Undomesticated Birth

In praise of more primeval beginnings

Birth is like an all-knowing, all-consuming character to me- wisdom and beauty and fury and divine purpose manifested into this beast of an experience. Because birth is an experience-it happens to you. The woman is a vehicle for the sensation necessary to propel another human into this life. Birth happens whether or not the woman consents, contractions begin when the body and the baby communicate in a thousand ancient and unknown languages and conclude it is time-the woman’s thinking mind is not invited to this conversation. When allowed to unfold naturally, the fetal ejection reflex is just that-a reflex, a primitive thing. And we, in those moments, are the primitive beings so many of us prefer to forget we are.

I have birthed in the hospital with an OB. I have been a Labor and Delivery Nurse and caught babies. I have received care at a birthing center and I have received care from a CPM. I have given birth unassisted twice, once much more intentionally than the other. I have had what many call a totally “wild pregnancy”. I have freebirthed a breech baby in my bathroom. I have even attended other women’s unassisted births as well- as a watchful eye-nothing more, nothing less. I am well-versed in this ultimate work of women, and I only find it more and more special as I grow older.

It is because of my intimate knowing of the specialness of this experience that I am invariably in favor of protecting it in its most ancient and true form. It is equally due to my personal and professional experiences that I feel this way. I know what sabotage of the female spirit looks like. I know what disrespect to new life looks like. I also know what the honorable upholding of this same spirit and of that same new life looks like. The difference is a woman born into motherhood broken or a woman born into motherhood healed and whole.

Pain can make us whole and surrender can make us trust, and the combination of walking through the veil of them both is like a baptism in the essence of creation itself. Our entire culture and the medical system that informs that culture on this topic robs us of this. It has made us fearful, with a distaste for any sort of pain or inconvenience or mess.

We need to get over it.

The unpredictable timing and the uncontrollable pain and the unruly bloody mess of birth illuminate for us that we are not the ultimate masters of our environments or bodies. And allowing these things, rather than fighting them, makes this fact okay. How freeing it truly is when you are able to know this.

I don’t know why this is, but I have always had a very opposing distaste, and it is for people who cannot handle pain or blood or dirt. People who are worried about being polite. The kind of men who need to shower immediately after sex. The sort of person who sprays Round-Up on Dandelions. People who wince when you describe an injury. Maybe I’m mean, maybe I just have no patience for fussiness. All I know is that I have always been very pro “HUMANS ARE ANIMALS”, while still recognizing our special place in the mammalian royal kingdom due to our special human talents such as logic and problem-solving and self-control and the like.

This attitude made unassisted childbirth seem obvious to me. I, like many, was indoctrinated by The Freebirth Society (I very purposefully linked the episode with the brilliant MaryLou Singleton of

Enchanted Family Medicine

here), but the impulses were there already, written into my being through my trial-by-fire first hospital birth and my experiences as a L&D nurse. I’m a natural homebody as well, and I truly see the value in birthing where we have some emotional-muscle-memory.

So today, I want to share my latest birth story, one I wrote not too long after she was born. My surprise breechling freebirth of my little Elora Arabelle, who has lived up to her origin story in every way. A birth of corporeal reminders, of fear release, and of unadulterated purity and love.

I see my birth in colors.

When I close my eyes to remember- I see the sensations in explosive tones like overturned vats of paint. At least for the end of her birth, the quick transition that began with overwhelm and fear, and that melted into all purpose and force and drive.

The beginning is different.  The beginning started with rest. Birth usually finds its home in the night and this birth is no different.  I awoke to moderately strong contractions around midnight the evening of my last Mother’s Day as a mother of two.  I was laying in bed with my 16 month old Rowan, the last night we would lay together just the two of us. 

I chose to go downstairs once I was awake and aware of the fact that these were not the contractions that I had been experiencing for days, these were fully formed.  Round, all encompassing-the work of labor. 

Water felt like where I needed to be, so I filled the tub up in our under-construction half-done bathroom. I made myself a big cup of the herbal infusion I had been drinking for months daily, hoping the plants imbued in it would somehow lend small little pieces of their spirits to me by way of coming into contact with a body. A body so steeped in the essence of this experience, much as they steep in the water that they infuse in.  I added a scoop of honey, knowing the easy energy was welcome. 

I laid in the tub, alternating sips of tea with sips of water and indulged in some mindless watching of cooking videos on youtube.  I really felt like I wasn’t quite ready to meet the work of labor just yet and knew the bath and hydration and distraction would help slow it down at this point, and I was right.  I had only slept for a couple of hours before awakening so I really was feeling wishful for some more rest.  I got out of the tub to go lay down. 

A shift.

As I got out, I felt liquid release from me. It ran down my legs and I looked down to see a pink tinge to what was meeting the bath water below me.  The contractions had slowed down in the bath but the ones that did come were very purposeful.  They had come to open my waters.

The time in the water around me had broken the water within me. 

I met the rest awaiting me with a sense of needfulness. I slept. I knew what was ahead of me, I am no stranger to this experience, one I have known in this life and ones before.  I know now that I was holding onto subconscious expectations that this birth would follow the same pattern as my last.  This would be to labor all night with increasing pain and difficulty and regularity of contractions and then birth would come in the morning with the sun. This baby needed more time. 

I was in and out, sleeping and waking to breathe my way through spaced out, irregular contractions.  They eventually spaced out so much that I was able to sleep for a few hours continuously in the morning, waking around 8 AM. 

My morning was spent in the water again, as after I stood up from waking, my contractions came on strong and water felt like the only place of comfort.  I felt this deep desire to be enveloped in warmth and soft movement, even the sound of the water running helped me turn inward.  In moments where I am feeling disconnected or depressed, I often ask myself to remember. To remember the moments in my life where I have felt the most like myself, where there has been an easeful sense of rightness, where gratitude is easy and hope is the default state of perception.  So many of these moments are related to water.  So in labor, the liminal space existing before a major life transition- both physical and metaphysical –it only fits that I and so many other women would feel the pull to be embraced by the liquid of life.  This is much like our babies inside of us and like ourselves within our own mother’s wombs. 

I spent my morning alternating between the bathtub and the couch, trying to sleep and failing.  I was experiencing a low level of anxiety for the fact that my contractions were so irregular, knowing my waters were broken.  The pattern of my previous personal birth experiences coupled with my previous nursing career indoctrination were seeping into my brain and trying to give my body a timeline it frankly had no interest in following (and that’s okay!).

I am usually the default caretaker in the early mornings but this morning Brennan of course took over.  He would check in on me with a “you okay?” here and there.  He knows I am a solitary being in these moments.  His questions of “ how long do you think?” only made me realize that I really didn’t have the sense that birth was upon me yet.  The fact that my contractions calmed so much with rest made my “thinking mind” doubt.  But my “primal mind” said, all you need to do is MOVE. 

So I did. I had been laying on the couch, and while my contractions were not closer or more regular, they were more painful.  The pain brought along with it a certain momentum, a force.  That force said, PAIN IS ENERGY….and energy demands an outlet. So I got up and I went outside.  Pain brings us inward in a way that other experiences just don’t.  The purpose of this pain propelled my body and it’s tissues into an alignment that was friendlier to my baby so that she could do her job. 

I took a walk. Down the gravel of our driveway I shuffled, holding hands with my 9 year old Ruby.  We walked the path that weaves through our woods. The difference in contractions from when I stood up and decided to venture outdoors and this point was significant. 

I marked time through distinguishing the easy mother-daughter moments of the in-between from the moments where the Earth had to hold me. The Earth knew something I didn’t.  She knew that these mother-daughter moments were the welcoming gates to my time as the mother to TWO daughters.

I held onto trees.  I was a literal tree-hugger.  I held my belly as it became firm and felt a similar firmness in the tree before me and the ground beneath me.  As we walked, the in-between times grew to be shorter and shorter, in what felt like no time at all.  The walk back up the hill felt like a test.

I only wanted to be inside.  The sun was glaring and it felt like a spotlight.  There were roosters crowing and children running about.  I wanted to hide suddenly, in the dark and alone.  Experience and logic said “ keep moving, it brings progress”. My primal mind and my body said “progress comes at will”.  I went and laid in bed with blankets covering the windows and shut the door.  I was in the denial place. A place I seem to go to in birth- the feeling of “ can I just go to sleep and maybe do this tomorrow instead?” Nature laughed at me.  This place has a job though-it allows me to calm down while my body continues to do its work.   

Brennan came in to check on me and see how long I thought it would be.  My response, “I don’t know, could be an hour, could be tonight”, downplaying what I was experiencing in order to maintain a sense of safety and sanity.  I wanted so badly to just go to sleep, and I tried to no avail.  I lay in the dark and began to think only about breath.  I clutched the side of the mattress and shook through contractions so powerful and painful that all I could do was moan and writhe around.  At this point, they were coming about 2 minutes apart.  This was transition.

I rose and felt an immediate sense of complete and total urgency. I had to find Brennan.  I made my way downstairs and realized that since I had told him it would likely be awhile, he had gone outside to occupy our other children.  I walked out into that same glaring sun and felt a prayer inside of me that this illumination would light his way to me.  It felt just that important.  I called out and my Ruby-girl heard me and alerted him.  She stayed outside to play with our little boy.  She had witnessed his birth and hoped to witness this one but I felt the need for the least amount of eyes and ears on me as possible for this baby. She is a little Earth angel who was so helpful in finding her Dad for me and for keeping Rowan happy while I brought a new sibling into this world for her. 

By the time Brennan walked up to the house from the chicken coop-all of two to three minutes-I had fallen into the desperate, animal state that birth brings us to.  When the waves came, my body willed me to the floor, on hands and knees.  I felt the need to be naked.  In taking off my pants, I saw brown on my pad.  Again, my previous knowledge base crept into the part of my brain that was still on-line at this point.  I regret letting that part of me affect me in those few moments before the animal-state took full control, but I would be lying if I said I felt no fear here.

What can I say about fear? 

It grips you.  It had a hold on me for some moments after seeing that meconium in my waters. But fear can either be coddled or defeated and I chose to defeat it.  I charged on, deciding I was capable, and instead focused on helping my baby to come forth.  I turned on the bathwater, slurped down some more honey, drank water greedily and sprayed flower essences in my mouth.  Small comforts but big nourishment that I felt the need to arm myself with.

With Brennan coming in to help me, I got into the bathtub, wanting to again be comforted by the water. It was of no comfort at this point though.  I tried to lay back but every contraction had me flipping myself over on hands and knees involuntarily, which was very uncomfortable in the tub.  I made my way through one last wave and felt my waters release completely into the bathwater.  More meconium.  I just knew I needed to sit on a toilet as soon as possible. I had pushed my second baby out on a toilet and the partnership I had felt with the force of gravity in that experience felt very reciprocal and easy, so I felt called to utilize that partnership again.  The problem here was that there was, in fact, no toilet in this particular bathroom at this time due to renovations.  So began a very short walk that felt like lifetimes.  I had three contractions between the two bathrooms and had to take on a flight of exactly 27 steps- 27 steps of perseverance, dedication and pure reverence for the being that I am and the being I was to birth. 

Safely positioned on the toilet in my 9 year old’s bedroom bathroom, surrounded by butterfly clips, nail polish, and a music box covered in horses, I birthed another little girl.  I was safe, it was dark, it was quiet, I had leverage and gravity there to support me.  No time wasted now.  I pushed involuntarily with my whole existence.  I heaved her little body with both great effort and none at all somehow, from her home inside of me out into this outer world to join us. 

I say her body, because when I felt down to pet her fuzzy head, there was no such thing.  Instead, there was soft, slippery, doughy flesh.  I had a moment of utter confusion here.  Brennan told me later that when I got off of the toilet at this point and he looked at her, he too was confused for a minute. In the otherworldly space I was in at this time, it was very hard to understand what I was touching.  Having birthed two vertex babies before, my default was to expect something very different when I put my hands down to greet my baby and to affirm to myself the literal fruits of my labor.  This felt different, but not wrong.  

I then moved to my hands and knees and felt a sense of urgency to push this baby out.  I had coincidentally read some passages from “Spiritual Midwifery” the evening prior.  I actually had randomly (or not so randomly) opened the book to the pages on breeches and felt compelled to read them.  Now I wonder if my subconscious was sending me a not-so-subtle message.  Different, but not wrong.  Because of my reading, I remembered “hands off the breech” so I didn’t feel down to her anymore and told Brennan not to touch her.  I didn’t feel fear knowing she was breech, I had every bit of confidence in my ability to birth her.  I did feel urgency though,  so I pushed “extra” on top of the fetal ejection reflex I was already experiencing.  I had her out in two contractions on the bathroom floor.  Her heels got caught up inside of me so Brennan gently guided them out, and her shoulders and head followed.  

My baby was in my arms.  She was quiet but held onto me.  I rubbed her back and sent Brennan for towels and the suction bulb  just in case.  By the time he came back upstairs, she was howling like a little wolf. She clutched onto me with her hands and feet, and the waves of euphoria and relief and the purest sense of gratitude started just washing over me.  She latched onto my breast almost immediately with her determined little eyes staring ahead and up to me in voracious hunger for her reward for her part in this long journey, those first drops of colostrum.

 I laughed in joy as Brennan joined me and I told him we had a little girl.  I sat on the floor and nursed my new baby while he hugged and kissed me and was in and out of the room to check on our other children.  Ruby came up to see us and squealed in happiness that she had been right all along-she finally had a sister!

We cut her cord after it turned white and my placenta released as I sat on the toilet again while nursing her about an hour after birth.  I needed to be alone for that.   I always feel a real sense of comfort and peace when my babies’ placentas have released- knowing the full circle moment has come and the work of this organ is done.  Rest was imminent now too, and for this I was overjoyed.  I slowly made my way downstairs to my nest on the couch and completely relished my clean clothes and the pillow to rest my head on, all while keeping my baby in arms.  

Elora Arabelle was born just before 3 pm on the Monday afternoon following Mother’s Day 2021, greeting a new moon and a warm breezy day, and greeted by only her immediate family.  Her fuzzy head was adorned with tiny flecks of blood, her little body was warm and squishy and so purposeful in her movements to get her to my breast, her eyes often peacefully shut but often looking right up at me-studying and curious.  My sweetest gift. 

My fascination with breech babies comes from a very special place now.  These babies, purportedly 3 or 4% of all full term babes, once thought to grow up to be healers and thought to bring good luck, are both special and ordinary-much like birth itself, in all its glory.  I know because my breech baby taught me so.