12 years ago

12 years ago....

I started my day with a brand new baby girl in my arms.

She was my first home birth.

It took 36 hours of real, live, miserable labor to bring her into the world, thanks to her posterior position. Most people would have ended up with a c-section for that birth, because a lot of doctors think that it just isn't possible for women to birth posterior babies. Thanks to the quiet, calm support of my midwife I was able to preserve what little strength I had left for the job at hand. If I had been in a situation where I had to use any of that energy for anything else, I doubt that I could have done it. By the time my daughter was born, I had experienced fatigue so great that I literally didn't know that it was possible to be that tired and still be awake.

Just to show you how horrid the entire labor was, when I was maybe 2 or 3 hours away from the birth, I tried to pep myself up by looking at my firstborn and asking myself, "If you had to go through all of this in order to get him, you'd do it, wouldn't you?"

And the answer I came back with?

"Nope."

It was that. bad.

In natural childbirth books that tell you ways that birth can be almost painless, the one exception is always..posterior position! Yeah--it's a toughie.

Fortunately I lived through it, so did she, and now I have this special girl--just the two of us ladies in a household filled with boys. She gave up wishing for a sister 5 years ago after she got 4 little brothers in a row. Now she's just content with the way things are.