12 Hours After Giving Birth at Home

My second child was born at home, my first fully home birth. In New Jersey, the closest to home birth that is legal is in a free-standing clinic with midwives attending, who have to have a hospital that has agreed to take an emergency transport if necessary. In Utah, however, home births are perfectly legal and there are many midwives who deliver at home. After my first delivery (which was long and painful enough I wished out loud multiple times to be dead and when I threw up after every contraction for twelve hours until they gave me an IV), I decided that it was a good idea for me to have a home birth.

I didn’t have a firm date of conception because I had a miscarriage in between my first child and my second one. I didn’t have an ultrasound, either, because lay midwife. So I will never know if my second child was late or on time. We thought late, but no proof. I had gone in and out of labor every night for several days (the midwife claimed this was the work of the full moon) and finally delivered around midnight Sunday morning after a much easier labor. The baby looked like a shrunken dwarf and was the ugliest child I’d ever seen. The midwife said that the placenta had stopped working and the baby had probably lost weight.

The midwife gave me some herbal drinks to help my uterus shrink, along with some painful massage, and packed up her things and left at about two a.m. I had never experienced after birth pains quite like this before, and did not get much sleep that night. I suppose I could have taken Tylenol, but it didn’t occur to me. Since I wasn’t sleeping, I got up at my usual time around 7 a.m. and got breakfast for my other child who was eighteen months old. I have a precious photo of the two of them together, both tiny, but a different scale of small.

Our normal church time was noon. Of course, any woman who has just given birth should not go to church just hours after delivery. Right? Right.

But I packed up the kids two kids in a stroller. And walked to church. Just like I always did. A few people commented on how maybe I should have stayed home with such a new baby. I don’t think any of them realized that the baby was only twelve hours old.

In the end, I didn’t manage to walk back home from church. I was bleeding too badly. So my ex went back and got the car and picked me and the kids up and took us home.

I could tell you that I learned an important lesson from this, but I don’t think I did. I did the same thing with each of the other babies in one form or another. I sometimes tell the story about baby #5, whose birth interrupted an important writing class I was taking with a well-known Mormon science fiction author. He thought I wasn’t going to come back when I delivered on Thursday morning. But Friday, I showed back up (a little late), with baby in tow. The next week, I was out mowing the lawn and sawing up a tree limb that had fallen in a storm the night before.

I used to think that these were stories about how tough I was physically. I used to take some pride in them. Sometimes I thought I was just genetically gifted to be able to recover from childbirth so easily. I hated being pregnant, I told people, but as soon as the baby was out, I felt like myself again.

Now, I look back on these self-inventions and think that they are a lot like me telling myself that I didn’t need more than five hours of sleep a night when my kids were tiny. I think that this is what Mormonism (and my specific family situations) made of me. I lived in such toxic misogynistic circumstances that I felt a constant need to prove myself strong by doing ridiculous things to my body to ignore the fact that I was a woman.

I also think, looking back, that a lot of Mormonism is about performing “The Perfect Family” TM and most of that work falls on mothers (who press it onto their children and sometimes husbands, as well). I thought that I was earning some kind of perfect family points by showing that childbirth didn’t faze me in the least, that I could go straight back to my regular routine. I was a STRONG WOMAN. I was like the pioneer women we heard stories about, who gave birth and then woke up the next day and either buried their dead newborns or their husbands or other children, and then picked up the handcart and kept going West.

I also prided myself on not needing help while pregnant. I bristled at anyone who offered to carry groceries for me. I moved furniture when I had a nesting instinct in the last month of pregnancy. All by myself. I didn’t want help. I didn’t need help. I wasn’t #likeothergirls

I wish sometimes I could go back and tell myself that actually, I was a terrible candidate for home birth. And also that it was all right for me to take medication for pain. But since I can’t do that, I can write pieces like this and hope that the next generation of women doesn’t think that being a feminist means ignoring that you are a woman and that you have a female body that has special needs. I will make sure my daughters get better care (and yes, Mom, I can hear the irony in your voice as you remind me that you TRIED to get me to go to the hospital and to stop carrying heavy things while I was pregnant).