She let down her hair

It's been a gazillion years - two months - since I've posted. I've been ramping up. You see, I really *am* a writer. Seriously. By training. By trade. But it's been way too crazy busy to write with any quality - or even consistency. I anticipate that will change.

Some major transitions these days: geographical move, fewer births likely as I start ... SCHOOL. College, that is. (It'll be my first official college class since 1994. I'm easing in gently with a 6-week sociology course and then - yee-ikes - a chemistry class I hear is, well, challenging in its accelerated format. Here goes relearning how to study, discern and PASS TESTS. I need As - straight As - if I'm to go on the way I anticpate doing so.)

Anyway, I hope to write more often and better.

ON to more interesting topics. Here are a couple of morsels from a recent birth experience:

I had the super privilege of attending a hospital - yes *hospital* - VBAC with midwife extraordinaire Laura and her sweet, if not slightly eccentric, Old-Order Mennonite client who let down her entire head of NEVER-CUT hair for her husband to brush and her to repin as she sat upright in a hospital bed. Her uterus contracted - little of which she felt, thanks to one of those when-it-works-it-works-wonders epidurals - and her hair was superbly redone. She even wore her white covering (you who don't know about "Plain folks" call them "bonnets") until she started sweating too much.

Certainly her hair wasn't the cornerstone of the experience. Her VBAC was. Her gentle but firm tenacity was. I likely could have cried when she so politely said, "Well, I really want to have a vaginal birth" to the doctor who would have cut her a c-section at the slightest murmur of such.

A couple more thoughts about this birth:

One, this experience simply cannot be mentioned without mentioning the tightie whities. Yep, underwear. (Hey, it's all part of the homebirth experience. This client was a homebirth transfer to the hospital, but we started her care in the old farm house down the looooong lane.)

This dad was especially sweet, caring and supportive. But he was such in his *tightie whities* and "#1 Dad" T-shirt *only* and did not, apparently, care that we were there to witness him that way. Thankfully, he kept dressed at the hospital AND nothing fell out when we got too close for comfort kneeling down to get heart tones.

Secondly - and I wished now I'd taken a picture - I'll fondly remember the midwife and the doctor sitting Indian-style on the floor while the mom pushed on hands and knees on that dreaded hospital bed. (I really dislike hospital beds as a general rule. I wish they weren't so highly revered in the birthing room.) You have to hand it to this mom. She had an epidural and near "dead-weight" legs but flipped over to her hands and knees, "if you think that will help," she said to me. (I'm tellin' ya, VBACers are usually highly *motivated*. I would have stood on my head had my midwife told me to and it meant not having surgery again. Oh wait - I did. My daughter was breech for a while, and I did handstands in the high school pool.)

Oh digressions!

Anyhow, seeing the doctor and midwife sitting and watching this precious woman working her baby down was cool. I *soooo* wished the OB would have walked in and seen them. It was as birth should be: a room full of women - we just happened to all be mothers about the same age, too - treating this birth with the casualness that says, "This is good. This is normal." I loved that the care providers weren't jumpy or anxious, and I enjoyed a mild amusement at what likely was a little surprise on the nurses' part. (Um, they just don't typically see doctors in street clothes sitting Indian-style on the floor while anesthesized women who've declined a repeat c-section in favor of the vaginal experience push on their hands and knees.)

I.Loved.It.

I hear no one wants to read long blogs, so I'll stop now and hope to start shaping this writing into interesting, relevant works in the future.

Catch you later.