SAY “CHEESE!” ????

One of the advantages of a home birth is that the woman/couple gets to orchestrate this event. At most hospitals, you can’t even video the birth. Are you kidding me? And people put up with that???? I mean, not everyone wants to have their birth recorded, but that’s not the point. The point is that we video everything these days – graduations, weddings, picnics, baby showers – and anyone who wants to have their birth available to watch in the years to come – well, they should be “permitted” to do so. 

Note: I ask my clients not to watch anything that has been recorded, nor to look at any of the birth photos until their babies are a year old. Very few listen to me, but it’s a good idea worth considering. I ask them to at least wait until after they have had time to write their birth stories – otherwise, the story becomes what the camera saw and not what they experienced. Details that they hold in their hearts and minds become buried or lost, as the details that are shown in the photos, crystal clear, take precedence. The birth becomes “what-the-photographer(s)-saw” instead. 

One woman chose a home birth very late in the pregnancy when she was told that the hospital had denied her request to have both of her sisters present at the birth. That would have meant that there were four people in the room in addition to the laboring mother, as she wanted ( can you imagine this?) her husband and a doula. The hospital said she might be able to have one sister, but definitely not two. She couldn’t choose between them. She loved them both. 

The most number of people at a home birth I have attended was 21 (well, 20 until the baby was born) – although often times it is a very private time with just the mother and father. Isn’t it wonderful that there is a CHOICE at home?

Oh, and one woman was watching her birth video while nursing her newborn – before the placenta was out. I had gone into the bathroom to get a warm washcloth and there she was, “reliving” the event. I told her that I hoped she would live it from the inside out before she began to live it from the outside in – and that made sense to her – so she turned it off and told her baby that they would watch it together in a year.