no promises
Dear god, I feel just awful.
Not physically. Physically, I’m fine. It’s just this blog I’ve been reading. As the spouse put it, it’s like watching a train-wreck.
I stumbled onto this blog while looking up other pregnancy and parenting blogs. For the pregnancy ones, I had looked up ones that referred to natural childbirth, hoping to find others working towards a natural, drug-free birth and hoping those search terms would also help me find other home-birthers. One of these blogs seemed rather promising, even though she’s a planned hospital birth, and I’ve been following it rather closely, as the writer is almost as far along as me.
Recently, though, it’s been painful. She sounds so determined to have a natural childbirth, but her recent posts sound like naive openings to Misconceptions, Immaculate Deception II or The Business of Being Born [add to NetFlix]. One of them was about choosing which hospital nearby to go with and, perhaps it was just omission on her part, but there was no mention as to c-section rates of either hospital (or the delivering doctor), staff policies on pushing epidurals or episiotomy rates, or anything like that. Her concern, as written, was which one would be more likely to have a birth tub available and maybe the pros and cons of recovery in the same L&D room. *sigh*
Now, I know how this sounds – crazy home-birther beating on other (hospital-birth) peoples choices, but it’s really not that. Reading one of her earlier posts yesterday, I was almost in tears. And I never cry over these things. (And it’s not hormones.) I’m just so sad & scared for her! I mean, she really, really wants a natural childbirth, and yet she believes the party line – that just by “eating right” and “exercise” and listening to her doctor’s advice, she’s doing enough and everything else is just chance. *groan* I know I have every chance of ending up in the hospital as her, but at least by then I could live with knowing we really tried everything possible first. I hear so many birth stories of women who only find out years later that there were more things they could have done first to safely avoid the hospital or a c-section. I want to reach through the computer and shake her and tell her that she needs to ask better questions, be better informed to make more relevant decisions if she really wants this to happen.
I won’t. Most of our friends already think I’m a fruitcake for wanting to do this at home. You’d think California would be more open to it, but there’s like 15 midwives that do home births here in Los Angeles. Yes, most of them know each other. And home-birthers often know each others’ midwives, too, as we all shopped from the same pool nine months ago. So the knowledge of home births, the awareness of it as an option, is virtually non-existent to most people.
Anyhow. I can’t decide whether to keep reading her blog, or to stop. I really hope it all works out for her, but I’m scared that the odds are stacked against her and that is just too painful to watch. *sigh*
