Witch. Revolutionary.

Today was my daughter’s third day at preschool.  She’s going to be four on August 17th and as we transition into her sign, Leo, I am reminded of all the challenging events that led up to her home birth. 

Lyric was conceived the month after my mother passed away and our first hope was that she really was my mother, coming back.  This is a belief that a lot of families of Eastern religion and philosophy support.  In the Western world, I don’t find many mainstream people who are open minded to reincarnation.  I don’t speak for everyone, of course, but in this, I will risk a generalization: most Witches believe in reincarnation. 

Prior to Lyric’s conception, I had been dabbling in baby magic.  I wasn’t trying to get pregnant but I knew intuitively that my mother was going to die and that the wheel of life would be turning in an extraordinary way.  I was open to whatever change was on the winds.  I had been enchanted by a picture of a fairy looking over a baby and had posted it where I would see it daily.  I was also regularly listening to a song Madonna had written for Lourdes and subconsciously inviting a little golden soul to come my way.  If this sounds corny or esoteric, it shouldn’t.  Consider any woman who is desperate to get pregnant, who has wasted time and money on useless fertility treatments – a woman like that would welcome any kind of gentle baby magic if she thought it would work.  I’m sad for these women and sorry to say that I was not as desperate for conception.

My Craft work was limited to caring for my mother while she was comatose.  I was with her when she took her last breath.  She died in October after a long time on life support, just as my father had, also in October, one year before.  Part of my grief process involved filling a new home with their ashes and what I could salvage of their former belongings.  More on that later.

Lyric is my only child and I was 36 when she was born.  Because I had spent so much time in hospitals caring for my parents, I no longer trusted the Western medical system and did not wish to be subjected to patriarchal, limiting ideas of childbirth.  It sounds silly to write a sentence like that.  And believe me, I know how dogmatic it sounds.  But there’s no other way to say it.  Being a Witch, I knew that the only kind of birth I could have would have to be entirely on my own terms.  So I looked to the world of midwifery and self-hypnosis for an alternative. 

I also wanted to put my money where my mouth was.  Being a Witch is not something you do part-time.  If the Goddess calls on you, you have to rise to the occasion.  And in this case, it wasn’t so much that I had to PROVE to anyone that I could give birth without drugs; it was that my INTUITION told me I could, and I couldn’t chicken out on my own instinct.  Therein lies the true journey of the Witch.  I only wish that younger women who dally in the Craft would come to that realization.  I think if they understood just how important the SPIRITUAL CALLING is, they wouldn’t take it up so feverishly during awkward adolescence and then abandon it so quickly post-college.  But that’s fodder for an entirely different essay.

Suffice to say that birthing with midwives turned out to be the most positive and educational experience I had had.  I started seeing the midwives at the Hollywood Birth Center on Gardner (right in the heart of ”Guitar Central” on the Sunset Strip – something we point out often to Lyric) at five months and I planned to birth in a water tub at nine months.  My entire pregnancy was waylaid by complications.  I was fighting a legal battle over my parents property that I lost.  I was living in two different cities, spending two weeks in one and two weeks back in LA, trying to manage my parents estate and keep my personal life intact.  The stress factor was overwhelming.  Other than the midwives, I had no supportive females in my life.  No sisters.  No immediate relatives to take over the role of mother or grandmother to me.  I wasn’t what you would call “physically fit”.  When we think of women who give birth naturally, perhaps we think of yoga instructors or women who had been athletic.  I was nothing like that.  And I was 36 and having a child for the first time.  In spite of all of these things, I still managed to believe that I could birth naturally and I persevered to find competent women in Los Angeles who would help me.  I knew the Goddess would bring them to me. 

I wasn’t reckless.  I was simultaneously seeing a female obstretician at a women’s clinic in Los Angeles.  I was getting regular ultra sounds and blood tests.  I refused amniocentesis.  I didn’t care to know if my daughter was going to have Down’s Syndrome or not.  I wasn’t going to love her any less.  Or view raising a Down’s Syndrome child as any less of a challenge than raising any other kind of child. 

Part of affirming that I could birth naturally was telling everyone the truth of my aspirations.  My cousin who is “successful and well educated” (and works for the hospital where my mother passed away) told me every horror story you can imagine about women being killed by midwives.  So did the female doctor I was seeing.  As time went on and we started discussing hospitals to prepare for, I let her know that I intended to birth in a tub.  She did everything she could to discourage me, even telling me that my cervix was shaped in such a way that birthing without cesarean or drugs could kill me.  As I had spent a great deal of time and energy learning about midwifery and separating fact from fiction, I couldn’t believe how very little people, especially women, in the United States knew about midwives.  Compared to the rest of the world, especially countries where birth with midwifery is the norm, I couldn’t believe how patriarchal the United States was.  And for NO GOOD REASON!

At one point I started bleeding prematurely and was taken to Cedar’s-Sinai Medical Center, supposedly one of the best in the U.S. and the one you hear about when celebrities give birth; Cedars was five minutes from my Los Angeles home.  I was at the start of my third trimester and was being told I would have to spend the rest of my pregnancy in bed.  They gave me steroids to help the baby’s lungs, in case she was born premature.  They hooked me up to a catheter and gave me only ice chips to eat in case I went into labor.  I was miserable.  After several lonely days staring out the window with only the Beverly Center to view, with no visitors except my partner, and no permission to even get up and wash my own hair, I called the midwives and told them what the “Western meds” had done to me.  They flew in like superheroes and within hours I was discharged and back in my own home, where I happily remained (albeit housebound, no walking up and down the stairs!) until I gave birth to my Leo baby in the comfort of my own bed. 

 This is what the birth was like. 

8:00 pm: I felt contractions and had a glass of wine.  I had not imbibed during pregnancy and thought nothing of having a glass for contractions.  I don’t recommend it.  But that’s what I did. 

2:00 am: The contractions were ferocious enough that I felt it was necessary to take a long shower, dry off, drink another glass of wine and try to get to the birth center. 

3:00 am: The midwives were called and told not to go the birth center, that I was very close to birthing and couldn’t (wouldn’t) leave home.

4:00 am: The midwives arrived, our pug was dropped off with a neighbor, birthing ensued.

7:30am: Lyric had arrived.  Curtis went to Buzz on the corner to get coffee for everyone.  The midwives shared food and conversation while Lyric nursed right away; we took her for her first baby visit at Dr. Fleiss’s office the next day.  The midwives had let Curtis cut the umbilical cord which they later shaped into a heart.  They also took the placenta and placed it in the freezer in case we wanted to someday plant it under a tree for Lyric, a common birth ritual that pagan children are delighted by.  I did not endure an episiotomy.  My daughter was not exposed to drugs.  Her first look at the world was gentle, a glimpse of lilac walls, a cast I had made of my belly and breasts on a shelf, the eyes of her father welcoming her into the “cold” of the room, the faces of women speaking calmly to her.  The midwives even did our dishes and tidied our front room while we slept with our newborn.  We were blessed by the Goddess and the God indeed. 

Four years later, I delight in showing Lyric the pictures of her birth.  One of the midwives had the sense to bring a disposable camera and as Lyric emerged, she completed the whole roll and later, when we dropped it off to be developed, warned the technician who would be developing the pictures what she was about to see.  Yes, of course we all had camera phones and digi-cam at the time, but in our ”pagan” setting, no one thought to use them. 

I am hoping to post more about midwifery and using hypnosis to get through labor.  In the meantime, I would like to assure anyone reading this of the following:

Having a baby at home with midwives was in no way an illegal endangerment to my child.  Midwives must be licensed and experienced.  They are also trained to call for emergency back up when a situation warrants it.  Many midwives work in tandem with obstreticians and pediatricians.  They are a wealth of knowledge and resources who view birth as an emergence, not an emergency.  Most births will not be classified as emergencies.  If you think they are, you have been watching too much TV. 

I do not view drug-free home birth as some sort of achievement over other mothers who “gave in” to anesthesia or cesarean section.  Of course not.  What I am saying is this was a personal triumph of my own intuition over impersonal, patriarchal, “lazy” medicine that the medical practitioners were selling me (admittedly, some of them very well educated and very well intentioned other women). WHERE and HOW to birth is a decision every mother has the right to make for herself.

In pregnancy, a woman’s greatest asset is being able to trust her own intuition, about herself and her child.  It is her primal instinct that must be validated.  This is not treated as a sacred state of mind in the United States.  And that’s sad. 

If you are reading about this subject for the first time and would like to find out more about birthing at home, I urge you to read the following books – they are essential in paradigm shifting, especially if you were strongly opposed to midwifery:

1. Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin and Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth (the bible!) – I hope to post more about Ina May in future.  She deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. 

2. Birthing From Within by Pam England and Rob Horowitz

3. Choosing Waterbirth: Reclaiming the Sacred Power of Birth by Lakshmi Bertram and Michel Odent (Michel Odent is revolutionary in birthing perspectives and I hope to post more about him here too). 

So after this experience, do I think I’m some kind of superwoman?  Well, yeah…all Witches do.  That’s sort of the point.  But not because I had a natural home birth.  I’ll be the first one to say that I had the easiest birth imaginable and I chalk it all up to two magical things I had in my possession: the ability to think and the ability to read; also, the ability to use the phone book.  Next time around, if there is one, I might find myself in a much different circumstance – we’ll have to wait and see what the Goddess says.  Having a progressive male partner helps.  Suffice to say that modern women are extremely lucky to be living in an age where ANY kind of birth is possible.  To women who secretly wish to have their births at home, without catheters and IV’s and episiotomies…I say follow your heart and use your “guts”

Blessed be…