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My Homebirth Story
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By Audrey Korshoff, all rights reserved. Do not publish or copy without my expressed written consent. Thanks!
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Me...in July 2002, before becoming pregnant with Madelyn, at an Alan Jackson concert (thus, the cowgirl hat).
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The road to my fourth child Madelyn’s birth was a long one. So much thought, so much preparation, and so much anxiety went into the decision to have her at home, that the pregnancy experience this fourth time truly was life changing.
In order to understand where I was coming from, you’d need to understand where I’d been before. You’d need to know a little about my previous births. All of my children were born in the hospital. All my children were healthy and born vaginally (one had meconium staining at birth and stayed in the NICU during my two day hospital stay, but he was fine), but the births and the birthing process itself was always interrupted by medical (“mis”)management of my labor. I left the hospital each time, happy to have my newborn, but not feeling overjoyed by the birth process. Other women I talked to had felt the same way and told me that labor was just something you went through to have a baby. I knew that deep down, there was something missing, and deep down, I knew they were wrong.
My entire pregnancy with Madelyn was a lesson in trusting my body, and trusting my intuition. I can say now, that I am very glad to have made the choice to listen and trust in both.
Several months before I became pregnant, I had a very vivid dream about a little child who was waiting for me. This little girl, appeared to me in my dream, and looked a lot like my son Joey, but with curly hair. She told me she was waiting for me. I knew I wanted a fourth child, and shortly after that dream, began to feel that urge to try for another baby. I talked it over with my husband, Frank, and we went ahead with our plans to try for our last child.
When I became pregnant, I immediately remembered my dream from the months earlier, and knew that this child was a girl. Through the first couple months, I had several more dreams where I delivered the baby in various rooms of my home. Even though I had been planning on a hospital delivery again, the frequency of these homebirth dreams sparked enough curiosity in me to start looking into the safety of homebirth. Frank was not comfortable with the idea of a homebirth at all, so I didn’t even say anything to him at first. I started a search for a midwife instead of an obstetrician. Every time I found something that looked promising, I hit a dead end. Finally, I found what I thought would be the answer. There was an obstetrician who did waterbirths in a hospital in the next town over. It was a slightly longer drive to that hospital, but I figured that this guy would have a more hands off approach, and would be more holistic in his approach to birthing than any other doctor in the area. I met with him once and decided to see him for prenatal care.
All the while, I kept having these dreams of birthing at home. I dreamt of birthing in my bathroom, in the kids’ playroom, in my bedroom, in the kids’ bathroom, out in our hot tub, on the back porch and even in the kitchen. I dreamt of a waterbirth, I dreamt of a land birth, but in every dream where I delivered a baby, I kept seeing me at home.
Sparked by my dreams again, I decided to look into homebirth as an option again, and knew that I had my obstetrician as a back up in case anything fell through. So I was not yet sold on the idea of delivering at home, but it definitely appealed to me. I bought a few books that were geared towards natural childbirth, as I didn’t want any kinds of interventions with the birth this time around, and found Birthing From Within by Pam England.
After reading that book, I was geared up to avoid the hospital if I could, as I had not had successes with the hospital respecting my wishes in the past three births I had. Reading that book, sparked my quest for homebirth knowledge and reading that book, was the door that I needed to pass through to feel comfortable with birthing at home. There were two sections that really caught my attention in that book. The first, was Pam’s recollection of a museum exhibit, where a prehistoric woman had a small infant with her. She had begun to think about how this woman labored and delivered that child. That whole section got me thinking about how birth was a natural event, and obviously our bodies were built to birth babies without help. The next section was a series of questions to answer for yourself about how you felt during your previous births or previous experiences. I answered them honestly and found that I had dug deeper than I initially thought I would, when I went back and read my answers. I uncovered how unhappy I had been with my birthing experiences before. I discovered that I had always felt like a prisoner in a hospital, rather than a patient. I wasn’t allowed to make choices for myself, they were made for me. As a person who likes to be in control of her life, this was unacceptable. I was always happy that I had a child at the end, but the whole process left something to be desired.
Continuing along in my quest for knowledge, I began digging into the homebirth files on the internet and I found a site about Unassisted Childbirth. Since I hadn’t been able to find a midwife to do homebirths in my area, it intrigued me, so I began to study more about it. Shortly thereafter, I made the choice to consider an unassisted birth as an option. The more I uncovered about hospital policies and procedures, including the ones that were applied to my previous births, and the more I uncovered about the risks of some of the interventions that no one had ever told me, the more I became angry. I became angry at the fact that some of the things that were done to me in the hospital were never discussed with me or fully explained to me as being something that could potentially be harmful to my child or to myself. No one had ever told me anything, and I never thought to ask anyone. After all, I was raised to believe that doctors knew best.
In November, as I was finishing up my first trimester, my grandmother passed away. She and I were incredibly close, and I had a hard time dealing with the loss of my good friend. I was with her when she passed, and told her shortly before she died that I knew this baby was a girl, and that I was going to name her Madelyn Frances (Frances was her first name). I also asked her to come visit me in my dreams, and I knew that she would.
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My Guardian Angel, my friend, my grandmother...
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