About Us

     For the most part, we’re all familiar with what happens during a hospital birth.
We know the cast of characters (nurse(s), obstetrician, husband, doula
sometimes) and generally what to expect (that bed, the fetal monitor, the pain
medication if requested, the doctor coming in when it is time to push). But unless
you’ve done it, and only one-half of one percent of women do, home birth is a
mysterious thing. At least it was to me, right up there with what really happens at
the event horizon of a black hole and does bigfoot really exist.
     First, you have to get your mind around the fact that home birth is a reasonable
choice. That women who choose home birth are not very different from women
who don’t. Let’s face it: birth is huge. We all want the same thing: a healthy baby
and, implicitly, to be healthy ourselves after our babies are born. The simple fact is
that planned home birth is a safe alternative for low risk women. Research
supports this.
     Second, you have to understand that midwives are birth professionals. In just
the way we still sort of imagine that Alaska is full of Eskimos living in igloos, it is
hard to resist the idea that a midwife is just some ol’ gal with candles and a first
aide kit.
     Not true.
     Though I am a middle class girl from Idaho, much more Brady Bunch than hippy,
for my second pregnancy (my first birth was by cesarean), we called one. Of
course, my eyebrows were raised and I had a healthy skepticism and I felt as
though I was calling a psychic hotline or an informercial number. My husband has
made a precursory call, sent this midwife, Alison Osborn, the notes from my first
labor, all the prenatal records.
     He has dialed the phone number and placed the receiver in my hand.
     After meeting with Alison, however, I am convinced. Her knowledge, training,
and experience are indisputable. And, there is this: a midwife’s paradigm is
holistic. The midwifery model of care assumes health and wellness in pregnancy
and birth. The party line is: A woman’s body is perfectly made to grow, bear, and
nourish her baby.
     Alison is in her fifties with radish-colored cheeks. She used to wear her silver
hair long, and it hung like waves to the middle of her back. Now it is stylishly short,
Jamie Lee Curtis with some curl. There is a sturdiness about Alison, a
fearlessness and wisdom distinct enough to be unusual. She is not only the most
experienced midwife in the county, she is one of the most experienced midwives
in the state. She has caught enough babies--almost eight hundred and sixty--to
know some things about having babies that the rest of us don’t.
     “I see spirit enter this world. I know better than to be afraid,” Alison says while
looking you in the eye.   Alison will always look you in the eye.
     Alison’s office is cozy like a living room. The walls are covered with thousands
of photos of beautiful (and less beautiful) babies and joyful pregnant mothers.
Over the course of my pregnancy, I begin looking forward to my prenatal
appointments like I look forward to chocolate milkshakes and Christmas. They are
an hour or so long, and I know invariably that when I leave, I will leave feeling
fabulous. The same things happen during these visits as at all the prenatal
appointments I’ve had with obstetricians: I am weighed, my urine tested, blood
pressure and fundus measured. Leopold maneuvers are performed, and we listen
to the baby’s heartbeat with the Doppler. (“Happy baby!” Alison usually declares
after calculating the heart rate.) But the effect is decidedly different. Alison and I
are, somehow, equals. We have become friends.
     Alison’s disclosure statement says: “I am available to answer questions
regarding normal care, breastfeeding, and herbal alternatives or additions to
allopathic therapies pretty much forever.”
     I go into labor knowing I am not alone.
     So, here’s how home birth ends for us.
     Claire Kaitlyn was perfectly born in our home on a rainy night in November.
     I delivered her wearing my favorite shirt, lying on our secondhand bed on a
striped, hand-me-down sheet from my dad.
     I labored for just over three hours, pushed for thirteen minutes.
     I spent early labor alone (always in phone contact with Alison, of course)
searching eBay for cutie girl clothes and watching Sex and the City dvds. When the
contractions became too intense to ignore, I flopped to my hands and knees to
rock and moan, then was up again: the computer, the television, puttering around
the house. I took those last hours of contractions in the company of Wayde (my
husband) and Alison and Cathy (who is a midwife, too) wide-legged on the pot, in
the industrial-sized tub Alison loaned to us for the birth, then lying quietly on my
side on the bed under the midwives’ firm and reassuring touch. Wayde lay in front
of me, silent and supportive, holding my hand for encouragement. Alison lay
behind me, her body curled next to mine, her hand on the small of my back, warm
and calm and certain and capable of great strength.
     The labor was meticulously documented, Claire’s well-being and my own
vigilantly monitored. Every time she’d hold my arm or hand or foot, Alison was
taking my pulse, feeling the texture of my skin, writing down data. I was given
oxygen. I was sutured while Claire lay naked and nursing, covered with blankets
on my chest. (I tore because Claire was born with her elbow by her ear.)
     Wayde and I couldn’t stop admiring Claire’s wide, dark eyes, her chubby, pink
body and her hands twinkling like stars.
     “Oh, She’s a beauty!” Alison said when kissing Claire. “Welcome to the world!”
Alison talked to Claire when she performed the newborn baby exam, then wrapped
her in the soft cloth of the hand-held scale to weigh her.
     Eight pounds, five ounces.
     Wayde gave me a whopper of a kiss.
     Claire lifted her head from the bed. “I’ve never seen that before,” Alison said.
“Strong little woman.”
     Alison filled out a birth certificate complete with Claire’s footprints, then put a
onesie on Claire and swaddled her.
     “Do you want to keep the placenta?” Cathy asked. She showed it to me. It was
in our cookie-making bowl. “This was the part attached to the uterine wall,” Cathy
said, pointing, but it all looked the same to me.
     Then, it was my turn. Alison and Wayde helped me up from the bed. Alison
hugged me, and then looked at me with a big smile. She and Wayde walked me to
the birthing tub and helped me in to rinse off. The water was still warm. I thought:
The last time I was in this tub, I had a baby in my body, now there’s just me.
     Alison and Wayde dressed me in my pajamas. I felt like queen of the world.
Alison told Wayde to give me a cup of sweet, white grape juice.
     “Are you hungry?” she asked.
     “No. Tired. It’s past my bedtime.” It was almost ten o’clock. We laughed.
     Wayde and Alison stripped the top set of sheets off the bed. We had made the
bed that morning with two sets. I climbed into our bed. Cathy handed me the baby.
     I cupped Claire’s head in my palm. It was big and firm and round.
     “She has a big head,” I said, mostly because it had felt so big coming out.
     “It’s a perfect head,” Alison said.
     “You are both so beautiful,” my husband said, and I knew it to be so.
     Honest as a stone, Alison kissed me and held me before leaving me and my
sweet, sweet baby to sleep. “I love you,” she said, and, God help me, I wanted it to
be true.
     The midwives did laundry and ate pizza before they left.
     I remember these things being said during the birth: “Your energy has
changed. Can I check you?” and “This is what we call ‘cooking,’” and “If your body
is doing it, it’s fine,” and “Good, good, good. You’re doing so good,” and “Use that
energy to push the baby,” and “Isn’t that the most beautiful sound in the world?”
when Claire cried. I remember the rainbow of light on my husband’s face and
Alison’s calm, confident smile, and how I trembled with joy and disbelief when I
stroked that slippery, little baby body so freshly and beautifully born of my own.
     Claire’s birth was holy, and I was radiant and powerful and (mostly) unafraid.
     “I think it will be the best day of your life,” Alison told me after our first prenatal
appointment when I had cried from the fear and uncertainty of what lay ahead of
me. And, being the wise, experienced baby-catcher that she is, she was right.