What's the plan?

There's one question I keep getting a lot, and it actually kind of makes me giggle. People keep asking what the plan is for my homebirth. Funny enough, the one person who hasn't asked me this is Alyson, the one who's going to be filling the roles of adviser and lifeguard (aka midwife) for this process. Oh, and Thak hasn't asked either. I just realized that. Everyone else, though, is curious about the ins and outs of this homebirth, and how exactly we're going to do this. They always ask, "So what's the plan for your homebirth?" and my response is something like, "Uh....... what do you mean?" because I really am not entirely sure what they want to know.

Some people want to know what happens if something goes wrong. (Most of the time Alyson can handle complications at home, but in that 1% if the time when she can't, we'll go to the hospital.) Others want to know what we do with the placenta. (Bury it in the garden most likely.) A surprising number of people want to know how we would get the baby circumcised if it's a boy. (Simple. We wouldn't.) A few are curious as to how we get a birth certificate. (Alyson fills out the paperwork for us.)

More than any of that, people just want to know how it's going to go. People know that when you have a hospital birth, you wait until the contractions are X minutes apart, then you go to the hospital, get rushed to the maternity ward in a wheelchair, and are given a bed, strapped to monitors, and poked with an IV. Then the nurses come in and do cervical checks every couple hours or so, and things are pretty much out of your hands. People just plain don't know what a homebirth looks like, or what you do. I would say it looks a great deal like a birth center birth. (Technologically, a birth center birth and a homebirth are identical. A good birth center birth is really just a homebirth in someone else's house.) Of course, most people don't really know what a birth center birth is like either, so that analogy doesn't really work very well most of the time.

The funny thing is, I have no answer. I don't know if I will have a waterbirth (everyone wants to know if that's in the plans). I probably won't. It really didn't work out very well for me last time. If I had to guess, I would say I will labor in water a lot of the time, because that has worked very well for me in the past. I cannot tell you what positions I will like, because what is comfortable, productive, and beneficial, really depends on the baby's positioning, and I don't know how the baby will be positioned yet. I cannot tell you what foods I will want to eat, only that there will be food, and I will be eating it (this blows people's minds for some reason). I can tell you that I'm going to have a ton of blue Gatorade, because I loved it when I was in labor with Orren, but I don't even know if I'll love it this time. For all I know, I'll only want water, or sweet tea, or grape juice, and I'll leave the blue Gatorade to everyone else.

I don't like birth plans on the whole. It's not because I think they're infeasible, or impractical, or that they set people up for false hope of a labor they will never have. These are the mainstream arguments against birth plans. No, my reason for disliking birth plans is a lot simpler. Beyond a few very significant things, I just don't know what I'll want in that moment. My birth plan for Orren's birth quite literally looked like this:

YES: Birth tub, delayed cord clamping, breastfeeding.
NO: drugs, IV, instrument assisted delivery, circumcision, vitamin K injection, eye ointment.

Because really, those are the only things I can truly be certain of. Everything else comes down to what seems like a good idea at the time. A big part of choosing the right midwife, is feeling pretty certain that you've invited someone into your birth who isn't going to need a 3 page long birth plan in order to be on the same page as you are. It's about getting your birth team right from the start, rather than having to fight for your voice to be heard at the end. My birth plan began to be written at 7 weeks when I met with Alyson for the first time, and found our views on the things that are important to me about birth, to be compatible. I spoke with other midwives as well, but they were not right for me. Rather than agonizing over a lengthy birth plan at the end, I spent a month at the beginning interviewing every midwife in town, and finding the one who was just right for me. Choosing the right practitioner from the start, will save a lot of trouble at the end.

Now, this isn't to say nobody should ever write a birth plan. If you want to write a birth plan, you should write one. I've always just found them to be difficult because when you're not even in labor yet, it's kind of hard to know what you'll want to do when the time comes. I've also found them to be largely unnecessary if you've chosen the right practitioner to assist you with your birth in the first place.

Homebirth. Me. Thak. Alyson.

That's the plan.