My 67-Hour Homebirth Was a Psychedelic Labor of Love -- All the Details and Why I Share Them

My 67-Hour Homebirth Was a Psychedelic Labor of Love

I thought I knew what to expect, but nothing could’ve prepared me for “natural birth.”

These two pieces go together. The first is an intimate 21-minute telling of the 67 hours I was in labor with my daughter. The second is a much shorter discussion on why I share vulnerable stories.

An Editor Told Me My Birth Story Was Too Personal to Share

Vulnerable TMI stories are often the most important to tell.

Photo by JR Korpa on Unsplash

A Lookback at My Favorite Writing on Medium This Year

Year-in-Review 2018
See it here (with all friends links, so you don't need to be a Medium member to read any of it).

Balloons. Photo by Sagar Patil on Unsplash

Sixty-Seven Hours of Homebirth

I've been writing and rewriting this birth story for years.

After an inspiring talk with my mama/writer friend Kai I started writing again this year, and the first thing I worked on was editing my birth story down to submit to the Pacific Northwest Writers' Association contest. I didn't win (or even expect to), but it got me back into writing, and now I've got 20-something new published pieces to show for it, and more slated to come out in print in Raise Vegan!

PNWA submissions receive two professional critiques, and I got my critiques in the mail this week.

There were some useful criticisms, which informed my editing today, some great compliments, and some criticisms I'm just going to have to disagree with:

"Additionally, some details are simply too personal for strangers to absorb, and do not need to be shared outside of one's loving family."

Both critiques mentioned that my pacing was spot-on, following the rhythm of my contractions. That was something that came naturally when I was writing it, and I loved that they both noticed it!

One thing I've struggled with was where to publish this, who exactly is my audience. When writing it, I didn't want to hold back on the "TMI" details (that's the problem with most depictions of birth--not enough reality), but who exactly is going to publish this sort of thing? I decided on Medium. Now it's out there, and it probably won't make any money, but hopefully pregnant people will read it (I was so hungry for birth stories when I was pregnant!), and if it gets some claps, even better!

Prenatal Appointments with Midwives

My new article on Prenatal Appointments with Midwives just went up on Raise Vegan. I was lucky enough to have my prenatal appointments with Kathy Luch, Maya Horrocks and Melanie Dickson at Peninsula Midwives. Then Tzivia was born in a tub, right in our living room, where I'm sitting in this 2014 picture, when I was 14w5d pregnant.