Current child status: Girl (9), Boy (7), Boy (3.5), Girl (2), Unknown (pending)
How strange to reduce these complex, strong, willful little people to a gender and age. It’s an easy shorthand, but it doesn’t really tell you anything about them. Child #1 writes me and Husband little illustrated cards about how much she loves us (unless she’s skipped a meal, then occasionally it’s death threats 👀), Child #2 is an endless source of hugs and only needs to look at any messy substance (mud, water, his sister’s tie-dye inks) for him and various other implausible places to become covered with it. Child #3 takes nothing for granted and has always been so empathetic he’s happiest when his siblings are evidently happy, and Child #4 is a startling combination of Disney cartoon cuteness, overwhelming shyness, and Valkyric boldness when only her fam are present (one of her favourite moves is to headlock Child #3 from behind then tip them both over backwards.
And now we’re expecting the arrival of Child #5 in the next 2-3 weeks. Whoever they turn out to be, our family will never be the same, and that’s exciting and intriguing.
We don’t know Child #5’s gender. I’ve never had a scan, so it’s less a choice to not be told and more that there’s no one to ask. Children #2-4 were all home births by choice, with progressively less involvement from the midwives. Last time we walked the crazy path of birthing neither of us realised quite how far along I was, so by the time we called the midwife it was too late for her to do more than check on me and the already-arrived baby once she turned up. Having a baby without anyone extra present is apparently called free birthing.
So this time we’re planning to free birth. All my research and experience seems to point to the following fact:
The less you mess with a normally birthing woman, the better the birth goes.
And obviously we’d like the best birth possible, please. I’d be very happy if this birth was exactly the same as Child #4’s – sleeping through the early contractions (I know 🎉), sitting on the side of the bed through the intense later ones, using breathing and vivid visualising of blasting through the sky above our home to the coast and plunging into the sea as my only method of pain control, then kneeling beside the bed while my body did its own good, involuntary work of pushing Child #4 out into this world. And the bit that’s often missed from birth stories but is actually pretty important from a health perspective – birthing the placenta too. As the midwife had yet to arrive and we had nothing on hand to cut the cord, I sat in bed with my latest darling with a waste paper bin tucked next to me full of the still attached placenta until the midwife arrived with her sterile scissors.
Hooray. The recovery was pretty good too.
But the one thing I can be certain of, is that this birth won’t be the same as any of the others. No birth can be. In Child #3’s early labour I was singing hymns in church while discreetly having mild contractions, and pretending to be unaware of my dad’s constant not saying anything but can we get you home yet vibe. Child #2’s birth was shorter than any of the others but in a way more discombobulating, and with Child #1 I double haemorrhaged and technically should have gone to hospital for a blood transfusion, but you know what, I didn’t and it all ended up fine. (Wherever do my kids get their stubborness from, it’s an unsolvable mystery)
So here we go again. Last night, for the first time since I got pregnant with this new human, I had a flash back to just how intense some of the birthing sensations can be and got cold feet. Rather late in the day for that! The path I’m on is a one way street. And I’m glad it is, because choosing to do something this hard deliberately needs the cushion of being nine months away to give me the nerve.
I know the birth will be intense and there will be times when I’d rather just stop it all. And I’m glad I won’t be able to, because I also know those brief moments of doubt and overwhelm will pass, and are the tiniest flicker of time when set against the years and years of joy this little human has the potential to bring, to our family and to the world.
Making new humans is not an easy ride, but it’s the most profound, exciting, all-consuming privilege that I’m blessed to be choosing once again.
Wish me luck!
Country Mum Writes 