INCREDIBLE, POWERFUL, EMPOWERING, MAGNIFICENT, JOYFUL, GODLIKE!!! WOW!!!

It was fun!

I started my prenatal care with a midwife that I had met years before in my search for good GYN care. I new she was a really zealous natural childbirth advocate so I thought I was in the right place. I also thought she was the only midwife or birth center in town that would take my state aided medical coverage (I would have opted for a home birth but simply could not find the money). At six and a half months pregnant I met a sweet deadhead girl who had home birthed her daughter and she posed the question to me "can you afford not to?" This seriously got me thinking. I went to my midwife with this to see if there was anything she could do for me and she went off on some strange tangent about the reasons she started her  birth center... first births were always difficult... the ability to use vacuum suction without transferring...and on until my head was spinning and my stomach turning. I never went back. A story I heard in my prenatal yoga class from a woman going on location with her husband and being willing to just give birth where she was gave me the courage to find a new care giver.

Through some digging I found several birth centers who would take my coverage and three days later I discovered the first MD in CA to have a birth center. She is a lovely doctor who always wanted to be a midwife. She had had a c-section with her first child and was really disappointed, so her second was delivered at home with a midwife. We talked, I took the tour, I was happy. 4:08 am August 17th, 1996 my water broke. I labored at home, walking the whole time, for two and a half hours. In that time my contractions went from 9 minutes. apart to 2 minutes. apart. I arrived very much in transition and at four centimeters dilated. My room was readied and I continued to pace for another hour. Then I needed sit on the toilet for a while, it just felt good. Debra, my doctor, came in to see how I was doing and I told her I felt like I was holding back, that I needed to move my bowels but there was nothing left to move. She said "hmmm".  I had dilated to 8 centimeters in an hour and she said to call her when I was ready to push. Ten minutes later we were pushing. I stayed way inside, not thinking, just feeling. I just let it happen, let the sound come out as it needed to. My partner sat on the end of the bed and I stood facing him with my hands on his shoulders, way up on my toes, contracting my body into a big C shape with each contraction. Twenty minutes later my son was born.

We just celebrated our second birthday and I can feel it like it was yesterday. Just last night we were talking about babies in tummies and I  showed him the photos of himself being born, with tears in my eyes...

~ Sheri