my positive natural birth story

For a whole host of reasons, I opted for an unmedicated, natural birth with my daughter, Juniper. It was quite an experience, and I wanted to share for anyone who might need some encouragement & inspiration to have a natural birth.

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I’ll start by addressing my fears along with how I overcame them because I think that was an important part of the entire birth process.

First, I was quite hesitant to give birth in a hospital setting. I personally associate hospitals with sick people just because I’ve only experienced hospitals when i or family members have been ill. I feel that’s a pretty common belief, so I’m sure some folks can relate. Things I did to reprogram this belief:

• EMDR (future templating) – more on this in another blog post
• Affirmations
• Visualization meditations
• Breathing exercises while repeating I am safe

It’s actually a bit ridiculous how many people will unload their often traumatizing birth story on you while you’re pregnant. It’s almost like people see a pregnant belly and take it as an open invitation to share their story. I’m typically all about active listening and finding what I can glean from other people, but this is one of those times where I allowed myself to check out of the conversation. Being a very empathetic person, I could have easily developed fears from this, but I was able to separate it from my own story by telling myself things like “that’s THEIR story, but I have the power to create my own.” This helped me a ton.

Now I know that having a natural birth in a hospital is completely possible, and I hope I can inspire others to go the same route. There are many benefits of having a natural birth. If you’re curious, I’d recommend checking out this post:

my experience

Now, let’s back up a bit. The time is 3:02am on Tuesday, April 11th. I’m laying in bed when I get woken up to what I thought were Braxton Hicks at the time. They were very similar to the Braxton Hicks I had experienced before, except these were painful whereas the others were more like sensations but not pain. I didn’t think much of it and continued to lay in bed. 8am rolled around, and I decided that it was too painful for me to be able to focus on work. These waves of pain took nearly all of my attention.

Beginning to realize that there was some sort of pattern involved, I downloaded a contractions app and began timing them. They were about 15-20 minutes apart… consistently. A sure sign of real contractions is that they are consistent. I quickly googled some of the other signs of labor, and it turns out I was experiencing all of them. I labored at home for about 12 hours before my husband and I were off to the hospital, about 45 minutes away, while I was having contractions about 4 and a half minutes apart. Ouch.

I was able to breathe through the pain pretty well, although I was quite silent during the drive — definitely beginning to go inward at this point (some also call this going into “labor land”). We hadn’t pre-registered at the hospital, so it took a few minutes to check in at the front desk, which also happens to be the check in for the emergency room. It felt much longer when a contraction would hit me, but eventually I made it over to the triage room in the birthing ward of the hospital. The birthing ward was calm and full of positive energy, something that really stood out to me when Erik and I toured the hospital a couple weeks prior.

My midwife showed up at the hospital right about then and did a quick cervical check in the triage room (only because I asked for it). It turns out that I was 6 centimeters dilated and 100% effaced, far enough into labor to admit me and continue the process in the hospital. We headed into room 2, and my midwife never left my side from then until June was safe in my arms.

After getting settled into the room, Erik made a couple trips out to the car to transport all of our things in. My midwife set up the flameless candles and star projector, Erik set up my salt lamp as well as our Bluetooth speaker. Music wise, he chose the “calm labor playlist” on Spotify. Creating a playlist was on my todo list, but when they come 11 days earlier than expected, there are some things that just don’t