if I didn't remember the feeling of her soft head, if I couldn't recall the faint smell of her newbornness? What would I do without my lock of hair, my bracelet, my footprints winking down at me from the fireplace? What would I do if she hadn't been real? I cannot put a value on that gift of memory. It saves me every day, makes me whole, makes me real.
This woman thanks me, and Charlotte, for helping her to know how to give her patient the gift of memory, and for helping her to know to respect the personhood of that tiny baby who never drew a breath. But I would argue that perhaps it is more the person that knows that it is only fair, it is only just, to send every mother home with something. Those who see it differently must be hiding from something. For how could it be better to be sent home with nothing? No memory, no photo, no nothing? It never could be.
But I will add, that it gave my sweet, beautiful, almost-five-year old girl a little bit more purpose in this world, to know that she is working her magic and spreading good will. That nurse may have had this deep in her core, but she thought of Charlotte when she wrapped that baby up and brought her to her mother. And so I smile, deeply on the inside of me, to know that my loss has made somebody else's loss maybe that much easier, and I hope that this will continue to happen. May all of our blows be lessened, little by little, one baby at a time. Thank you, sweet kind nurse, because you have just made somebody's whole life completely different: a mother out there now knows her baby, when she could have never known her. Wow. That is one big deal.

Ta

One of the things I like about having this blog is that everyone seems to be really nice to me so far and it's a good ego boost. So thanks, y'all. I really don't know what to say.
I mean this is the thing, isn't it. We're all pretty unimpressed with ourselves. On a daily level I am. As a survivor of losing my baby I do feel badass, I will admit this to you. Having already done the most difficult thing I will ever have to do feels good. Every time I say this, my brain starts concocting scenarios of what could be worse, now that I have two living children with me. But gearing myself up to push forth my child who would not breathe, that took a lot. I cannot imagine any single act of courage that would trump that one, and I am proud of myself for that. I still cannot concieve of any single person performing such an act, much less myself. But on a day to day level I do have these teenagerish moments where I feel dreadfully incompetent. I look around as if to say, "Where's the mom around this place?" I wonder to myself who is going to fold the baskets of laundry, and when. I think "I wonder what's for dinner?" The flip side of this, the being the mom part, is that I do sometimes gleefully eat hot fudge sundaes at midday, and nobody can stop me from doing it. But I waver, sometimes. I second guess. I compare.
Don't we all?