Bodie's Birth

Revelations from my first birth

My older son just turned 4 and I’ve been thinking a lot about his birth. What a wild ride! I learned so much from this experience in spite of, or perhaps because of, it not going the way I wanted. It feels important to share this story partly for my own catharsis and also because we can learn a lot from our mistakes. As a doula and teaching classes to prepare for birth, I’ve used this story to illustrate how to go towards what you want and how to give yourself grace when surprises arise. Looking back it’s easy to see how starkly different this medicalized birth was from my second undisturbed birth where we stayed home (you can read about that here). The way we birth affects our journey into motherhood and beyond.

Here’s the story of my birth as I remember it from 4 years ago. In my next piece I’ll unravel the mistakes I made. Many of them are common mistakes, especially for a first birth. One of the big themes I want to look at is the belief going in that I needed a lot of hel…