Feel at-home in Birth, Wherever You May Be

I’ll help you process all those thoughts buzzing around in your brain and come out the other side feeling ready to meet your baby– your way.

I remember trying to make sense of what I wanted and how to go about it. There is so much to consider and not a lot of help to process what your plan is for the birth YOU hope to have. In my experience, dreaming up my ideal birth and “hoping for the best” wasn’t enough. Neither was saying “so long as we’re both healthy and survive.”

To have the birth I truly wanted I needed to get educated, dig down deep and work with my fears. Becoming a mother is one of the most meaningful rights of passage, and I believe it really makes a difference how it starts. Birth is a transformation that will leave you feeling empowered as a mother if you take the time to create what you want and prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for scenarios you hope to avoid.

Write Your Way to a Meaningful Birth

The first thing I recommend doing is writing. Here are some questions to get you started:

What is your #1 hope for how your birth will go?
Get specific about how you will feel, who is with you and how those people will support you.
What are you most afraid of when you imagine your birth process?
How do you respond to stress? How does your stress response change when you are exhausted or have reached your limit?
When new people are in your house how does your body respond? How do you respond to travel?
What type of support do you think you’ll need to emphasize? (Think spiritually, physically, mentally or emotionally)

Once you have taken the time to write, set aside time to process what you wrote by talking to someone (ideally your spouse or birth-support person) about what came up for you and any areas of concern. Your support person might get some good ideas about how they can help you most. This is an important part of helping them to help you. Surely they do not want to feel incompetent!

In my experience, how birth goes sets the tone for motherhood.

Start How You Hope to Continue

In my experience, how birth goes sets the tone for motherhood. If we enter this new role feeling empowered, we’ll feel more connected to our body and baby, and more trusting of our instincts. I knew that for me to be fully embodied in the process of birth I would need to minimize interruptions.

If this sounds like you, and you’re hoping for the least intervention possible, read on. I decided that I needed to create the feeling of being at-home even though I was going to give birth at a hospital. I needed to feel as comfortable as possible and turn my attention inward. If you would like to know how I successfully achieved the feeling of being at-home during my hospital birth download my “At-Home in Birth” guide now.

How to have a Hospital Birth and not feel like you’re at a hospital

Make a birth plan knowing that birth doesn’t usually go according to plan. I really liked using the template from Mama Natural, it was easy to edit and gave simple visual symbols for each of my wishes, making it easy to keep everyone on the same page. Know what kind of support you do and do not want to receive. Having a clear NO is necessary to create space for what you DO want!

Imagine your birth process unfolding: how do you want to feel? In my case I found the birth hypnosis recording from Curiously Present extremely helpful. I felt mentally prepared and more trusting of my body’s intelligence than ever. Birth can be a super empowering experience if we choose to follow our own guidance.

Choose a hospital most aligned with your values. Do a little research and take a visit. See what kind of props they have available for laboring, birth balls are very helpful and it’s one less thing to pack. Also knowing that there are birth balls on hand is a good sign that someone will be willing and able to help you use it to move labor along.

Releasing my need to know and going with the flow helped tremendously, and I ended up with someone that felt like the absolute best midwife for me!

Face your fears.
1. I found myself feeling very insecure about the hospital because I couldn’t visualize myself in the space. Who would be on call that day? What would the room be like? In order to address this I looked carefully at all the staff members and read about them. I tried to meet as many of them as possible. I got to know their faces and smiles, and then I decided that whoever was going to show up for me when the time came would be the right person for me and my baby. Releasing my need to know and going with the flow helped tremendously, and I ended up with someone that felt like the absolute best midwife for me!
2. I made time to visit the birth center at the hospital twice. The first time I got a feel for it, the second time I went on the table and learned about all the ways it could move and fold to support different laboring and birthing positions. I tried out some of the birth positions that I had learned about from my doula and the birth circuit she gave me.
3. I asked about dimming the lights and playing my own music because I knew both of those things would allow me to create the environment I needed to feel safe. I made a birthing playlist and learned how to control the lights.

Decide if having a birth doula with you during the birth feels like one more person to manage. You can choose to have a doula to help you prepare for the birth, and have them on call, but not present when you’re having your baby. Do you want to feel like you are in your own bubble and spend as much of the labor on your own with as little communication or disturbance as possible? Or do you want someone right by your side? Most people want a little of both… Decide on the right balance for you. For example, if you’re the type of person that finally relaxes when everyone leaves your house or leaves you alone you might be better off having only one go-to support person who you know and trust completely (like your husband, partner, a parent, sibling or best friend).

Interview your pediatrician with any questions you have about how they can help and what their procedures are like. Do you feel content with the answers they give? It can be very stressful post-birth to end up in a situation with a pediatrician you don’t trust or who is pushing you to follow a plan you aren’t comfortable with. When you are tired after having a baby it is easy to default to a pediatrician’s authority, so make sure you have chosen someone that satisfies your need to understand what is going to be best for you and your family. Some hospitals won’t let you leave until that first check-up is scheduled.

Barring a true emergency, people can wait. If you get into a situation where you feel pressured to make a decision you can always ask what risks you are facing if you delay or decline. Often in medical settings decisions are made out to be urgent even when they might not be. Do your homework and decide what risks you’re comfortable with. Some of the standard medical procedures surrounding birth are made out to seem risk free and helpful when in reality any intervention comes with risk.

It is possible for birth to feel as seamless and natural as other life processes. Birth does not have to be a medical event or procedure. We can be grateful that life-saving medical interventions exist, and also choose to birth as free from them as possible.

Linnéa Lovinsky