Hi Readers! I’m featured on xoJane.com’s It Happened to Me today!
When my husband and I found out we were pregnant, we embarked, without a heap of conviction, on a journey to have our daughter in our Jacuzzi tub.
My admittedly shallow reason: I was not trying to pay on a hospital bill. Yeah, deep.
Once the midwife problem was solved, I began to settle into my decision to give birth at home. Prenatal visits with my midwife were amazing. We sat on her couch, which smelled faintly of incense, surrounded by ambient music and two soft-spoken doulas, and sipped agave-sweetened hot tea.
She lent us books and videos on birthing, labor, parenthood, breastfeeding, and prenatal yoga, and expected us to grow just as our Little Bean was.
But if anyone had told me that a birth plan is a dream like “I want to be a firefighter” or “I want to save the whales,” a haloed, hallowed dream with fuzzy edges that you practice telling your unborn children when they are old enough to ask; a dream that you grow over nine months and cradle inside your heart; a dream that you wrap yourself with gingerly at 4:27am during itch fits, or when sharing your lunch with office toilet bowls; a dream that is the bridge from pregnancy to motherhood, which women must build, plank by plank, to stay sane — if anyone had told me that a birth plan is that type of dream, I wouldn’t have believed them — until I cried at the loss of mine.
dara t. mathis 
Aww, it’s okay! Writers need tough skin. I’ve developed a Teflon alloy that works pretty well on the Internet. 🙂 Thank you for being so sweet! 🙂
I have tried and tried to leave a comment over at xojane and apparently my android phone is cranky.
I am just appalled at some of the responses you got.
I am so sorry.
Thank you so much for reading and for giving voice to mothers and women who feel that their perspectives are devalued. This is much needed!
I really appreciate you sharing your story! I felt the same way at my first birth. I hope more women will share their stories so we can start to transform the way we treat birthing and postpartum women.
Thanks, Yoles! Yeah, I’ve been subject to bad bedside manner before, and it’s really almost as essential as competent medical care itself. Valued mental health care, as you probably know, is critical for any patient’s well being. At least I feel better prepared to stick a foot up someone’s behind if that ever happens again.
oh D…. i felt for you… i can’t stand staff that forget their bedside manner… shame on them and congrats on the beautiful baby… hi samira 😀