My Birth Story

My birth certainly served me some humbling and transformative lessons. It brought closure to a trauma loop that began as a young maiden...

This time last year, I was enduring the biggest initiation of my life to date: bringing my baby boy earth side. It wasn’t till my boy was five months old that I felt ready to start writing my birth story and only now, almost a year in, have I craved the space to finish it.

Birth is truly a deep medicine that takes time to integrate and process. Tomorrow morning marks a year since I gave birth to my Son, Otis Reed. It's taken me this long to soak in the medicine of it and revel in the huge shift that becoming a mother has gifted me. It is only now I feel ready to share my birth story.

I have written this in a few sittings. Each time, supporting me to process and integrate another layer. It’s hard to prepare yourself for the bigness of birth and motherhood. It's something you cannot fathom till you are experiencing it. I now know that the medicine of our unique birth journey serves us as pearls of intrinsic wisdom in our next chapter of motherhood. 

My birth certainly served me some humbling and transformative lessons and for that, I am so grateful. It brought closure to a trauma loop that began as a young maiden discovering myself as a sexual being and consumed my adult life in one way or another.

"Birth is not only about making babies. Birth is about making mothers—strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength." - Barbara Katz Rothman

I didn’t get the birth I wanted, I got the birth I needed. 

I believe our babies know how they desire to be birthed into this world: they have their own plan, despite our birth plans. This isn’t to disregard the very real birth trauma many women experience. Squeezing a human out of you can be the most beautiful and traumatic experience of a woman's life. My body certainly held some shock from the experience, which I was able to transmute in a bodywork session postpartum.

I have always wanted a home birth and early on in my pregnancy I explored the idea of “free birth”. I’m the kind of person who likes to rebel against social norms and do things my own way. So, free birthing appealed to me. 

I grew up in a household where we rarely saw a GP, didn’t vaccinate and got regular acupuncture done. There was very little trust in the mainstream medical system installed in me and I have personally experienced doctors abusing their power inappropriately. Some of the reasons why birthing at home (unassisted) felt safer for me than birthing in the hospital. 

Leading up to my birth I felt so calm and trusting of the process, but I had spent a lot of time feeling and transmuting my fears of birth. I’d spend time on the land, calling upon the divine wisdom to support me. I’d read many books and spent around 50 hours listening to free birth podcast interviews and stories. I spent two half-days learning from a wise birthkeeper who had been witness to over 700 unassisted births. She was a true master in the field and taught me so much about birth. The sessions with her were invaluable. I would have never educated myself like that had I planned to have a midwife present at my birth or a planned hospital birth. For this alone, I’m grateful I chose to free birth. 

I prepared my body for birth with chiro, yoga, perineum and vaginal massage. There's always more you could do to prepare, but I felt I had done as much as I had the capacity for at the time. Those last few weeks before my boy arrived were so surreal. The veil gets pretty thin towards the end and I often felt like I was between this realm and others. 

I had two due dates. The due date following my menstrual cycle was the 25th of November. Which is based on a 28-day cycle. My cycle was a 30-day cycle, so in my head, I calculated my EDD as the 27th. When I was 9 weeks pregnant I decided to do a dating scan as I was eager to see my baby and make it real. Here I was given the 21st as a due date based on the baby's size. Turns out my boy was big right from the beginning. 

On Sunday the 27th of November 2022 I woke up early around 5 am to light cramping. It didn't click straight away that it was early labour contractions. I had woken up many times in the night to go to the toilet, thinking I was experiencing full bladder aches, but now I see it was early contractions. 

I was so excited that I called the birth team (my mum and my friend Nic) to let them know to be on standby. Stu was off work already and we had a beautiful slow morning preparing the space. 

The birth team arrived early afternoon. We spent some time in the garden before a big storm rolled in. Surges (contractions) were still pretty light at this stage. Stu and I rested in bed while the ladies prepared some food. Late afternoon the surges ramped up and got closer together so I got in the pool. In hindsight getting in the pool so early likely stalled the progress. 

I was peacefully labouring in the pool for a long time. I was doing hypnobirthing breathing and listening to birth affirmations. As things ramped up I started to cry through each surge, not because it was too painful but because I was experiencing emotional waves through the waves of surges. 

I got out of the pool eventually and things ramped up. Around 10 pm the pain started getting pretty intense. I lost my mucus plug around here as well as my ability to speak much. Everyone, including me, started getting pretty tired as we hit midnight. I tried to rest between contractions but it was very challenging as I was so uncomfortable. 

In the early hours of the morning, I remember thinking to myself “I’m not sure how much longer I can handle this pain”, followed by the thought that I was probably in the transition phase of labour. 

I remember needing a lot of presence and space held at this point and although I had three people there, doing their absolute best for me, and reassuring me, I could feel their doubt in the space which affected my self-belief. Looking back I could have benefited from someone who had held space for birth many times and could hold the pillar of trust and give me their reassurance from this space. 

I intuitively knew my baby was fine, so when the idea of calling an ambulance was raised I shut it down. At this point, I was on my knees praying to God to support me to have this baby soon and end the agonising pain I was experiencing. I was clearing energy in the room and shamanic field as surrendered myself to God, praying I meet my baby soon. It is such a beautifully, vulnerable moment to glance back on. 

I was getting many intuitive messages at this point, one of them being that I was feeling all of the pain my maiden carried and didn’t have the space and tools to feel and process. This made sense to me as I had always carried around this burden of deep grief that felt like it had no end. But here I was going to the depth of it. 

I tried to communicate all this to my friend Nic who was right there with me holding my hand in this realm and others. I think I said something like “I’m getting a lot of messages” and when she asked what they were I realised I didn’t have it in me to share, so I replied with “cannot speak now”. 

After about 6 hours of this, brought to my knees kind of pain, I was exhausted and needed something to shift, so I surrendered to calling an ambulance. I still wasn’t certain I’d go to the hospital but I figured I could make my mind up when they were here. 

When they arrived I remember feeling like I had done something wrong and they were going to tell me off but they were so lovely and felt safe so with some help I got in the ambulance. This was my first ride in an ambulance and I was freaking out about birthing in the hospital. I was reminding Stu of some of my birthing preferences (and fears) and the paramedic did a great job of reassuring me that I would be treated with respect and care in the hospital. 

We arrived at the hospital around 4 am and I was wheeled into room 11, the same room I was in about five weeks earlier getting tests done as I had a rash on my belly and a migraine. This synchronicity soothed me a little, knowing somewhere inside of me that I was right where my baby wanted me. 

Upon arriving I had a hind water leak (waters broke) but I didn’t put two and two together to realise the fluid running down my leg and pooling on the floor was indeed this and only Stu and I saw this. Before I was able to get on the bed I had puked all over it and myself. This new environment had obviously given my body the safety it needed to transition into those final stages of labour. 

The staff were super supportive in asking about my birth plan and ensuring me they wanted to respect that. I had spent my whole pregnancy listening to free-birth stories which often included women's hospital birth horror stories as the reason they chose the free-birth route. So I was pleasantly surprised with the level of care and support I was given in the hospital. 

There were a few things In the hospital that felt pressured around, but I was able to hold a boundary that was respected. I don’t care to share much more about this as my story isn’t about this. What I will say though is that not every woman is in tune with her body's inner compass, nor has the courage to voice this and assert boundaries for herself. Birth and post birth is such vulnerable space to be in, in every way, so I can see why some women’s birth journey goes in a direction that is traumatising. I do, however, trust in birth and life experiences as something to serve us on our path of self-realisation. 

I agreed to an internal inspection and was told I was 7cm dilated. At this point, there was a discussion around possibly rupturing my membrane (breaking my waters) to speed things up (at the time we all assumed they hadn’t ruptured) and getting a birth pool ready in another room, as I was in the only birth suite without a pool (and my birth plan was to birth in a pool). 

But before the decision was made, I was pushing. I experienced foetal ejection reflex where my body was involuntary pushing through each contraction. I remember putting my hand inside me at this point and I felt my baby's head. A feeling I will never forget. 

Right before the pushing reflex, I remember saying to my friend that I needed to poo and she said I’ll get someone to help move me to the bathroom. I remember replying saying “No, I’m not able to move” and then next minute I was popping on the bed. Definitely not a dignified moment and one I didn’t remember till months later, but since has brought me many moments of laughter at the wild chaos of birth. 

I was on all fours on the hospital bed, covered in every bodily fluid possible. I remember the strong scent of vomit in my hair when the midwife asked if I wanted to get in the shower. No one had ever suggested anything more appealing. 

I was on the shower floor on all fours. Mum on one side with a shower head and Stu on the other side with another shower head, both watering my back. Two midwives (possibly one of them a doctor) and Nic behind me. It felt like I was there, pushing, for an eternity. 

I pushed through the contractions and each time they ended I kept pushing with any might I had left. I was confident that I just needed to get his head out and his body would come easy. 

I kept slipping off the pads they had put down to protect my knees and they fussed over trying to get my knee back up on it. I remember wishing that I could talk so that I could tell them “fuck my knees, I can’t feel them anyway, I’m trying to push a baby out, let's just focus on that!”. 

At 6.38 am I finally managed to roar our baby boy out on the bathroom shower floor. He was a big boy, weighing in at 4.07kg. The midwife caught him and passed him through my legs and he opened his eyes and looked right at me. Such a magical moment. 

I didn’t know what sex my baby was till now. I heard the midwives discuss passing “him” through my legs and I said “Ohh is it a boy?”, and they played dumb like they didn’t know. I was a bit annoyed I discovered the sex in this way, after 9 months of feeling like he was a she, but at this point, the overwhelming relief and joy I felt of finally holding my baby overshadowed anything else I was feeling. I remember Stu dropping to his knees next to us crying “You did it, babe!”. 

"Birth is an opportunity to transcend. To rise above what we are accustomed to, reach deeper inside ourselves than we are familiar with, and to see not only what we are truly made of but the strength we can access in and through birth." - Marcie Macari

The next half an hour was a blur for me, I don’t even remember getting out of the bathroom and back in bed. I do remember finally getting a good look at our boy in the lighter room and instantly knowing that we weren’t going to name him either of the two boys' names we had chosen. Shortly after this, Stu mentioned he didn’t think those names suited him and that he felt he looked like an “Otis”. It took us a few days to fully land in certainly of that name but he was right, Otis suited him perfectly. `

When I pushed our boy out, I felt myself tear. It felt like a pop. Once the birth process was complete and I had birthed the placenta, my tear was inspected and I was told that it looked like a third-degree tear and that I would need to go into theatre to get properly stitched up. I was absolutely guttered. I think I cried till I was wheeled away for surgery. 

My mum had a third-degree tear when she birthed me and that story of birth was imprinted in me. I had done a lot of work around rewiring my beliefs and releasing birth fears throughout pregnancy, as well as the massage prep, but It's now clear that I was meant to experience the same thing. 

This story ends with me in surgery, lying with my legs up in stirrups with about 4-5 men (gynecologists/surgeons) around me staring at the gaping wound that extends from my vagina almost right the way to my anus. Tears were streaming down my face as I grieved the unnatural distance from my newborn child, as well as feeling that somehow lying here in the hospital meant I had failed at birth. 

To some, this may sound traumatic. To me, this moment was so healing. It was the closing of a huge trauma loop that began when I was sexually assaulted at 15 years old and which created ripples of fear, mistrust and the need to defend and protect myself all my life. 

My birth showed me that I can put myself in a vulnerable position, where people may want to do things to my body that don’t actually feel like a yes to me and that I can kindly decline and know that my request will be respected. I could lay my sword knowing I didn’t need to fight anymore. 

My birth allowed me to heal my maiden’s biggest wound before stepping into motherhood. It humbled me greatly and allowed me to soften into allowing myself to be supported by others in ways that once felt too unsafe. My motherhood journey has served me with similar lessons. 

I still feel sad that my maiden self never felt like she could take up space. She never felt safe to embody her gifts of softness, vulnerability, and innocence. She felt like she was boundaryless and weak and like she had to hide in the shadows while her cleverly crafted “warrior woman” persona led her. 

But my maiden self is always with me. She didn’t just magically disappear when I became a mother. Her gifts and energy are integrated into the fibres of my being and infused into my mother self. She finally feels safe to take up space. 

I’m still grieving to enormity of becoming a mother. I cried so many tears writing this story. I am still grieving the freedom I once had to do what I wanted when I wanted, the friendships that have changed, and the lightness of the little responsibility I once had. I share this to normalise this natural grieving process. 

I absolutely love my son. I feel so blessed he chose me as his mother. Being a mother is the most beautiful, expansive, challenging and rewarding journey I’ve ever walked. It’s already stretched me in unimaginable ways, and I’m just getting started. 

Here are a couple of first photos of our boy…

It’s been an honour to write this and now share this with the world.

Thank you for coming along for the ride.

xox