A joyful surprise arrived in my e-mail box on St. Patrick’s day. Our friends K. and E., who are Milo’s godparents (and we’re the godparents of their son who’s the same age as Milo) sent the news that they had their second baby early that morning — very fast, unexpectedly on their apartment’s bathroom floor!
As I read E.’s (the dad’s, that is) brief account, I hooted with joy (and laughter) for them. He described it as "amazingly smooth" and "much smoother and easier" than the (hospital) birth of their first. I had encouraged them to look into homebirthing when they were first pregnant. They interviewed one or two homebirth midwives and decided against it. Surprise! I can’t help but grin like a maniac. I’m so happy for them.
K.’s labor was two hours and nine minutes long, from the very first contraction — and it really was the first, she says, there wasn’t any prodromal stuff — up to the moment E. caught the baby. E. sent a photo that their boys’ aunt took just before the paramedics arrived. In the picture K. is getting ready to nurse the baby boy, who is wrapped in towels. She looks as if she was just about to lift her sweatshirt to latch him on when someone said, "Smile!" She is grinning from ear to ear — she looks gorgeous, radiant. The baby’s chin is up, searching. He is chubby-cheeked and pink, with dark hair.
I went over later with some red raspberry leaf tea (it’s all I had in the fridge!) and heard more of the story. The worst part, according to K., was riding in the ambulance after the delivery, to get the newborn tests at the hospital. Even though they’d both been up for hours and hours and hours, they were glad to see me, wanted to talk, and too excited to sleep. Especially E. the dad, who was exhiliarated and thrilled, obviously, but still had a kind of deer-in-the-headlights look about him! (My godson the toddler, on the other hand, was very tired and near meltdown, so I didn’t stay long.)
E. showed me the digital pics from just after the birth, which included many shots of firefighters posing while holding the swaddled, sleeping baby. "That guy’s the rookie," E. told me, pointing to a young-looking man made burly-looking by the big firefighter coat. "This is only the second fast birth he’s been to." Really? And the others? "Well, let’s see. The driver said he’d been to more than thirty. And the others had all been to a bunch too."
I have a feeling that this happens more often than people realize, despite the near-heroic language used to describe unexpected home births in local news stories. I looked into planned unassisted home birth, quite seriously, for some time before each of my previous pregnancies. We wound up both times hiring a midwife (who is a wonderful match for us — very hands-off and gentle) , but I learned enough to know that most of the time, particularly if there are a lot of interventions, particularly in the hospital, an attendant is more likely to create a problem than to solve one. The best attendants stay out of the way and let birth unfold on its own.
Which is probably one reason why fast labors, the kind that happen on bathroom floors (provided the mother is healthy and the infant is full term), seem to be comparatively problem-free and fairly smooth. Google for local news stories about fast unplanned home births and read them. I just did. Some of them mention aspects that were obviously perceived as alarming by the parents — and, crucially, by the reporter writing the story — but that happen commonly and aren’t necessarily really problems: e.g., "the baby was born with the cord wrapped around his neck." (So was E. and K.’s baby. E. unlooped it.)
The other reason why fast labors (again, provided the baby is full term) may go well is simply that a fast labor is almost by definition one that’s working really smoothly. Problems slow it down, don’t speed it up, you know?
Actually, most of the last two paragraphs is just my perception, plus my memory of having read all that somewhere, perhaps in Emergency Childbirth: A Manual by Gregory J. White. The data about the safety of unplanned home births of healthy babies is pretty hard to come by. It seems that most people who study home birth safety lump planned and unplanned home births together (probably because they mine the data from birth certificates), and the few who have separated them lump preterm and fullterm deliveries together.
Anyway, I went home from K. and E.’s house with a new thrill in my heart, the kind that always leaps up when I am lucky to be near a new baby with a gentle birth story, that birthglow I guess. Throughout my own pregnancy, almost 20 weeks now, I’ve been oddly detached, maybe too busy to think about it much. Seeing this new little person asleep in his daddy’s arms has got me feeling pregnant again, in a good way, and wanting much more to meet my own new little one, who’s only just starting to make Little One-self known to my senses.
I got home and told Mark, "I’m jealous. I wish that would happen to me." (Come on folks, even you fans of hospital birth! She had fewer than 15 contractions, none of them closer than five minutes apart! Wouldn’t you?)
He said, "Oh, so it’s ‘I’ll have what she’s having,’ is it?" He paused for a beat and added, "You can’t have what she’s having."
Postscript: I gave E. my copy of Emergency Childbirth for a present inscribed "Great job!" (I was in too much of a hurry to write anything smarter than that.) Guess I’ll have to get another copy for myself.
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