Confession, I'm a total birth junkie. I looooove birth stories. Everyday my Facebook feed gets filled with them. Some are homebirth, some are hospital, some are birth center, some vaginal, some c-section, none exactly alike, except... The one thing they all have in common is they seem to try and top each other. THIS baby was born in the caul, THIS baby was a HBA4C, THIS baby was a 75 hour natural labor. You get the idea.
Now, it's not that I don't think those births should be celebrated. I absolutely think they should. What those women accomplish is incredible, and they should be viewed as amazing. Heck, I've done the natural birth thing twice and I'm still in awe at what they accomplished, but that's the problem... When the only thing that a woman sees over and over again are stories of
women beating the odds to have the birth they want, then natural birth
begins to seems like something for extraordinary women, instead of
something for ordinary women.
This all crystallized for me after the birth of my third child when I sat down to write out her birth story. I felt like I needed to emphasize the more dramatic events surrounding her birth. The only problem is that there really weren't any. I went into labor at boring old 10:30am, my husband and I picked up my older daughter at school because she was sick and dropped her and our dogs at my parents (still pretty boring...). Then we went food shopping, (yawn), and came back to the house where I quietly labored to my hypnobabies CD for a couple of hours (the only pic is one of me lying on my side with a cat sleeping on me, no one can even tell I'm deep in labor, lol). My midwife couldn't make it (about the only dun dun dun, suspenseful! moment) so she called the backup midwife who only lived 10 minutes away and was able to come (bah, suspense ruined). The midwife came, my husband filled the birth tub, I had 3 hard contractions, then pushed about 5 times, and our daughter was born into my husbands hands. This all took about 5 hours, not super fast, not super long, BORING!
Now, of course I wasn't bored, nor do I view my daughters arrival into this world as anything close to boring. It was incredible, it was life changing, it was normal, and natural, in the most wonderful of ways. It doesn't make the best story though. There isn't a "my baby almost died" moment (thank goodness!), and there isn't an "overcoming all the odds" moment. There is just a normal family having what should be a normal birth and I'd love to see that celebrated alongside the truly amazing women in the birth community. I'd love to see some of the wonderful birth advocates out there highlight at least some stories that backup the mantra "birth is normal and natural" and really promote the idea that this is something women do everyday and should be supported as such alongside the more extraordinary stories.
