An ordinary extraordinary day in a young boy’s life. Wake up. Go downstairs. Meet freshly born little brother. Ask what’s for breakfast.
The Sunday Photo Album is a regular feature of the Safe Birth Blog. If you would like to submit a picture, please email soracolvin@gmail.com.
I have three daughters: a bright, feisty 12-year-old; a sweet blonde 4-year-old with huge brown eyes; and a snuggly five-week-old peanut. Looking at the baby, it is hard to imagine how quickly she will grow, but her oldest sister, who was a snuggly little baby herself just yesterday, is now on the verge of young womanhood and so I cannot forget that all of my daughters will, in an astonishingly short time, be grown women, and that it is very likely that they will someday be mothers.
What will it be like when they have their babies? When I was born, women were still fighting to have their husbands and other support people in the delivery room and to avoid automatic shaves, enemas, and episiotomies, but back then, no one would have imagined a 30% Cesarean rate. Will 50% of babies be delivered by Cesarean when my daughters have their babies, or will the trend have reversed? Will my daughters have trouble finding home birth midwives because they have been litigated out of existence, or will they be legal, professional, and accepted as part of the health care system?
If my daughters end up having hospital births, will they get supportive, respectful, evidence based care? If they have home births, will they have to fight to have their health insurance cover the cost?
My daughters will have grown up with a paradigm of birth and motherhood that is shaped by my choices. My oldest daughter has had five younger siblings born at home, has watched them breastfed into toddlerhood, has listened to me talking with my friends about our pregnancy and birth experiences. This will give her a foundation that many of her peers do not have. I think of other young girls growing up today whose exposure to birth may be limited to media depictions and hospital “horror stories” and wonder what their initiation into motherhood will be like.
I believe there is something deeply wrong with much of maternity care in the U.S. today, that mothers and babies are needlessly damaged by a model of care that does not use technology wisely or appropriately and that does not respect the long-term psycho-social effects of the birth experience on the individuals and families involved. Do enough other people see the problem to create a positive, long-term change?
“In the olden days people didn’t have to go to hospitals to have babies. They had them at home.”
“So they did,” Mother agreed. “But even if I had the baby at home, I couldn’t come see you being the angel.”
“Why not?”
“Brand new babies need a lot of attention,” Mother said, “and they can’t be taken out in the cold. I was pretty tied down at Christmas time the year you were born.”
“But I was born!” I cried. “And you were home for Christmas. You didn’t go off and leave John and Suzy alone. Oh, I forgot. Suzy wasn’t born. Anyhow, Mother, please could you ask the baby to wait till after Christmas?”
“I can ask,” Mother said, “but I wouldn’t count on it.”
I pull out The Twenty-Four Days Before Christmas by Madeleine L’Engle to read to my kids every year during Advent. It’s a longer picture book, about right for elementary-school aged children, though my preschoolers will usually sit through it. Narrated by seven year old Vicky, the book describes her close-knit family’s Advent traditions, her eager watch with her siblings for the first snowfall of the year, her anxieties about her role in the church Christmas Pageant, and her horrified realization that her mother may not be home for Christmas. All these plot strings come together on Christmas eve, when a terrific snowstorm blocks the roads and the pageant and Christmas Eve service are canceled. During the snow-storm, the baby arrives at home without fuss, panic, or painful disruption of family traditions, with Vicky’s mother attended by her husband, who is a family practice doctor.
This story is particularly special to my family because I have been pregnant or had a newborn during the Advent season many times — including having a baby on Christmas day. But I also enjoy the way the home birth in this book is worked into the storyline as an important plot feature but not the main point of the book. It’s a well-written children’s story that happens to include a home birth rather than a children’s story about home birth.
Published in 1984, the illustrations seem a little dated to me, but none of my children have ever complained. The book is, unfortunately, out-of print, and some of the copies available online are ridiculously expensive, but check your library — Hamilton County library system has a copy. I found ours several years ago at a library discard sale.