The gentlebirth.org website is provided courtesy of
Ronnie Falcao, LM MS, a homebirth midwife in Mountain View, CA

C-section, VBAC, HBAC . . . Ecstasy?

My son, born in April of 1994, was supposed to be born at home.  This  pregnancy was unplanned...I discovered just nine weeks after my husband and  I got married, that I was pregnant.  We weren't ready to have a baby! This  is what we thought.  I was, after a few weeks, able to let go of this  hang-up, and get on with planning the kind of birth we wanted.  My husband  just couldn't get into gear for a baby.  Through the entire pregnancy, he  found it impossible to even talk about the upcoming baby for more that a  few minutes!  But he agreed to the homebirth, the midwife, whatever I  wanted to do was fine.  So I read lots of books, believed I had the whole  birth game under control and waited over-eagerly for our baby to come.

eight days after my due date, I began having contractions at about  8pm...about 4 minutes apart.  I went to bed and got up to go to the  bathroom at midnight and as I hauled myself out of bed, my water broke.  I  was ecstatic!  Contractions stayed steady at 3 or 4 minutes apart and not  too difficult until about 7am.  At that time, my midwife checked me and  said I was about 6cm dilated.  When I got up from that internal check, I  was in "back labor"...my baby's head was ramming down on my tail bone with  every contraction.  It was very painful and I began to feel a little  afraid.  But I didn't know it was back labor and after awhile I began to  think, "transition is supposed to be really difficult to manage, maybe this  is transition!"  Once again, I was ecstatic.  But at the next internal  check, 9:30am, I was still at 6cm.  I just fell apart.  I cried.  I felt  defeated.  I wanted someone to rescue me, but didn't know how to ask, or  what I even wanted.  I continued in this very painful back labor for  another eight hours.  My husband napped through the day, and I resented    every wink of sleep he got.  But I didn't ask him to stay with me.  I sort  of martyred myself, not a good response, I now know....Jon did take me for  a few walks on our roof (we lived in a Boston brownstone) then at about  4pm, he went for a walk alone, and during his absence, the midwives and I  decided I should go to the hospital.  When Jon came home, he was shocked by  the news and the sight of all of us scrambling to get me out to the  hospital.  The short and only necessary part of the story from there, is  that after six more hours of the same misery, I was incapable of making a  rational  decision, and when  c-section was offered I said "sure, go  ahead".  After my beautiful nine and a half pound son was removed from my  belly and I saw my sweet husband holding him and crying, I realized that I  had been afraid that Jon would reject his baby, and maybe I was holding  back for that reason.  I also, believe that even with all the reading I  did, I was not sufficiently prepared for the intensity of the work that  birthing a baby can be.

Eighteen months later when my daughter was born, I came to her delivery a  changed woman.  I knew that part of my trouble with David's birth was due  to the fact that he was in a posterior position...as was Audrey.  I spent  about two hours a day during the last four weeks of that pregnancy getting  her rotated around to a better position by crawling around on my hands and  knees, reading books to David on hands and knees...and it did rotate her  around so that her spine ran just off center of the front of my belly when  I began laboring on her due date.  I had walked a total of more than nine  miles around our neighborhood over the previous three days.  I had taken a  tincture of black and blue cohosh and had applied Oil of Evening Primrose  to my cervix every evening for ten days.  (Check out Susun Weed's Wise  Woman's Herbal for the Child Bearing Year) Anyway, I got to the hospital at  7cm dilation...which was a great victory for me...sort of like starting out  farther along than I was at the end of the last labor!  I was shuffled up  to a labor room, and it took me awhile to get out of my clothes at such an  advanced stage of labor...this mercifully delayed the nurses from getting  their mitts on me. When I got onto the bed, Jon was right there with me,  and I pulled and wrestled so hard with him during those contractions, I  actually ripped the pocket right off his pants. Now, the nurses knew form  my chart that I had had a section before, and they couldn't wait to  puncture my vein for the IV insert.  I kept putting them off, then finally  at the height of a contraction when I was pushing my daughter out, the  nurse succeeded in poking that needle into my vein.   less than a minute  later, i pushed Audrey out after a three hour labor, and not too  difficult.... a beautiful little (7lb11oz) girl.  What a wonderful moment  that was.  I got to catch Audrey myself, and I was the one announcing to  the room..."A Girl!"  Incredible.

So for my third baby...eighteen months later...I had a very young and  energetic homebirth midwife named Chris.  Chris cannot sit still.  This may  be an unusual feature in a midwife, but for me it was just perfect.  She  was bustling around busily while I did the work of my labor... My water  broke for this baby three weeks before his due date.  Labor cranked right  up and I was having heavy duty contractions about 2 minutes apart within an  hour.  Chris just left me alone in the shower.  Jon had just gotten home  from a trip overseas and was just awfully jet-lagged, thought he was really  giving me his very best energy, he'd been awake for more than 36 hours so I  left him napping in a chair and just rode out the contractions on my own in  the shower.  By this time I knew in my heart that labor was my job, and  mine alone to do.  Michael was born two hours later...he had been another  posterior baby and even at three weeks early, he weighed almost nine  pounds.  And I didn't have the slightest tear!  When I caught Michael, I  just laughed uncontrollably for several minutes.  That was just a fantastic  birth.  NO STRESS at all.  And, though I think all my babies have been  fairly easy babies, Michael has been always the very most happy and loving  and affectionate little man I have ever known.  I think part of it is  because he came into the world to the sound of laughter, not the impersonal tones of a medical staff and the strange smells of a hospital.

I am now pregnant with our fourth.  Jon is really excited about this  homebirth coming up.  I have seen him come full circle...from the  freewheeling bachelor to the very devoted and INVOLVED parent.  I believe  that our increasingly joyous birth experiences have been a real blessing to him and to us as a couple.