Birth at home: an immanent power

Birth at Home: An Immanent Power

A few months ago, I gave birth to my second child in the upstairs bedroom of an ordinary house on a quiet and leafy suburban street. I had no bright lights, no steel bed, no electronic monitors, no needles, no drips, and no charts. I had, instead, the understated comforts of anyone's corner room--books, family photographs, and well-used furniture in familiar patterns--augmented only by a stack of clean linens and one small satchel of medical equipment.

I labored by lamplight, first in a broad, soft chair and then on a bed piled with pillows. My attendants were neither shift nurses nor the on-call obstetrician, but rather my husband, two friends, and two midwives. I did not have to wonder if my older child missed me, for I knew she was peacefully asleep in the next room.

The long night was humid. Every window in the room was open wide. Strains of Pachelbel's Canon in D wound slowly through the dim gold light--in intricate counterpoint to the gentle night noises, my own heaving breaths, and the soft words of encouragement from the people encircling me.

For a long time, I rode the contractions like waves. My mind, balanced on their cresting force, was never submerged in pain. But as the waves turned to riptides, I abandoned self-control. I could hear nothing beyond my own loud voice, grunting or yelling like a beast possessed. But even then, I had hands to steady me--sinewy hands that I gripped like lifelines; cool hands that mopped my face; soft hands that brushed my belly, finding reassurance in the fetal heartbeat and then quickly, respectfully, withdrawing.

I complained. I wanted the miserable laboring to end. In the midst of it all, however, I knew something cataclysmic was happening to me. In my struggle to open myself and let the baby be born, something else was opening as well--some aperture between me and what was beyond me. Swept through this opening as if by a tidal bore, my senses were overwhelmed by a rushing, roaring momentum driving me to the margins of not only what I could bear but what I could comprehend.

Then my baby arrived, slithering out into waiting hands, joining our human circle and completing it. At that moment, the wormhole to infinity snapped shut. I was cut off forever from some magnificent mystery. I was beached, quivering and raw, on the sands of everyday life.

Tales of Another Sort

The glory and swirling passions of this birth night were like a dream I could share with no one. Everywhere I went, my new babe-in-arms drew other mothers to me, but after they cooed over him and congratulated me, the conversation would invariably derail. They would talk shop about doctors and delivery procedures, and I would change the subject. As desperate as I was to share my story, I could not do it justice. Telling it only brought unpleasant reactions, from rage to absolute, eye-blinking silence.

Once, over dinner at a mother's night out, I mentioned my home-birth and set off an hour-long discussion on hospital birth. The six women at my table were eager to share their horror stories--of trying to hold the baby back during a race from labor room to delivery room, and of the doctor's annoyance when the baby appeared before the sterile gloves did. Of the epidural that didn't work, despite an agonizing hour of immobility; or the one given, against the mother's will, to retard labor until the doctor could arrive. Of babies "too big to be born" unless their mothers consented to knives or forceps or suction machines.

The telling was clearly cathartic; the tone was dark humor. Each woman claimed her trials were "all worth it," once she held her baby in her arms. Not one mother was willing to question her choice of a hospital environment or the ascendancy of doctor's orders, although many admitted that their discomforts were due to hospital routines and that they disliked the doctor's high-handedness. Moreover, much to my astonishment, no one asked what birthing at home had been like.

I went home feeling deeply misunderstood. Could no one even imagine the possibility of another way? Why is birthing considered such an ugly and dangerous ordeal? Why are mothers so grateful to doctors and hospitals for managing "the trauma" that the surliness, the coldness, the indignities, and the bullying are all forgiven? And why the constant focus on outcomes--healthy babies, however awkward or painful their extractions may be? Of course, a healthy baby is the desired result of birth, but that end does not justify every draconian means used to reach it. Surely, the process, as well as the result, can be honored.

All the same, I felt uncomfortably self-righteous. How could I be so sure my way was better? Perhaps no rational person would have done what I did, as one woman claimed. Or perhaps I was so neurotically afraid of hospitals that I could not go near them. Or I had so overreacted to the medical birth of my first child that I stubbornly refused to give the system a second chance. Or I was on some kind of macha power trip, doing it "the hard way" so I could boast about not needing drugs.

Busily staving off these simplifying assumptions, all I could give were partial explanations: I do believe that labor is overmedicated and that drugs can contribute to complicated deliveries; I do dislike surrendering to impersonal systems, hospitals included; and I was bitterly disappointed in the circumstances surrounding my first birth. What I could not explain to the women at the dinner party was the dimension of reasoning that lay beyond pat justifications.

A Matter of Self-Determination

I chose to have my second baby at home, outside the medical arena, because I wanted a birth that was spiritual as well as physical. For that, I needed an environment of peace and dignity. I needed attendants accustomed to cherishing birth as the first interaction between mother and child, and therefore willing to support the event as it unfolded rather than manage it according to rules. And finally, I needed to accept responsibility for the birth, to acknowledge that I would be the one to bring forth my baby.

With my first child, I did not understand any of this. I expected birth to be uplifting, but had no idea of my part in it. I figured that birth belonged in the hands of the professionals. So when the day came, I was hospitalized for the first time in my life. Laboring among strangers and machines, I felt desperate, lonely, and frightened; and I accepted a drug for pain when all I really wanted was help. Many hours and several drugs later, as my daughter was yanked out of me with forceps, I was overcome with guilt and rage, miserably unsure whether I had failed or been failed.

Months later, I was able to sort out the problem. Having let the doctors direct the birth, regardless of how well-intended their actions may have been, I had inadvertently invited them to take it away from me. I had carried my baby and nourished her in my body for nine months, but when labor came, I checked out. Why? Because I was too timid to do anything other than what I was told.

Not until I faced down some of that timidity did I begin to appreciate the importance of taking on responsibility for birth. I was in a riding class at the time, and just beginning my second pregnancy. Over and over again, people asked, "You're going riding when you're pregnant? Did your doctor say you could do that?" And over and over again, I gave a noncommittal reply, suppressed a squirming doubt, and changed the subject.

Then, midway through my third month, I took a fall. My horse stopped short in front of a jump, while I completed a 360-degree rotation in the air and landed like a gymnast on the far side of the fence, feet firmly planted and knees properly flexed. Unhurt, I congratulated myself on the amazing midair correction. But in the ensuing hours, I grew increasingly anxious--at first about life in general, and eventually about riding while pregnant.

Conventional wisdom about what to do and what not to do while pregnant seemed suddenly simple and safe. I moved from feeling I ought to quit riding but thinking I didn't want to, to questioning the maturity of a person so ready to break the rules, to interpreting the fall as a sign that I should never go near a horse again. Then I recalled the many criticisms I had heard early in the pregnancy, and my anxiety gave way to anger. A rebellious upthrust fist formed in my mind, and I said out loud, "I own this pregnancy!"

Own it. I was deeply shocked at the audacity of linking self-determination with maternity. Nvertheless, my feeling was one of rightness--the kind of clearing lift you get after at last unraveling a complicated motivation. Owning the pregnancy meant I got to decide what to do and what not to do. The baby's needs would not be imposed on me by doctors' orders or other people's opinions; rather, they would rise from within me. After all, they were organic to my life, like the pregnancy itself.

Owning the pregnancy also meant I accepted responsibility for the results of my choices. I would take the risks--not the doctor, and not the hospital. If something went wrong, I would deal with it. And if the pregnancy led to a healthy birth, it would be mine to enjoy. No one's ego and no one's rules would dictate the color and shape of my experience.

Throughout the rest of the pregnancy, I tested my faith in this newfound right to self-determination. I worked out the logistics of birthing at home, faced my fears about what might go wrong, researched the probability of complications, arranged for emergency medical backup, and dealt with numerous accusations about being selfish and crazy. The final test came with the birth itself.

The first part of labor was as peaceful and satisfying as I had hoped it would be. I had those hands, the voices, the music and the comforts of home to anchor me. But the pushing was as difficult as it had been the first time. After pushing for two hours, I began to feel the contractions spacing out, and I was waiting lifetimes between them--panting, sweating, barely aware of the circle of people waiting with me. At one point, I asked the midwife if it was nearly over, to which she answered, kindly but succintly, "No."

I wanted desperately to give up. At the same time, I understood the reasoning behind the original forceps delivery: the doctor had let me quit, had encouraged me to give up and allow him to deliver the baby. So, drawing on the love, experience, and compassionate support of those around me, I dug out of myself the ability to birth my child. I pushed on and on, fueled by a kind of dull anger, a will that had no need for conscious directives.

At last, gently prodded by the women, I stood up. With gravity's assistance, the pushing went quickly. My husband held me upright--my full weight hanging from his neck and arms--as a midwife, crouching beneath me, caught the slippery little body. Everyone cheered, and their joy broke my trance. My befuddled mind came wandering back, but still I could not speak for many minutes. When the cleaning and weighing and checking were done, my husband placed our baby between us in bed, and the three of us slept until dawn, cocooned in bliss.

The Ineffable Power of Birthing

It was the birth I had wanted. And I struggled for weeks to distill from my giddy postpartum euphoria a single, perfect word capable of communicating to others the overwhelming mix of fear, exhilaration, and awe that had rattled my soul. At first, in a moment of poetic excess, I likened the upheaval to a glimpse of the face of God. Only my childhood concept of the terrible majesty of God the Father, it seemed, could account for the rush of power that had swept through me. But the metaphor was incomplete, for in the aftermath of the experience, I felt not humbled and introspective, but proud and feisty--qualities that have little to do with experiencing God in the traditional, patriarchal sense.

Gradually, I came to understand that I had felt not power from without, but power from within. Through the support of my attendants, and through my own physical and mental strength, I had been empowered to birth my baby myself. That empowerment, in turn, constituted the spiritual dimension of my experience. In fully accepting birth's power, I had realized my personal power.

This transformation is precisely what differentiated me from the women at the dinner party. They were not wrong to give birth in a place that felt safe; and I was not superior for having the willingness to buck the system. They were, however, robbed of birth's power. Strapped down and shouted at, humiliated and manipulated, they were treated not as bringers of life but as ill-equipped and unpredictable containers for babies. Even worse, my dinner companions could not know what they missed.

This not-knowing happens when a medical staff takes responsibility for getting a baby born, and when the mother shifts her natural anxiety about the baby's well-being onto someone other than herself. Insulated from doubt, insulated from pain, and protected from the birth itself, she cannot access the forces inherent in the process.

Birth challenges us the same way life does. Each offers us pain and release, joy and despair, uncertainty and self-knowledge in unforeseeable sequences and proportions. Each offers us an opportunity to open ourselves to the full spectrum of experience, to open ourselves to risk, and ultimately to open ourselves to empowerment. When we put aside our responsibility for birth, we throw away a piece of ourselves.

I live on an island now, with a thousand miles of ocean between me and the house where my son was born. Some mornings I sit rocking him and watching the sea, remembering the night of his birth, and listening to Pachelbel's canon. Some deep part of me resonates with the patient majesty of the bass tones and with the eternal tenacity of the tide. Something shimmering and free is borne out of me on the wings of violins, soaring on unfettered wind to the infinite reaches of cloud banks. I did not birth my child the hard way; I did it my way. What I have gained I still cannot fully explain, but I know it has altered my course. After all, can a woman bring forth a life from within herself and not listen for a reverberation in the spirit?

Christine Hale (35) writes and rides horses with passion in Bermuda, where she lives with her husband David Amis and their two children, Jacqueline (5) and Buddy (15 months).

COPYRIGHT 1991 Mothering Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group