My Firstborn: our journey from Free Birth to First Breathfeatured

The Conception

Madly in love with my husband, I finally decided to allow our baby into my womb.  I was the one holding him off for years as I was needing to feel deeply in my bones that I was ready for this complete shift into motherhood: to fully honor it. Once we decided it was time I was beyond excited to start the process knowing the timing was right.  

We looked at it as the “birth year” knowing the life cycle of sperm & egg maturation starts in the 3 months prior to conception. We set our intention to receive a baby who would teach us a lot and we were open to whatever lessons our baby had in store for us. We placed a birth altar to welcome our baby in, it had all sorts of funny things on it: a photo of lush forest we took in Jemez when we first met, a red silk scarf from his great grandmother, a Venus of Willendorf ceramic tile, etc. We also kept our eyes open for communication with our baby in whatever way it might come and we found that communication through many encounters with hawks. During that time of preconception both of us had more hawk encounters than ever before.  We would come home and tell each other what hawk encounters we had everyday, it was amazing.

Driving down the Taos Canyon one afternoon a hawk swooped down above my car and flew with me for a minute just feet above my windshield, like he was guiding me.  That never happened before or since in my life to have such close encounters with hawks. 

A mother hawk even set her nest at the top of the ridge across the canyon from us in perfect view of our front porch, we watched her all the time it was so fitting.  Having the luxury of planning, we both did a 14 day herbal cleanse and then added back in quality, nourishing foods slowly eating as if I was already pregnant.  

He took alfalfa & nettle for vitamin rich sperm and I had been drinking infusions of nettle & red raspberry leaf as womb prep for many years.  We planned to start “trying” in July.  I was tracking my cycle with the fertility awareness method mostly for fun and to get more in touch with my cycle.  I’ve always known my body well and the waves of hormones as I moved through the months.  Even when I was 14 before I got my first period I knew something new was happening in my body and that I was moving into a new chapter of life, into this wild time of fertility.  

I was practicing yoni steaming to get my cycle more to 28 days as I had a little bit shorter cycle, and to warm up & spiritually prepare my womb. The hawks seemed to be the messengers that baby was ready and waiting for us to allow him in.  Then in late July without checking my fertility chart or any “planning” other than knowing deeply it was the day,  we stayed in bed a little longer that morning with the intention of conceiving for the first time. It was such a feeling to be totally open to receiving, totally open to life, and having no thoughts of preventing what we were made to do as we always had before.

I knew immediately I was pregnant. I could feel the union of our biology happening in my body.  I could feel my cervix was open allowing him in, pulling him in. 

I knew for sure then that I had never been pregnant before.  Later that day I had a “hormone halo headache” as I would describe it that told me it was so.  I didn’t even feel the need to take a test but I did once I knew it would show positive.  

The Pregnancy

That summer I worked 7 days a week, Taos shuffle style, knowing it was my last months of working out in the world. Fatigue hit hard right away so August was a really rough month, I remember napping out of pure exhaustion in a number of places while ‘at work’ – that first trimester narcolepsy all the women told me about.

Soon we moved into an almost off grid hand-built adobe home that was half 1941 Bluebird school bus & half adobe, a real Taos-house in Ranchos built by a local artist.  I cut back to only working 4 short days a week at the midwifery college office.  My paternal grandfather passed away, my most loved family member. I saw him for the last time that spring and knew it was for the last time, I didn’t mourn him as I would have if I wasn’t pregnant, like I was protecting my baby from stress from the get go even on a subconscious level.

Second trimester came along and I was less tired but I prioritized eating, sleeping & bathing. I took many many many epsom salt baths & naps.  Cod liver oil & calcium magnesium drink were my only supplements. I ate a lot of eggs from our hens and followed the Weston A Price style of eating. I ate lots of bone broth & local pastured meat: our own meat birds from that summer and local beef all raised on the grass of the Taos Canyon, feeling the land directing & expanding my cells.  I never vomited except for when we tried to eat Christmas goose and my gallbladder did not agree with all that grease. I first felt my baby moving inside of me at 16 weeks, he was a very active fetus.

Despite loving each other deeply my husband and I got into maybe 5 pretty passionate disagreements but day to day he cared for me so well and we looked forward to spending all our time together outside of both working.  I really believe that women start being mothers the moment we start growing life in us but men don’t start becoming fathers until the baby emerges.  I was already changed, I was already mothering our baby and he was utterly confused as to why I was so different…the root of our arguments stemmed from this being on different pages (plus the hormones heyy!). I’m sure there is some biological reasoning for that lag of understanding between the sexes but it was something we noticed and I’ve heard other women speak of also.

I found a midwife around 24 weeks by urging of the women around me. My original plan was to just give birth without any assistance out of fear of the midwife getting in the way of or pathologizing my woman-human experience, which is what came to be.  I loved this idea of free birth, as I trusted wholly in my ability to innately know how to give birth and it spoke to my freedom-loving DIY spirit. I went back and forth on whether I wanted the midwife there or not up to the birth. I enjoyed the midwife a lot and every time she listened to him with the old fashioned fetoscope she always said he’s strong. I did not get an ultrasound. I felt good and generally normal aside from the constant urge to rub my belly and send love to him all day. I spoke to him telepathically all the time and we even had games in his movement, he would push against my hands back & forth, it was just magical. I read tons of books about birth, mostly spiritual in nature as I was preparing for the biggest initiation of my life…

The Birth

I went to work that day and had what felt like bruising on my shins must’ve been some swelling. Felt nothing out of the ordinary otherwise, I had it in mind I wouldn’t give birth until after the 13th so of course he arrived on the 12th.

On Cameron’s way into the house from work a hawk swooped down low over our garden and looked him in the eye, when he came in and told me and we should’ve known our baby was coming.

I was 39 weeks + 5 days.  We remarked on how weird my belly looked that evening, low and tight but I didn’t feel anything at all and I had no practice contractions that I could feel in the weeks leading up to labor. I had a little 3rd trimester insomnia so around 1am I reached up to turn off the light and boom felt a shift, like a shift in perception of all my senses. I immediately emptied my bowels and started to question the slight queasiness as labor.  Here’s where it starts to get really blurry, around 1:30am when it was clearly now contractions not stomachache/bm I remember thinking maybe I should text the midwife but I figured it could last for hours or days so I just was in it.  I have no idea the timing between contractions but I assume they were very close together from the start.

I fully dropped out between the contractions, when I say “fully dropped out” I mean blacked out & was not in the room, I was somewhere in the ethers my cells were so spread out I just dissolved into the space between matter.

I have no sense of time at all, I remember coming back to my body for the contractions to put my fist into my lower back as counter pressure then immediately drop back out again when the contraction was over. I was on the ground mostly then I put myself into the bathtub at some point, I don’t even remember this as a conscious decision. All the while Cameron is sleeping. Once I started to make noise uncontrollably around 4am I called him in and he started to warm up the room by making fire and I barely communicated with him at all. He tried to touch my back and I did not like that.  Once I started to make really loud roaring type noise and I felt his head drop past my pelvic bone I remember thinking holy shit I need to slow this down and I tried to breathe deeper and slower but he was coming through and in one involuntary push he shot out: full body sunny side up, looking at me under the water.

At 5:02am he was born, I pulled him to my chest quickly seeing he was my boy and we burst out welcoming him with tears of joy.  Quickly I knew something wasn’t right as he was struggling to take his first breath and told Cameron to call the midwife right away. I tried to suck out anything in his airways but nothing moved though.  The midwife instructed us over the phone how to give him breaths and we did but maybe not as regularly as we should have since we weren’t aware of how to do this in the way it is commonly trained.  I was still pretty incapable of focusing and my uterus was cramping down to get my placenta out and I was very shaky and in shock.  Despite all of that, we kept him alive until the midwife arrived & took over.  She said when she arrived his heart rate was lower but she quickly got him up to a good heart rate and continued giving breaths & rubbing his back with all of us expecting him to breathe at any moment.  All along he was trying to breathe, he even made some noises like he might do it so she continued giving breaths following the protocol she was taught, soon she intubated him with her emergency kit and we called 911.  I passed out at some point from overwhelm or blood loss and I think I took a ‘freeze’ approach to the whole drama taking place on my lap like I needed a full time-out from the overwhelm. Once they put my feet up I came to pretty quickly and when I opened my eyes all the EMTs were there looking at me with great concern as I lay in naked in the tub unsure of how much time had passed. 

I felt very separated from my baby, I went from the highest high of my life to the lowest low in a matter of moments.  It was just a cascade of realizations one right after the other that this birth was not going at all as planned as the situation escalated, why wouldn’t he just breathe?

Everything I had dreamed of was falling apart right on my lap, I sort of disassociated because I couldn’t even cope with the reality. There was a lot of worry in the air, the midwives, the EMTs, the feeling in the room was that of heaviness, suspended pressure pressing from all directions. Cameron carried him to the ambulance and he kept his hand on his chest the whole way to Holy Cross.  There right away they shot him with adrenaline as they continued to use the intubation bag to give breaths expecting him to just breathe, when he didn’t they took a xray and finally discovered he had a ‘diaphragmatic hernia’ so there was a hole in his diaphragm that allowed his intestines to move up into his chest cavity preventing his lungs from expanding upon delivery.  This could have happened at any time of his gestation or even during the birth. Our baby was taken without either of us directly to UNM by helicopter, Cameron drove down to Albuquerque immediately but it still took him hours to get back to our boy.  I didn’t get to the hospital until about 11pm that night so we were separated from before 6am to 11pm. 

After they left in the ambulance, there I was still naked in the bathtub covered in my blood in total disbelief with what just happened, I had no baby and no strength.  The midwife literally carried me to my bed where I just uncontrollably wept very confused. My dearest friend was called on to be with me, to anchor me into the present, to cry with me, to hold me, to make decisions for me and to feed me her homegrown atole…I was so utterly incapable of rational thought it felt as though everything was just happening to me as I was in a nightmare.  I was focusing on the weirdest things but mostly trying to get the midwife to pack up my entire home along with my postpartum “plan” I meticulously curated and bring it all to Albuquerque with me, turn back time, fix it all, complete redo – in the moment I’m sure I believed this was possible though everything had gone out the window.  The midwife tried to keep as much of my plan in place as possible (bless her) she made a placenta print for us and passed my placenta off to my dear friend to be lovingly cared for and tinctured with herbs for me.  This period after my baby left my arms to the moment I saw him in the hospital bed covered in tubes, wires, tape & gauze was the weirdest span of time of my life.  I was awake for well over 36 hours at that point and my whole sense of reality was completely shattered.  This was it: my full ego death, the woman I was before he came out of my body was dead.  It’s as if when I woke up from fainting in the bathtub I left 99% of the self I thought I was behind.  Before I was always so ‘in control’  and now I was just a formless, selfless, entity  just throttling through space like I could feel how fast the earth was moving beneath me for the first time and I was just letting it.

5 days old: first look into each others eyes since birth,
6 days old: first skin to skin though the magic was dampened by gagging on his breathing tube, 
8 days old: skin to skin again and he was a little sedated so it was much better for both of us,
10 days old: was surgery day, general anesthesia, laparoscopic hernia repair, 5 incisions, 1 chest tube opening, 4 horrible hours long wait,
12 days old: breathing tube out and finally no tubes going down his throat since birth.  They gave him pedialite as his first drink through a bottle, my breasts wept.
13 days old: his first nourishment from my milk, starting with the earliest colostrum and working forward,
14 days old: new doctor who threatened a feeding tube upon 10 minutes of picking up his chart without even looking at him.  To not get the feeding tube she insisted on for no reason, she required him to take 14ml milk at the next feeding, he took 40ml like “back off lady”.  This was our boy’s style, as far as he was concerned he was just there to get his intestines out of his chest and he was ready to go.  All the staff constantly repeated “the NICU is 3 steps forward, 2 steps back” but for our boy no steps back.  The term “the rockstar of the NICU” was thrown around by those astounded by him and intense power-struggles with the disbelievers.  Doctors are just people in the end with their own perceptions & opinions, some are optimistic almost angelic and some are just mean especially when we questioned them.  He exceeded EVERY expectation, we were told the best best case scenario 1 month but he was out in 18 days.  As soon as we got there we told everyone we know to pray and tell everyone they know to, we had whole churches and homes from California to Eastern Europe praying for him, lighting candles, holding him in their thoughts, etc…We got to feel the healing power of energy directed toward him through those prayers, thoughts & candles – it is extremely potent medicine. We touched him and talked to him when we were near him. We gave him his name and put strong, soaring hawk images all around his room. 

Every 2 hours I pumped for 20 minutes and we listened to these Tibetan chants, structuring my breast milk with healing frequencies. We intentionally were not speaking our worries or fears while I pumped but thoughtfully infusing our dreams for his vibrant health into every golden drop. 

I covered every poke, bruise and wound on his body with my colostrum and all around his breathing tube entry, ears, nose, third eye with a q-tip.  Anointing my boy with our milk, letting his body know on a cellular level I was there breasts full just waiting for him to be able to receive it, our bacteria communicating reassurance.  Cameron & I wore scent handkerchiefs against our skin, switching them out with every visit to our baby so he could smell us close even when we had to leave the hospital to sleep on the other side of town.  I would call in the middle of the night when I woke up to pump just to hear the night nurses tell me he was doing just fine & hear his monitors beeping in the background.

He was still on the bottle for about a week after we got home as the hospital lactation consultants were no help and my confidence in innately knowing anything was completely shattered.  Our midwife helped to get him latched and we never gave him a bottle again.  Finally we could do things our way. We found each other again in the place he was born, suckling at my breast and we started over. Our first 40 days started at that moment, we revived the postpartum plan the best we could.  We slowly came back down to earth, to this place & our loving community here held us as we regained our footing.  The sweet Taos summertime returned and we had the new family mantra: “no bad days” with somewhere over the rainbow playing in the background.

I held a lot of blame over myself for a long time.  There was a lot of worry I came home with from the hospital as I experienced a lot of ‘home birth shaming’ from hospital staff who only saw things from their limited point of view as they were trained to.  Time helped, being completely vulnerable helped even more.  Sharing the deep dark thoughts I had for not doing things a certain way or how “I should have” allowed others in to understand and remind me it’s all perspective.  What if I chose exactly right to birth him the way I did, what if had I known via ultrasound that he had the hernia he wouldn’t of survived or had a bad outcome? Why did the story only go one way: I was wrong and I should be punished for it and living in fear of the next ‘event’.  Why does the story only go one way top down from the medical authority to silly little me birthing at home (as women have since time immemorial)? What if the real story is in me following my intuition and choosing to birth him in full surrender & trust witnessed only by the man who loves us most is what gave us all the power to get through the next part?  The part where regardless of how or where I gave birth he was always going to need to go to the hospital to get surgery to be here with us, we are super grateful that we live in a place where there were emergency doctors & surgeons to help our baby.  I can’t help but look back and believe it all worked out the way it was supposed to, as life always seems to do.  His birth set us on the path we are now of actualizing radical self responsibility especially in terms of our health.  The deep dark spiritual work of being parents started right away for us.  Here I am 3 years later finishing up this story with my brilliant boy running around reminding me that gratitude is the way.

In our preconception time we asked for a baby to teach us, we had no idea of how we would receive that tenfold as so many lessons came through his birth. For me the overarching theme was: ACCEPT HELP – I previously saw accepting any help as admitting to my own weakness. I ended up being forced to accept help in the most extreme way, my baby’s life was completely out of my hands. I was forced to trust doctors (who I have a long history of not trusting), I was forced to seek help when I felt so out of control emotionally after we got home. I was forced to show my weaknesses and learned that in being that vulnerable its the strongest thing you can do: show yourself, not hide away all the “bad parts”. The truest truth is that there’s no bad parts, there are just humans in progress, always in progress needing to be seen and held and loved to be able to carry on.

We are here to love & to believe without limit in those we love is the most important thing we can do.

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If you are living in shame from your birth story, please share it: with a friend, a healer, a stranger, the internet at large! Releasing this story allowed others to mirrior it back to me, to see the light in all that blame & shame I was holding for so long and to remind me that being in the best state of mind possible IS the best thing for my baby. Our nervous systems were so intertwined, I had to help me to help him.

The power of sharing my first birth story is what inspired the creation of this website, if you gave birth in this valley share your story and weave it into the story of this place: https://taosbirthstories.com/share-your-birth-story/

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