Home birth part one...

The first time the idea of Home Birth ever entered my head was during my 12 week appointment at the hospital. The midwife went through the usual questions ‘Any heart disease in the family?’ ‘Was the pregnancy planned?’ ‘where would you like to have the baby?’ I quickly replied ‘Here, at Warrington Hospital’ 

She looked at me ‘Not a home birth?’ 

I was taken aback. No. At Hospital. - Thats where people have babies isn’t it?

The idea of having a home birth had previously never even occurred to me. But as I left that appointment and we got into the car, I couldn’t get the idea out of my mind. No I thought, its just too scary. Home birth’s are just what hippy women did on their second or third child.  And anyway, surely it would be putting the baby at risk.

A few weeks later I was at work when a colleague of mine, Dom was discussing his wife’s home birth. The conversation didn’t involve me, but I was listening intently. 

“Half an hour later she was in the bath, and me and the boy were downstairs watching the football”. I plucked up the courage to ask him about it. My colleague then gave me all the details of how wonderful and personal this birth experience was, and this was a man’s man, there was nothing soft about Dom. Yet here he was gleaming from ear to ear as he revisited the memory of the birth of his son. 

When you are pregnant, people cannot wait to tell you their birth stories, and I lapped it up. I loved hearing all about peoples experiences. Shortly after this, I was talking to another male colleague, Paul. Who was telling me his experience of the birth of his son. Again he described it as the happiest day of his life, but then finished the story by saying “It was really surreal though, 40 minutes after Ethan was born, I was in my car driving home.” Their baby had been born out of visiting hours, so Paul could not stay. Once everyone had been cleaned up he had to go home, leaving his wife and new born baby in the hospital.

I knew at this point I secretly wanted our baby to be born at home, I darn’t admit this to myself, never mind to the Boyf. So when I was 30 weeks pregnant we started our NCT classes. During probably the third session, our lovely class teacher, Aileen, asked if anyone was thinking about home birth. To the surprise of both Boyf and myself I put my hand up. Ha, that was the first time I’d realized it was something I seriously wanted and Boyf's face was a picture.    

We finished the session and went home to discuss it. To my complete surprise he was all for it, and actually thought it sounded like a great idea. His support gave me the confidence to believe in myself, and so we had together made the decision, we were having a home birth. 

Next stop was to tell our midwife and our family. Our midwife was lovely and again really supportive, our families took the news well; “Right...ok.” my Mum said, behind her smile I could see she was thinking it was just another of my harebrained ideas. The in-laws had a similar reaction. They were a generation apart from us. In the 70’s when they were having children, medical science was a great new thing, neither of our parents could understand why we would want to come away from that. But by now I had made the decision and I was going with it....