This is my honest review of unmedicated homebirth. Spoiler alert, during labor, I said it was like being on an acid trip. My whole goal in this labor was to not tear and to not push my baby out. And I achieved both of those things. He had the cord wrapped around his neck twice and a full knot in his cord.
Bear in mind, everyone’s birth experience is different. There’s a lot of factors that go into it. But if there aren’t any actual medical complications, a lot of it is mental. If I had to choose childbirth or pregnancy, I would choose childbirth every time I labored for like 14 hours and most of it was so chill.
I made some lunch. I made a couple TikToks. I hung out with my son. We went out outside. Contractions themselves at the start were really manageable. I couldn’t sleep through them. They woke me up at 3:00am, but I was just kind of hanging out like I was on my period. As it progressed, I would have to breathe through them more and I focused on relaxing my whole body absolutely and utterly during each contraction, even if I felt like I didn’t need to. And I’m glad I did because then I carried that on through when they got really intense about halfway through, things got a little more intense at that point with contractions a couple minutes apart. When you’ve been practicing breathing and relaxing your, our whole body and mind, it becomes very meditative. And imagine you’ve been doing like breathwork and meditation all day long. You’re gonna go into a little bit of like a floaty headspace.
My midwife was saying things like your cervix is melting like butter. You’re an elastic band. You stretch so far open. And it was actually really helpful. If you think about it, we’re literally made to have a baby’s head come through our cervix. So it can’t be that we are made to like a bust open at the seams, which is what I was nervous about. As the contractions got stronger, I went into a more out of body headspace. And then I come right back to earth. In between, when you get to transition, which is the time just before you start pushing, you can often tell you’re there because you feel like you’re gonna puke or poop or both. And a lot of women get an overwhelming feeling that they can’t do this. And I felt those things, and I was like, aha, I’m in transition. We’re almost there. And it was so powering and encouraging. And at that point, surrendering to my contractions went from a relaxed, slow breath thing to a very active interaction with them, where the whole contraction, I was noticing parts of my body that were tense and relaxing them and noticing parts of my mind that were tense and had fear and relaxing and releasing that. So as I was going through those things and my husband or my midwife would be there with me, like helping me to do so, by the time it came around to the end of the contraction, I was just getting into this very like enlightened headspace and I was kind of like fine. And then the contraction would end. I’d be like, oh, okay. A couple of legit kind of out of body experiences where I just like zoomed out of my body for a second and felt that I was completely one with nature and all the women who have done this before and blah, blah. Kind of like if you’ve ever done a hallucinogen, not that I’m advocating for them, okay? But I have done, you get a lot of thoughts that are very big and deep about the connectedness of everything, and it makes perfect sense to you and you cannot explain it to anybody. That was how I felt, this connectedness to everything. And it was very deep and spiritual, and I couldn’t explain it to anybody. And it was intense, but I was fine. So I woke up in labor around 3 a. M. And at 5 p. M, I got in the tub, a Big Water birthing tub. It was so nice.
As soon as I got into the tub, things changed. I thought breathing your baby out would be being able to calmly control yourself when you’re breathing through the contractions. For me, that would not have been surrendered. That would have been control for me to surrender to these contractions and not tense up my body and not give into fear and not push him out.
Had to move my body, move my hips, do different breathing things, different sounds. It was very primal. And at the start of it, I had a moment of embarrassment for how I might look or sound to the people around me. And I just realized I cannot afford to be embarrassed right now. I felt during a fire, but it came just for moments at a time because my body was gently pushing him down and then he would go back up like that. So you would just feel it for short skirts. My midwife was like, why feel how far up his head is? And I was like, what do you mean fit? And she was like, yeah, just feel up in there. And I touched his head with the tip of my finger. And that was the most incredible and empowering feeling in the whole world.
A couple contractions later, I checked again and he was like this bar up there. I was clinging on to my husband during those contractions and I was just cycling through movement and noises and breath and everything to try and keep my body at all costs from tensing up. And then finally, all of a sudden, I felt his head crowning. I could not resist the urge to push whatsoever. But what I did do, because, again, I was terrified of sharing, I was able to go like, and like suck in and stop the push every couple of seconds. And so I felt his head come out in like a few little pushes like that and he was on me. And it was great.
And then we ate chocolate birthday cake in bed and had a delightful time. I felt no mental and emotional trauma after it. Like I did with my first. I had the most minimal, tiny tear, which literally healed in a couple of days from literally later that evening, my husband and I looked at each other and we’re like, kind of wanna do that again. Honestly, I would give that birth experience a 10 out of 10, even though it was so much work and so intense, it was the most powerful experience I had ever had in my life. I literally would never choose an epidural after having felt birth like that, which sounds crazy. It’s hard to explain, ma’am. It’s a trip.