My eldest daughter was born via cesarean in 2007. At the time I didn’t have too many opinions on babies and birth; just some hand-me-down ideas from friends and co-workers about how things could, and were supposed to, go. You go to the hospital. You have the baby. You go home and live happily ever after.

When my happily-ever-after ended up looking vastly different from my mental picture, I felt cheated. More than cheated. I felt broken. My body had not done what it was supposed to do, and I didn’t really know why. I mean, I hadn’t even read the parts in my pregnancy and childbirth books dealing with cesarean. That’s how confident I was that I was not going to have one. And, okay, I also checked out (and quickly flipped to another chapter) when one of the books described a cesarean as, “feeling like you were being unzipped and someone was rummaging around inside.” I shut that book about as fast as I used to shut a Stephen King when I was 13, alone, and in the dark. I stopped shy of hiding the childbirth book under a pillow for my own personal protection, but only just.

For a while things were easy. Well, not easy exactly, but easy from the standpoint of not having to worry about what I would do differently if there were a next time. I got divorced, and so in my mind, I had a wonderful, beautiful daughter. There would be no next time. Full stop. I focused on other things, and whenever I took a shower my hands would quickly pass over my scar, taking care not to linger too long on something I so patently did not want any reminder of.

Then I met my husband. Wonder of wonders, he loved my eldest, and she grew to love him with all the exuberance she could muster in all of her three years. He adopted her and we were a family. Later, when our talked turned to adding another child to our family of three, what was most clear in my mind was what I did NOT want. I was not going to have another surgical birth.

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Knowing what I didn’t want, I started to amass information like I was stocking an armory. Fact after fact on uterine rupture risk, risk to the baby, risk to me. Risks of having another cesarean, and risks of trying for a vaginal birth. When I felt my ammunition was sufficient, I approached my husband again. I bombarded him with facts. He was impressed. But he was more interested in listening than in firing back facts of his own. He patiently endured my cannonade, and then reminded me of why we were headed down this road together in the first place. He was with me, 100 percent. We were going to try to do this naturally.

We started by contacting hospitals in the area. We live in a place where there is not too much choice, and unfortunately, it was no real surprise when none of the hospitals wanted to touch my potential VBAC with a 30-foot-pole. Too dangerous, they said. We’d be happy to give you a nice surgical birth. Why don’t you pick a day that works for you and come on in and have a baby?

So, we were back to square one. I made peace and decided I liked our family just the way it was. My husband thought that there must be something we had overlooked or at least not thought to try.

After more time, and more debate, we started to kick around the idea of having a midwife attend a home birth after cesarean, or HBAC. See, the fact that there was an acronym meant that I was clearly not the only person to have enough screws loose to attempt such a thing. There were lots of us. And the more research I did, the more I felt confident that that could be a safe and okay choice. It was our only choice if we didn’t want to have a pregnancy that ended in surgery.

Finding a midwife, though, was almost harder than looking up Johnny Depp’s unlisted phone number in the Yellow Pages. Where we live, it can be hard to find a midwife who will A) attend a HBAC, B) is at least somewhat qualified to do so, and C) lives close enough to The Butt of Nowhere, MN to do both of the aforementioned for you. We finally found someone, but it involved many dead ends, many calls to numbers that were no longer in service, some Sherlock-style internet stalking, and friends of friends of friends. When we finally found someone we wanted to work with, we started trying to get pregnant.

During my pregnancy everything I did was with the goal of a home birth in mind. I ate healthily. I exercised regularly. I squatted, kegeled, tailor sat and crawled on all fours until my five year old just about collapsed from laughing at me and I felt like some strange sort of primate. I practiced yoga for flexibility and so I could practice, “envisioning my perfect birth.” When the yoga lady would drone on about “breathing in peace, breathing out bad energy,” I did not throw my set-aside shoe at the TV and call her on that crap. I breathed in peace and breathed out bad energy.

There was no way that I could fail. My body was made to do this. I was reading books that referred to my vagina as a “yoni” and held out the possibility of an orgasmic natural birth just in case they started to lose you with the whole at-home-no-chance-of-drugs thing. I was reading books that told me how the baby would be so much better off, and more secure, and better attached because she was born naturally. Peacefully. And I start to hate myself just a tiny bit for not “trying harder” the first time. And to feel a fairly relentless guilt.


I had NO idea what was coming when I asked my husband to take this picture of me before Lowly was born. I thought this photo would be something I could share when telling her of her peaceful birth at home. I am still glad I have one last “pregnant picture” to share with her.

The pregnancy was a dream. I looked forward to each visit with the midwife. It was like talking with a dearest friend, only a dearest friend who also possessed a magical window into my uterus. She smiled and seemed almost as excited about the growth and flourishing of our little sprout as we were. After she would leave, my husband and I would wax poetic about how great she was and how midwife care should really be the gold standard everywhere.

Then, one day at the beginning of my 38th week, my water broke. I’m taking a bath and it feels like I peed in the water. Only, hey, I’m a grownup and not incontinent and I totally don’t pee in my own bathwater. So I start to get excited, because I am the kegel queen and so the only thing this could be is my water breaking. I call my husband. I call the midwife. We test, and it is amniotic fluid. This is it; we are finally going to meet this baby.

But nothing is happening. At least not the way it did in any of the labors in my books. And I had read hundreds, probably. My contractions are coming, sometimes regular, sometimes not, but things are just not seeming to progress. After many hours the midwife comes, and so does our doula. We try everything we can to get contractions started and regular. I do spinning babies exercises. Walk up and down the stairs sideways. Go for walks. Walks that don’t end. Walks that take me miles down the dike and on endless laps in our machine shed and shop, weaving in and out between tractors and semi-trailers until I have blisters on my feet. Sometimes I walk alone, sometimes husband is with me. Sometimes we time the contractions, and sometimes we don’t. But one thing remains the same: when I’m not walking, the contractions don’t continue in earnest.

It’s then that the giant pink polka-dotted elephant in the room shows up, and no one wants to talk about it, least of all me. We are on a giant timer. Yes, even with my forward thinking midwife and doula, we are on a timer, because my water is broken, and there is risk of infection now. My midwife doesn’t do any cervical checks because of this, trying to buy us, to buy me, more precious time. But the clock keeps ticking.

The birth tub is prepped, and my midwife and doula cheerfully say we are going to get the birth moving. I follow more suggestions, try a homeopathic remedy or two. My contractions remain stubbornly gentle and my worry grows. At some point in the early morning my midwife asks if she can check me for dilation. I know, without her having to say anything more, that this is the end. That no matter how much I wanted this, no matter how much I prepared for this, my body is in mutiny and it will not happen. I cry as I lay back on the bed and let her check me; 4cm. Nothing. I cry even more as she says the words, “time to transfer to the hospital.” I cry and my precious husband cries with me as we make a list of requests to bring to the hospital, like a magic talisman to protect us from all the interventions we were so scared of in the first place. I cry as we pack all the things we think we will need for a cesarean birth, and in the car on the way to the hospital, and while we get checked in.

The doctor treats it like an emergency. Almost as soon as I am in I am given an IV and asked questions. The doctor doesn’t forget to tell me how irresponsible I am for not signing up for a repeat cesarean (CBAC) in the first place. Which is great, you know, because now I get to feel not only like a giant failure, but also like someone who recklessly endangers lives. Big win there. That list of requests we made so carefully before we left home– skin-to-skin, breastfeeding almost right away, etc.? The only concession they allowed was that my midwife could also be present at the delivery along with my husband for support.

So my second daughter was born. And, finally, mixed in with the tears of frustration, and failure; anger, and resignation, were tears of joy to finally see her. But almost as soon as my heart started to soften and yield to the cries of my darling baby, she was whisked out and I was left with tears drying on my face.


Just a few days after birth. She was then, and is now, such a content little girl

The next time I saw her she was in the NICU- dotted with needles like a small, human pincushion, and under an oxygen hood. The only way I was going to get down to see her was if I could get out of the bed, and that edict gave me a fierce determination. They would NOT keep me from my child. Not if I had to walk on shards of glass. Not if I had to knock over a dozen nurses to get to her. And so, I walked. Almost doubled over despite the pain medication, I walked. And I sat by her. And I touched the only parts of her that I could reach through the oxygen hood. I stroked her and told her I was there. That she was okay. That at least, if this was a nightmare, I was with her and I would spare her in whatever small ways I could. Despite my worries of nipple confusion, I asked that she be given a pacifier, because she had no way to soothe herself from the indignities of being poked and prodded and was so far away from arms that could love her back to herself.


What a difference time makes. She hardly is recognizable as that baby with so many wires and tubes.

In my spare moments I pumped, terrified for my milk supply which wasn’t even barely adequate the first time around. My husband and I held each other, and we cried. We cried for the way our daughter entered the world, which was so far from the gentle beginning we had envisioned for her, and we cried for all we had lost in the process.


It was days after birth before big sister was able to see baby any other way than through a nursery window. She was so happy to finally hold her little sister!

I won’t lie; things got better. Once baby was safely off oxygen we were able to successfully nurse. And it was enough. But we were sad for a long, long time. There are days yet that my husband has to remind me, as we hold hands and watch our smiling, laughing little girl, that, “she sure SEEMS okay.” These days we can both laugh at that. She is okay. And so are we. Not that that makes it any easier to read about some other mother’s beautiful homebirth, or read the FB feed of my doula and midwife friends as they attend hundreds of the sorts of births I had dreamed of. But it does make it easier to look at my daughters and know that they are okay. Know that they were both given the very best we had in us to give. And I don’t care how you do it; birth is a hard experience. An experience that tears you up and heals you in ways you never knew were possible. Ways you never saw coming. And the tears that still come far too easily? No matter how many the “beautiful” births, we are, none of us, as alone as we may sometimes feel. And, I suspect, there is more grief even in the beautiful than we could ever imagine.


It’s hard, when faced with this joyful smile so many times a day, to not at least feel like we did something right.

C-Section Birth Stories part 2 of 6

1. Chloe's birth story, part 1 by Mrs. Jump Rope
2. Not Natural; My CBAC (Cesarean Birth After Cesarean) by Mrs. Twine
3. A Positive C-Section Story by Mrs. Bee
4. Welcome to the World: Meet the Babies Blue by Mrs. Blue
5. Becoming a mother of three, my twin birth story. by Mrs. Train
6. A scheduled C section & a tubal ligation: Lilly's birth story by Mrs. Train