Being pregnant for the first time by definition means you don’t really know what lies ahead. You can read until your heart is content (and this can help), but you never really know if you’re making the right decisions. It is no surprise that making 1001 choices about your pregnancy, birth, and unborn baby can be a little stressful.

I started thinking about the birth almost as soon as I found out I was pregnant. Why? I had 10 long months to contemplate this, but yet it was one of the first things I wanted to sort out. Strangely, I was excited for the birth. If I could have skipped a majority of the 10 months getting there, that would have been okay with me. The birth seemed like the ultimate spiritual escapade and I wanted in on it.

Specifically, I wanted to have this experience at home in the water. I was really clear on this.

When I told Missus Scooter, she looked at me as though I sprouted a second head. Oops, apparently we never talked about this.

When I started to feel around the edges of where she was at on the issue, I was coming to realize changing her mind wouldn’t be as easy as I thought. She felt pretty strongly against it and I was pretty strongly in favor. Missus Scooter was primarily worried about two things: 1) Safety. Would her wife be okay? Would her baby be okay? 2) Clean-up. Seriously. Who was in charge of the mess? But beyond these things, she had lots of other concerns. Neither one of us had any firsthand experience with a home birth so she could not imagine how it would be and I could not effectively talk her through how it would be. We were at a bit of an impasse.

ADVERTISEMENT

While we sat in limbo, I was devouring information about home births any way I could get it. I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (twice), underlining and dog-earing favorite sections. I googled. I watched home and water births on YouTube. The more I researched, the more resolved I became. Missus Scooter wasn’t interested in reading any of my books and when I enthusiastically tried to show her a home birth video, the most she gave me was “hmmmmm.”

She really wanted to find a compromise. She suggested a progressive hospital… some place with birthing suites, tubs, and an orientation to support women who chose unmedicated births. Her arguments were rational but it wasn’t what I really wanted. I toyed with the idea of pulling the baby-carrier trump card with something really delightful like, “unless you’re pushing this baby out, you don’t get a say in it,” but I thought that would be especially unhelpful and the truth of it was I wanted us to be on the same page. I wasn’t really interested in bullying her into something she didn’t want to do. So instead I told her I was open to visiting a hospital like she described so long as she was open to meeting a few midwives to get educated on the home path. She agreed.

I was a lot more zealous on nailing down the birthing plan, so I decided we would start with meeting some midwives. I made an appointment with a pair of independent midwives in our area who came highly recommended.

Missus Scooter and I went to their office and sat on a very comfortable couch, a cat purring away on her perch in the corner. We talked. They wanted to know about us. They wanted to know our concerns. They wanted to know what we were excited about. There was no physical exam. They educated us on how it would all happen (including the part about how they would bring the tub to our house, set it up, take it down, and clean up everything behind them). They told us they would be responsible for all of our prenatal care and 6 weeks of postnatal care for me and baby. They told us they were fastidious about safety. We talked a lot about supplements and how they take care of mom during pregnancy, paying attention to many facets of my well being, not just how big my belly was measuring or my blood pressure (although they would take this information as well).

I really liked the holistic approach to the entire experience and that most importantly, these two women would know everything there was to know about me and my baby when it came time to deliver. After an hour and a half visit, as we were closing our meeting, Missus Scooter stood and said, “Well, this is a no-brainer. We’re having a home birth and you’re hired.”

This is my Missus Scooter. She is spontaneous and emotional and always follows her gut. Good or bad, frustrating or glorious, this is how life goes with her.

As I tried to recover from my shock in front of the midwives (after all, shouldn’t we have discussed this first as a couple?), I reminded myself that this is what I wanted. Like Missus Scooter, I knew after our meeting that these were the women to help us bring our baby into the world. So I smiled and it was decided.