When I was pregnant with my second child and started researching the idea of a home birth, at first it felt radical. Then, as I grew comfortable with my decision and read many, many birth stories of other women who’d had their babies at home, it started to seem…almost ordinary. I found myself going online and searching for more (and more…and more….and more.) This was in the days before blogs were popular, but there were hundreds of journal-style websites out there detailing different birth choices and experiences, many with a definite air of sanctimony. One night a surfing spree took me far beyond anything I’d ever considered. I found myself in a whole new realm of birth crunchiness.
It started like this: I read about a peaceful home birth and thought “Wow, that seems really cool. That’s how I’d like my birth to go.”
Then I clicked another link and found myself reading about a woman who gave birth unassisted (no midwife or hired birth attendant on site) in a hot tub in her back yard. “Wow, that seems really cool,” I thought. The “unassisted” part made me a little nervous, but the story was so peaceful and powerful that I found myself feeling a little wistful that I wasn’t planning one myself. (never mind that I didn’t have a hot tub. Or even a backyard–I lived in a second-story apartment. I could dream, couldn’t I?)
From that story I clicked another link and found myself reading a website about a woman who gave birth, unassisted, in the woods on her property. She not only didn’t have any paid attendants, but went off completely by herself to give birth.
I clicked link after link, each story becoming more “radical” than the last, until I found myself fantasizing about having an orgasmic birth by a stream in the mountains (we lived in the middle of Michigan, so what? Minor obstacle), alone, and leaving the umbilical cord and placenta attached until it fell off itself (called a lotus birth) Never mind that, when I really gave it serious thought, the idea of carrying a placenta around for two or three days didn’t much appeal to me (I barely had enough room in my dresser for the actual baby’s clothes–what was the placenta supposed to wear? Would it need a hat and booties?), and neither did the idea of potentially getting mosquito bites on my butt while pushing a baby out in a forest. Even orgasmic birth isn’t that appealing to me–more power to the women who have them, but to this girl, birth is birth and sex is sex and I’d rather keep the two separate. There was also the fact that I LIKED my midwives and wanted them (and my husband!) at my side when my baby was born. But never mind what I actually wanted. In my quest for more–more information, a more perfect and more “natural” experience, and yes, perhaps a little more radical cred–I was willing to entertain ideas that didn’t even appeal to me or line up with my personal philosophy.
Luckily, my obsession with all uber-natural birthy things didn’t last more than an evening. I went on to have a lovely plain old homebirth attended by skilled and highly trained midwives, something that’s plenty radical enough for most people and turned out to be plenty radical enough for me. And while I respect that for many birth is a highly spiritual experience, for myself, my choice was far more pragmatic–I felt that I would be safer and have a better experience at home. But somehow, in my quest to have the natural-est, purest birth (and somehow by extension, define myself as an uber-earth-mother) I had lost sight of why I was stepping outside the norm (hospital, OB, etc) and having a home birth in the first place. Hint: it really had nothing to do with an attachment to mountains or forests or placentas or any desire to go it alone, it was just a strange game of one-upping myself and trying to emulate women I didn’t even know.
We probably all do something like this from time to time. If the idea of a home birth of any sort doesn’t appeal to you in the least, maybe you’ve found yourself investing a little too much time fantasizing over being the fill-in-the-blank-iest mom: the craftiest, the most patient, the most involved, the greenest, the sportiest, the most domestic, the hardest-working, the best read, the best-travelled, or the busiest. As this essay at Babble suggests, sometimes even being the worst mom can be a form of one-upswomanship (maybe this explains the “slacker moms are cool” trend?)
The truth is, all good parents have some standards, and that’s a good thing. And looking to other parents for inspiration, even on blogs, which we should know are not a totally accurate representation of that person’s life, can be a healthy and fun pastime. But it’s definitely possible to get sucked into a dream world where we try to live up to an ideal that isn’t even our own. Once in a while, it’s important to ask the question: what do I really want for myself and my own family? We attach so much judgment to the idea of “values”, but really, our values are just the things that we prioritize over other things. We all have different values and that’s okay–one value is not necessarily more right or more motherly than another. (I’m assuming, of course, that your values do not prioritize, say, gambling and cocaine over caring for you children).
Bottom line: we all have to be confident enough–and sure enough of where we want to go–to be our own parenting gurus. And we should never raise the pedestal so high that we can’t climb on up ourselves.
