The theme of yesterday’s post was “reveal,” but I waited until this one to close that loop. I am not going to yoga on Day Eight. Instead I went back to a second class on the evening of Day Seven.

This does feel like cheating, I admit. But looking at the day, with a wedding at 2:00 and a mother blessing 4-7 p.m., and commitments to my family and my home in the morning, it is just not feasible for me to go to either of the Saturday classes offered. If there were a 6:30 Sunrise Yoga, I’d be there. But 8:30-9:45 is just too late for all we have to pack into the day, including my preparing all the food I will need to eat all day to accommodate my special grain-free, starch-free GAPS diet. My friends and family need a nourished, rested mama, and that is already a little sketchy.

So instead, I went out for a second time on Day Seven to my first evening class at Centered Yoga. It was Yin yoga, a class described by the studio as using passive poses and the breath to create a “sense of balance, harmony and inner peace.” Sign me up!

Even though I was dragging a little all day, and it was so lovely outside I might  have rather taken a walk than spend as much time in the car as in the yoga studio, I knew that I would feel better for having had the meditation and relaxing stretches. And I knew that I would feel almost I wasn’t a cheater if I doubled up on one day but certainly like a failure if I didn’t go on Saturday or Friday night. My husband was going to be home early, so it was the one time I could get to an evening class.

Aside from the yoga, which I’ll get to in a second, one eye-opening part of the experience was seeing what life is like for the hundreds of people who work in Georgetown and live in Virginia. The post-work and Friday night scenes are foreign to me these days. It felt like cultural tourism just to sit on Key Bridge at 6:15 p.m. And then, on the way home, to sit on Canal Road at 8:15 p.m. That was the most exposure I’ve had to over-20/under-30 humanity and to external combustion I’ve had in a long time. Witnessing it — while listening to classical music — was an exercise in anti-narcissism. It’s important to be reminded that your own individual issues are not being obsessed over by everyone else in the world.

But I’m avoiding talk of the class, I see.

Early on, the teacher invited us to dial back our intellect and to “turn up the volume” on our intuition. She said a lot of provocative things, and sometimes the music helped me get out of my head and let her words take me to their essence.

The first time she said, “Our hips tell our stories” — that they reveal a lifetime — I could only think of boys and things you do with them in the dark. But on the second side in pigeon pose, I thought of giving birth to my daughter, 10 months ago yesterday.

In the birth pool, I had my left knee down and my right knee bent, up and perpendicular to the ground. My labor was short — just 4.5 hours from the pop of my water when I went up into bridge pose at 5:30 a.m. to her birth at 10:08 a.m. — but I was pushing for too long. I’d been unpracticed in the art of breathing through intensity; as soon as it came, I wanted to match it. But three hours later, I was tired and the midwife’s tone got just a touch stern after my daughter’s head was out that the rest needed to come along, too. No longer feeling the inevitability of the next contraction, I had to finish on my own, and quickly.

And when I did, I was cautioned not to pull the baby too high out of the water because of her short cord. My son’s cord was so short, he’d been breech and delivered via c-section. I’m not exactly a fan of short cords. I got a little freaked out.

Then I remarked that, while my surgically-delivered baby’s head looked quite intact and non-smooshed, and this baby’s did not. It looked funny, her eyes and ears seemingly set wide apart. She also didn’t cry right away. I didn’t know what to make of this near-flaccid baby who looked rather like Gollum. My first thought was a worry that she might have Down Syndrome and that I would not know how to be a good mother to her. I worried I wouldn’t love her enough, that my heart was not big enough to envelop this being I’d spent nine months worrying about and loving and feeling move inside me. What would this reveal to me about me if I stopped short of adoration?

We can never know who are children are, but it is striking to me how much with both I just looked at them in wonder. And with my daughter, I had a nervous first two minutes wondering if anything had gone wrong, chromosomally or otherwise. Here I’d had my successful homebirth in barely enough time for my midwife to make it to my house and relieve her backup. But what would happen now? Who were we all going to be?

In yoga class, I felt my hips expand in pigeon pose and thought about my story. The teacher told us, before folding, to expose our hearts, and I found that sob at was hiding on Day Four. And I cried. Mostly it was in my body, but some tears fell on my block, the floor, my cheeks.

I hope the teacher wasn’t concerned if she noticed. It was an important release.

I came home wanting to embrace my baby and her father. They are precious.

And yet, life is not just a Lifetime movie. The baby would not go to sleep. When I pulled her off my breast, she writhed like I was sticking her with a hot poker. I gave her homeopathy, Rescue Remedy, an herbal calming tincture. My husband tried again to get her to sleep. Finally I put her on my back, did some watercolor painting for the motherblessing books, and there she lies, her neck cocked over in a way that probably feels as uncomfortable as the extra 20 pounds feels to my back while I sit with horrible posture.

But it’s what is working right now. I don’t want to challenge it. Sometimes you just have to go with that and have faith that things will all work out as they are meant to be.

Right?

Other posts in this series:

Day One: The challenge begins!

Day Two: “Let your bottom blossom”

Day Three: “Shine!”

Day Four: “Surrender”

Day Five: “Root and reach”

Day Six: “Brighten the belly”

Day Seven: “Reveal”

Day Eight: “Expose your heart”

Day Nine: “Play”

Day Ten: “Party in the pose”

I’m thrilled to share that my daughter was born in a successful waterbirth at home on Monday, August 2, a vaginal birth after cesarean (VBAC or HBAC for homebirth after cesarean) assisted by a certified professional midwife (CPM) and support from her assistant, a certified nurse midwife (CNM).

I first want to thank all my friends and family for their support through my pregnancy and birth and to thank the many groups that have supported me personally and work for birth rights and VBACtivism in general including the International Cesarean Awareness Network (especially  Northern Virginia and DC chapters), Holistic Moms Network (especially my Arlington/Alexandria chapter as well as the NoVa, DC, and Annapolis chapters), Birth Options Alliance, NoVa Homebirth, blogs like The Feminist Breeder, Momotics, The Empowering Birth Blog, and others I’m too groggy to name.

Thanks also to my midwives and doula and to all the childbirth educators who moderated discussions or held solo sessions with me from Bradley, Hypnobirthing and Birthing from Within traditions, to my yoga instructors, and to so many healing professionals who assisted me on this journey from conception to homebirth. It really was a collective effort! Thanks to the NIH for holding that conference  on VBAC in March and to Mothering magazine for giving me the chance to report on it and also to MJ Hanafin and the National Center for Homeopathy for allowing me to attend the powerful “Midwifery and Homeopathy” seminar in April. I have learned so much on this journey!

Below is the story of the birth of my daughter told in the way I feel comfortable sharing with the public. I want friends and family who are interested in the full story to have access to it, and I’d also like to have this out there as one more success story about HBAC for anyone who is interested.

A note on names: I might have once been in the habit of referring to my son as EJ on this blog, but he’s just going to be E from now on, and his new baby sister will just be A. She doesn’t have her own friends & family blog yet but I’m okay with a few public newborn photos, though I typically don’t do face shots of E on this blog. “LJ” is my husband.

Please consider that this whole entry might be one big TMI if you’re not into birth stories. I’ve tried to be tasteful, but not all details may be appropriate for all types of readers. Skim wisely if you’re squeamish. Otherwise, enjoy!

Pre-Birth Story

I went to bed Sunday night after 11 (post-“Mad Men”) upstairs alone while the boys camped out downstairs in the guest bedroom as has been the norm during the super hot days of July. (We are getting estimates on insulation for the upstairs!) But I had less numbing wrist pain in the upstairs bed, so I’d been sleeping up there since the heat wave calmed down. It was actually a nice night to sleep with the windows open!

I’d gotten a massage and some craniosacral work that afternoon, and when I asked “any recommendations?” the therapist said to talk to the little girl and see if we were on the same page about what kind of birth we wanted to have. So I did, for the first time in a while. I told her I hoped it would not be too long but didn’t want it so fast that I couldn’t really inhabit it. I didn’t hear any disagreement, but I also didn’t get a clue it was going to happen the next morning. Maybe all she was waiting for was for me to acknowledge what was actually going to happen.

I fell asleep listening to my Hypnobirthing CD and woke early making a mental list of all the things I wanted to do. One was to find Creative Memories software to re-load on the computer that got cleared off a while back so that we could make our own birth announcement (and a very belated “We’ve Moved! announcement and an apologies-for-no-holiday-card card).  Another was to make phone & email contact lists. And a whole bunch of other stuff. The list was stronger than my fatigue, so I threw in the towel on sleep.

I looked at my watch at 5:21 and decided to get up and do some yoga and try to get back to sleep for at least an hour 6-7ish. I was planning that day (after dropping E off at camp) to drive to Maryland to observe and take photos of Monica Corrado’s “real food” camp so I could try to write and pitch an article to the Post by Tuesday evening. (I might still try a less timely piece for a magazine at some point since I have plenty of interview notes, but it’s a bummer that I can’t see it with my own eyes!) I expected a busy day and had even arranged to have a friend pick up E from music camp at 1:00 and take him to her house for a while so that I could spend more time on the job and not worry about making it back on time. But I knew I’d be tired once I got to pick him up, especially if my day started before 5:30.

I got out my mat and did some pelvic rocks and side stretches. Then I thought that since I hadn’t been sleeping soundly in the mornings, maybe my adrenals could benefit from a bridge pose. I lifted my hips up and felt a funny pop and then a small gush of liquid. “Oh, no,” I thought. “Do not tell me that my water just broke.” I envisioned that I’d be walking around for hours or a day or more with broken water and no signs of progress. Wrong!

I sat down to pee and felt a bit of a contraction of a different sort than regular Braxton-Hicks but nothing walloping. I called my midwife, Marilee of TLC Birth and the Institute for Holistic Midwifery (hereafter referred to as M), who was already at the home of my neighbor and new friend who was also going for a home VBAC (but was at that point two weeks late). Her son and mine had played together at the park with their dads just 12 hours earlier, and now she and I were in labor at the same time, something we’d joked about when we first met.

M said she would send her birth assistant, Susan (luckily a midwife herself, but a certified nurse midwife, or CNM), up the hill to check in on me. By the time she arrived, I was contracting every 4 minutes (starting with the first one I wrote down at 5:47). They each lasted close to 2 minutes, which is why I was thinking (and told some people) that they were 2 minutes apart (because I only had 2 minutes of respite). As much as I’d have liked to imagine them to be “surges” in the Hypnobirthing lingo, they came on too fast for that to fit (at least not for this mama who hadn’t really practiced enough).

S then became our primary midwife for most of the labor. My husband furiously ran around cleaning some things up and getting the hose connected to the birth tub. Thankfully, our son slept through all that prep. I had no time to putter or arrange anything. As soon as possible I was on my knees on the floor bent over a birth ball (which turned out to be just the right size – thanks for the bday gift, LJ! Sorry I complained that it was too small!). I was moaning my head off. It was nice for us that it was a cool morning so we didn’t have to have the A/C on, but I also wonder if our neighbors thought there was a gang of raccoons getting into some s—t with the mangy fox couple that likes to hang in the same forest ‘hood. Oh well! At least I didn’t wake up E.

I was still on the floor when he did get up though, and I remember LJ asking, “Is it okay for you to hear this?” of my intense sounds. We never did get around to watching YouTube birth videos, but I had shown the boy all the birth scenes in The Business of Being Born, and we’d read “We’re Having a Homebirth” and “Welcome with Love” and some other kids’ books about having a baby, so he had a clue. But I will never forget hearing his voice upon just getting up for the day and walking into lights and commotion, curiously inquiring, “What’s goin’ on out here?!”

So labor started at 5:47 a.m., and at 7:15 a.m. I asked, “When can I start pushing?” I was just not in a place to let the contractions just travel through me and really wanted to lean into them. Still, I also didn’t want to develop a cervical lip by starting too soon.

S checked me and said it was okay if I felt like bearing down. “Am I complete then?” I asked. “Yep!” Wow, 3 cm (as I was a few weeks ago at an prenatal appointment where I requested an internal exam) to 10 cm in about 90 minutes of labor. Who knew? Well, my midwife had pointed out that four years ago I’d dilated to 4 cm with my breech son without the help of head pressure on my cervix (maybe even to 6 cm on the Pitocin, if you believe one set of reports over the other that says I remained at 4 cm as I’d been for a few weeks). Ever since she remarked on that and indicated I’d better call her early, I had the idea that maybe my labor would be on the faster side. It was!

Birth Story
S was talking to LJ about what to do if I had the baby in the position I was in on the floor, which was a little freaky to hear that she thought it might go that fast. I started to wish I’d woken him up earlier, but I wanted him to get as much rest as he could, and I thought we’d have more time. Fortunately, we did get the birth pool filled up, and the difference was amazing.

On the floor, I’d felt like there was hardly any time between contractions and like there was no choice but to moan and groan through them. (When our doula walked in, she quickly commented on the “great sounds.” Bless her heart for being such a pro-birth nut! And she (Camilla of revelbirth) was fabulous with E, who was super comfortable with her. Plus she took great photos and video! I’m so glad we had her on board).

Once I got into the water, the experience changed dramatically. I had a little more time between contractions, and they just felt so much more manageable. “That’s more what I thought late labor would look like,” LJ said later. Still, neither of us thought the whole thing would take only 4.5 hours!

It got very quiet as I labored in the tub, bearing down with each contraction because that’s what I wanted to do. All in all, you could say I pushed for close to 3 hours, but I was not thinking I was really moving toward birthing the baby until I felt the head with my hands. I spent some time on my back in the pool, but most of it I was on hands & knees. LJ made breakfast for E, they ate, I tried to tune out the smells, and then it was just quiet again while I did my thing and S and LJ watched and waited, bringing me electrolyte water and coconut water and cool washcloths. At some point we added more warm water to the tub.

Although S had been great and I feel so lucky to have had her as M’s assistant, I still longed for my midwife who had been so encouraging (“I’m so excited for your birth!”). But at the same time, I felt bad that my overdue neighbor had lost her birth assistant and I certainly didn’t want to leave her without her midwife. I kept wanting to say “I’m sorry!” for having such bad timing and for things going so quickly.

Since my neighbor’s birth was not imminent, M came to the house when S said our baby’s head was visible, and S returned to my neighbor’s place. It was great to hear M’s familiar, soothing voice and positive words about my position (left knee down, right knee up, leaning against the side of the Gentle Birth tub.) I felt like now, even though this was faster and a week earlier than I expected, now I could feel like this was the experience I had been planning. The baby was born just about 15 minutes after M arrived.

Most of the time I was in labor, I was conscious primarily of the contractions, which were all in front. When I became more aware of the sensation of the baby moving through me, I did have moments of being able to appreciate the sensation as connected to the act that got us there. Having watched Orgasmic Birth with its director at last fall’s “Perinatal” birth symposium, it was important to me to try to find some enjoyment in the intensity, and I’m happy to say that I did.

There was a little stinging but nothing I’d have described as a ring of fire. It was quite something when I was encouraged to reach down again. I balked initially saying “I think I’ll be disappointed” as though I was going to expect to feel more than would be there, but they were right that it was worth checking out to feel the whole head.

And yet, my contractions were not lasting as long as I’d like, being as strong as I wanted, or coming close enough together for me. I felt like I was losing momentum. M was watching the baby’s color with a flashlight and mirror and when her head started to lose its pink, M was insistent with me about taking big breaths. “Really push this baby out,” she demanded. It was a little unnerving for a mama who had wanted to “breathe the baby down,” but necessary.

The baby’s shoulders were what M would call “a little sticky” – not dystocia – and she helped gently get them through, something that might have happened a lot easier if I’d torn, but I didn’t.

I don’t have a clear memory of the physical sensation of the whole body coming out, but I was pleased to hear myself back on the video make a kind of sexy contented sigh. Yes! M told me to pick up my baby but that she had a short cord so I couldn’t raise her all the way to my chest, just enough to get her head out of the water. (The cord wasn’t anywhere near as short as E’s, but my placenta was high so there wasn’t a ton of slack). Of course, having had one child with a short cord (which necessitated a c-section) and having just been urged to push, I was a little freaked already. And then seeing my baby rather blue and not very active, I didn’t exactly know how to react.

M told me to talk to her and rub her, stimulate her. The heart tones were fine, but her lungs were wet, and she wasn’t crying, so she got a few puffs from the Ambu bag just to help her clear out her lungs. Then she got a few doses of homeopathic Antimonium.

E and the doula had come upstairs at just about the right time, so he saw the whole thing and was quickly saying sweetly and so cheerily, “Hi, baby!” and asking “Where is the cord? I can’t see it. What color is it?” I think we sang to her “This Little Light of Mine” but that might have been after we got out of the tub. There was no serious concern, but the celebrational feel was a little delayed while we waited for her color to improve and for her to wake up. Her head was super cone-shaped, and her eyes were so puffy; she looked a lot different than she does now!

We moved over to the couch and marveled at her super long toes and her long, pointy fingernails. And at her red hair! I was convinced this baby was going to be a raven-haired beauty like her mama, but she’s just about as strawberry as her brother was (is), but with more hair. It’s so soft! But I get ahead of myself. She was not interested in nursing in that first hour, but she did latch within two, I think. However, we still had some business to take care of before we could just settle into our comfy home as a family of four.

The Afterbirth

“Where’s the placenta?” my son asked after a while (and again and again for the next few hours). Good question. “It’s still inside my tummy. We’re hoping it comes out soon.” But it didn’t. I have one friend who hemorrhaged after birth and the midwife had to manually remove the placenta immediately, which M said she would have done if there was any concern. But there wasn’t; I wasn’t bleeding much, my blood pressure and vital signs were all fine; I wasn’t feeling faint or dizzy like another friend who I knew had gone to the hospital to have her placenta removed after her homebirth. Mine was just stubborn.

And it was being held up by several hours worth of pee I was unable to release on my own. Catheter, nice to see you again! (I remember being saddened when the catheter was removed after my c-section because it meant I actually had to get up out of bed. Ouch.) By the time I’d filled half a large bowl with pee and removed one barrier to the placenta’s descent, I just didn’t have any contractions that were strong enough to do me any good. It was still super high up, and no tugging by M was going to do any good.

Besides, she really needed to get back to my neighbor, so she left, and S returned to see if a shot of Pitocin would help. It didn’t. I’d also tried two or three homeopathic remedies – cimicifuga, caullophyllum, and pulsatilla and then a fourth later when I reached my friend (the one who’d had the retained placenta with her first pregnancy) and she looked up the condition in a book I didn’t have and found a remedy for lack of contractions after birth, retained placenta and inability to pass urine: Cantharsis.

One concern was that my cervix had closed enough that it was just going to be too hard to pass the placenta. So it was decided after about four hours that I would need to go to the hospital to have it removed. M called ahead to let them know we were coming and to make sure they knew I wanted this to be an outpatient procedure (that I did not want to be knocked out and have to spend the night). It sounded like I was probably going to need to get an epidural or something after they’d figured out why it wouldn’t come (as in an accreta or some other condition). I wasn’t scared because I knew I wasn’t in danger, but I sure was annoyed that we couldn’t just wrap up this birth experience at home. I tried nursing the baby again and she latched so well, I was really disappointed to have to leave. But at least she didn’t wail when I pulled her off.

As we got me dressed in whatever clothes my friends and doula could find in the mess that was (is) my bedroom, I felt some uncomfortable pressure toward my bottom. Then, when S and I started walking out to her car, I commented on it. She said maybe we should try again. “But it doesn’t feel like a contraction in front. It just feels like I have to poop,” I countered. “That’s what we’re looking for,” she said. So we went back inside. I set down my purse, took off my shorts and put the chux pad down on the bathroom floor. S put on her gloves and with a push from me and a little help from her, out it came!

After the Afterbirth

I was so grateful for S making me go back inside! And so darn relieved that I could get on with my homebirth and now babymoon experience instead of making an expensive and intrusive hospital detour. Now I could finally call my family and just hang out, enjoying the luxury of being in my own space and just getting to know my daughter.

There was just enough time to release LJ and E to go to his 3:00 gymnastics class so that the poor kid would have something regular about his day. My doula stayed until a friend came with her kids and some food, and then my other friend who had been training to be a midwife returned from my neighbor’s house where she’d been on hand to help out since S was going with me to the hospital. What a collective effort. It was nice that the kids were here when E got back from gymnastics and they got to run around outside and play with the hose.

Six hours old on mama's painted belly

It was great to hang out with some of my homebirth mama mentors and feel their support, which had been unfailing despite my having made it pretty hard to want to be my friend through an emotional third trimester (and a detached/disbelieving/not telling first trimester). I felt so grateful to have a community of women to take care of me, including preparing my placenta and making me a smoothie. (I hadn’t ever gotten around to exploring what was required for encapsulation or even what all the benefits of placenta ingestion were, but I trusted them and was grateful for their help!)

Our doula had trouble loading photos on our computer before she left, but I’m thrilled she got the video loaded and can’t wait to get the other images on CD. She also took a bunch of great shots with our SLR camera, which is also having challenges loading images, and we just haven’t had the time to trouble-shoot it all between eating, sleeping, nursing, pediatrician appointment, osteopath appointment for conehead, midwife follow-up appointment and trying to put back together a house that was not exactly ready to be turned upside-down at 6 a.m. Monday morning.

We still have chux pads littered around in places that might surprise visitors and some other clean-up to do, but we’re getting there. The birth pool is back in its container, and our son is back to being four years old, complete with lots of “no”s, “I want it right NOW”s and other challenging behaviors. He wants to kiss his sister near constantly, which is super sweet, but it is also a little much. He was playing so loud with his trains this morning that I suggested I’d need to move her from where she was sleeping in her Moses basket, and his reply was that then he’d move his play to be near her. Thank goodness he’s still in camp this week. I have got to figure out what to do for the next few weeks so that we don’t all lose our minds.

Reflections

It has been an amazing past few days, and we still can’t believe how quickly things changed from what we expected Monday morning. E kept saying, “I didn’t know the baby was going to come today!” and we kept shaking our heads saying, “Neither did we!” I really expected to go late, and I certainly did not expect to be holding a baby less than five hours after sitting down to do yoga with zero signs of labor and a busy day stretching before me.

Shortly before that bridge pose/water breaking moment, I just sat with myself and tried to shake of the grumpiness that had come on the previous evening after I misjudged the size of my belly and sort of ran into the bedroom door frame because E was behind me. I’d worried about hurting the baby and felt guilty for how annoyed I was at E just for taking up space, even though he quickly offered “Sorry!” when he realized I hurt myself.

And there was the working/thinking/busy mom vs. birthing/about-to-be-new mom conflict: I really wanted to visit the food camp and write an awesome article about it because it’s so exactly what I’m passionate about, but I also knew my brain was no longer screwed on in a writerly/researcher way. I would give the piece a shot, I figured, but I worried I just wouldn’t be able to come up with something good enough for a paper to take on such short notice since part of my brain had already checked out. I wanted not to fall behind on sleep, and I was torn because I knew it would be wise to spend more of my limited free time wrapping my head around the birth in what I figured was my last week. So I was ambivalent and not feeling super centered the night before my daughter arrived.

As I sat on my yoga mat, I looked out the open window into the early morning and reminded myself that soon this hour might look very different once there was a newborn around. There is nothing like being alone at that hour of the day or being just with a completely dependent being, when all else has lost its regular heft of priority and the only thing to do is nurse and love. I tried to embrace the beauty and quiet of that just-before awakening time.

And then it all began.

Sigh. Sometimes it’s easier to mother when your child is really in a rough state.

My son has been mildly sick for over a week, just sick enough that he’s been unable to go to school. And I’ve been unable to work. It’s been a delight to see him fully immersed in play by himself, to have three meals a day with him, and to see him grow developmentally — like actually being interested in creating representational art instead of scribbles. And, at the same time, it’s also been incredibly frustrating to not have any time to focus on anything either in my head (writing, volunteer work for Holistic Moms) or in my body (meditating, doing yoga, focusing on the baby in my belly). I have really been impatient for him to hurry up and get well!

The weekend offered some respite, but it was not as restful as the boy needed. Though I do appreciate his dad taking him out to Home Depot to buy garden supplies and then involving the boy while he worked, clearly the activity (and the insane wind!) tired both of them out such that sick one needed another day home on Monday to recoup. I was not pleased and felt sorry for myself.

He declared himself “still sick” and not well enough to go to school, and I decided not to push it. He’s never had Tylenol or any other drug, and I’m not one to just push him through because I don’t think that is going to do him any favors in the long run. But this letting the body heal approach sure takes time! It seemed like he needed a transition day to warm to the idea of getting back out in the world. He’s a very social kid and is always saying he wants to see friends, but I think he got pretty used to being home all day when he could rub his face on his mama’s growing belly at his leisure (well, not really, but it sure was more accessible than when we’re apart!)

After a very low-key morning, we had an afternoon visit from a friend who was dropping off some pregnancy and baby items now that she’s had her son. All day, E was asking, “When is Liz coming over?” He hasn’t even played with her daughters in months, but he really wanted company.

And yet, while we were at the park, he started to melt. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He was hungry but wouldn’t eat the apple I cut up when we got back. I ended up having to kick out my friends because he was just crying like a baby. Reminder: he’s four. I couldn’t believe what I had on my hands.

Fortunately, the dinner was mostly made, so we ate just after 5:00. “I want to go to bed,” he whined, and I complied as soon as I felt his belly was full enough. “I guess Daddy’s going to have to celebrate his birthday by himself,” he sighed, then offering with a little glint of possibility, “Or maybe we can celebrate in the morning.”

Although he was more stable by the time we got upstairs, I had seen him really hit bottom, and out came my fierce unconditional love tools. I wanted only for him to feel better in his body, mind, and spirit and to know that everything was going to be okay by seeing me not lose it (and nourish myself — I was not going up there on an empty stomach, either!)

So I held him like a baby while looking through my homeopathy books to see if Pulsatilla was the best choice. I chose four Bach flower remedies I thought might help: Mimulus, Aspen, Larch, and Gentian. At dinner, I made sure he finished his broth from a gelatin-rich batch of stock I made and added apple juice to water with a little electrolyte powder so he’d be sure to hydrate. Once upstairs, I wiped his face and feet with a wet washcloth with lavender oil and then gave him a foot massage before we put on clean socks.

After reading two stories, I felt compelled to sing to him — to make him some kind of offering–, but he declined the offer of a serenade. So I told him how, when he was in my belly, I sang to him every morning and that after he was born, his dad and I sang to him while he held one of each of our fingers. With the storytelling preamble, he let me sing “You Are My Sunshine,” somehow ignoring how my voice broke and noticing (or saying) only after I was done, “You’re crying!” I smiled and told him it was because I loved him so much.

He climbed into bed and fell asleep while I closed rocked in the chair. I left at 6 p.m.

But then he woke three more times in the next few hours. I took one of these shifts and just laid next to him and let him feel as close to me as he needed to. His dad handled the other two wakings, and when the boy came into our bed after going potty sometime in the night, he slept soundly and woke at 6:15 a.m. talking about how he remembered one time Caillou got sick and had to stay home. Before I knew it, he was jumping on the bed, and two hours later, I was handing him over to his teacher, who seemed very happy to have him back!

It will take a while to crawl out from under all the backlog I have to get to the place I expected to be mid-week last week: shifting my focus to my baby and my body. But I’m confident that some of these steps along the way — the bonding with my son, the benefits I got when I found a craniosacral therapist who would work on both of us, the memory of how powerful it is to nourish and nurture another being who is seemingly helpless– were all important in their own way.

I had a hunch my son was not in the greatest health when, on Wednesday morning, his breath didn’t smell right. Whenever he gets a fever, his breath has a metallic or medicinal smell. I get the impression his body is heating up and detoxifying.

But it’s hard to justify keeping a child home for funky breath when you’ve got a lot of work to do. So off he went for a full day of preschool. When we got home on a gorgeous afternoon, I was ready to walk him down to the library and finally get some exercise. He was whinier than usual (which is saying a lot these days), but we eventually made it out and back home in time for a quick dinner before I headed off to an ICAN meeting to watch Pregnant in America.

I didn’t get home until 11 p.m. and had to find a source for a statistic for this piece on the NIH conference on vaginal birth after cesarean that was to be published by Mothering. I was exciting about the work and about having really gotten my head into this pregnancy at the meeting. My 20-week sonogram was scheduled for the following morning at 8 a.m. It seemed like perfect timing.

Except that it wasn’t. I heard my four-year-old crying like a baby and wondered where the heck my husband was. Turns out he was right next to the boy in bed, as he had been for a few hours since the wakings and squirmings had started not long after he went to sleep. Something was up, and my husband, who had planned to work all evening while I was away at VBAC Central, was exhausted.

I told my son I was going to get him some water, dashed off the email I’d started, and went back up to more tears. I decided we were going to be together all night and that his wimpy IKEA bed was no match for my almost 20-pound-heavier-than-normal body. I suggested we move to the guest room, and he perked up at the idea and obligingly went to the bathroom before we headed downstairs. I didn’t really know what his symptoms were, but I knew he’d be happy to take some “Curious George pellets,” or Calms Forte, and I put some Rescue Remedy on his wrists and forehead.

He slept pretty well after that, until we plucked him out of bed Thursday morning to go to the appointment, which I did not want to reschedule or have my husband miss. E was clearly a little feverish and flushed, but that had faded within an hour or so. He was disappointed to have to cancel our playdate at the farm, but he acted pretty normal the rest of the day with, sadly, no desire to nap, even though I was dozing off on the couch right next to him.

I’m not sure when he crawled into our bed last night or this morning, but, right after my husband got out of bed and into the shower, I felt a little hand poking me and chirping, “It’s morning time!”

I decided then the bug had passed.

Here is a health-focused piece cross-posted from my main blog, Crunchy-Chewy Mama. I had been putting more health-focused pieces here and more snippets from life on the alternative mainstream divide over there, but I now that I am writing for The Washington Times Communities at “Reading Ingredients: Tales of a Health-Conscious Mom,” I’m re-evaluating my blog strategy (which includes looking for someone to help me upgrade them all or combine at least these two blogs.)

Here is my tale of a recent illness and how I fought it off the pharma grid.

***

We’ve got 60 degrees here in Metro DC and I think I’m finally getting over a cold that started two weeks ago. I never get sick and stay sick. This was annoying. Not so bad that I had to make the husband stay home or back out on a major event I was planning, but bad enough that I sounded like the woman from “The Nanny” if she had a sinus infection. Not pretty!

We don’t do drugs in our house, so I did my best to self-medicate. This starts with food — lots of nutrient-dense homemade (from pastured chickens) bone broth and a limit on refined carbs. When I look back, the weekend before I got sick I had hot rice cereal for breakfast one day and French toast another day (GF millet bread, but still) and a bunch of rice crackers. That’s way more packaged food than usual. So I cut out what I could but still allowed myself some antioxidant-rich raw cacao.

When I started to feel an illness on I restarted the flower essences I maybe should have been taking all season long from Perelandra. On Tuesday the 12th, I tried the homeopathic remedy Hepar. Sulph. Calc. and promptly got worse with a sore throat and swollen glands. I think I honestly fell asleep on the floor of my bathroom while my son played with toys in an empty bathtub. A homeopath said it was most likely that this reaction was just pushing the natural course of events forward and that now I just had a cold I might as well let run its course. So I gave up on the homeopathy – none of the indications seemed 100% right on anymore,anyway – and just tried garlic & ginger in hot lemon water in the morning, eating well, getting sleep, staying in bed even if I couldn’t sleep well (instead of getting up to work), and putting some eucalyptus in my shower. I kept meaning to get even just a basic saline nasal spray but didn’t, and we found our humidifier but never got it working.

Well, all that, and a lot of water and a lot of bodywork. My head was killing me with major sinus pressure, so I looked for whatever healing hands had openings. On Wednesday, the day after I felt terrible, I had a chiropractic adjustment and acupuncture. On Saturday morning I had a massage, primarily of craniosacral therapy. On Monday afternoon I had another bodywork session, a combo of craniosacral therapy and lymphatic drainage massage. Each time I handed over my credit card after a session, I did feel better. But it didn’t last to the next day, not as much as I wanted. I still had a lot of nose-blowing and some coughing.

Then, on Wednesday when I’d been sick for a week, my eye looked red in one corner, which I thought was from not sleeping well until the next morning when it was sticky and red all over. This was the day of my event. None of the many homeopathic remedies for conjunctivitis sounded spot-on for my symptoms, but I got so weepy when my friend rang the doorbell while I was trying to have my son nap, that I decided to take pulsatilla. And I found some homeopathic eye drops at CVS, which I think helped, for sure with the redness. The eye was cleared up a day later. (The second eye got it too and also cleared up after a day).

Friday I saw an osteopath who worked a lot on my head in general, my sinuses and even in my mouth and upper palette. I sounded like a different person after that appointment — much less nasal. But the next morning I slept in and still felt like I’d regressed. Maybe shopping for a sofa, meeting friends for coffee and walking a mile in mild winter day were too much. But we did get a new rebounder, which I used twice, hoping that it would help my lymphatic system clear out. And I did fit in a little yoga.

Sunday I had to drag myself out of bed but felt a lot better after starting the morning off with Vitamin C before my lemon/ginger/garlic drink, to which I added turmeric and elderberry. And then I had a full breakfast and set to work on some reorganization of the house, which felt great. I even had a little decaf coffee and some GFCF sugar-free (maple syrup only) chocolate cake my son and I had made as a celebration of my successful event Thursday night (adaptation of this cake recipe but using mashed cherries instead of applesauce and adding cacao and coconut flakes).

Despite this indulgence, I could tell I’d turned the corner Sunday afternoon. It’s now Monday afternoon, and though I still am not ready to go out and do a full run in this gorgeously warm day (or to be too far away from a tissue), I am glad I was able to ride this out and that so far, no one else in the house seems to have any symptoms.

Almost a month ago, I went to the grand re-opening of Holeco Wellness Medi Spa, the first holistic/wellness medispa recognized by Green America as a Green company and listed in their Green Pages. The owner is a wonderful woman who recently spoke at a Holistic Moms meeting. They are in a building that just underwent some lobby renovations, including new glass doors. On my way into the event, where I hoped I might win some fun beauty or energy door prize, I got instead the most ironic of injuries — I walked right into the glass door that I thought was open, cutting my nose bridge with my glasses and giving myself a huge blow that resulted in a mild black eye a few days later.

As someone who has gotten a ton of craniosacral therapy, I knew that this blow was going to be with me for a while. The knowledge that I was setting myself back hurt more than the immediate physical trauma, though that was pretty bad, too. I was so upset that I was not aware enough to prevent this injury. Honestly, a perpendicular piece of glass did sort of look like the door, but I still should have seen that the door was closed before I rammed into it.

So after I bled all over the ground, went up to the open house and got some ice (and got looked at by a nurse), I drove home as soon as I felt it was safe to do so. When I got home, I immediately took Emergency Trauma Solution and then later Arnica. This was a Tuesday, and on Friday I had a previously-scheduled craniosacral appointment. The therapist said there was quite a bit of trauma, and he recommended Traumeel cream and anything to help with lymphatic drainage.

The next Tuesday, a week after the incident, I saw an acupuncturist and chiropractor who, before he did acupuncture, used an activator on my sinuses, which kind of freaked me out. But some stuffiness cleared up right away, and when I saw the craniosacral therapist again on Friday, he said I seemed much better than he would have expected. He gave props to the acupuncturist. Two weeks later, I saw him again, and he said that the intense jarring of energy actually let him work more deeply into my birth strain than he’s been able to before.

So even though I really hadn’t planned to spend that much money on treatment and time without exercising (even after three weeks, I still felt the injury in my nose when I first went jogging), I am trying to believe that there is/was/will be something good to come out of this injury, as the spa owner suggested when she kindly called me the day after the injury to check up on me!

“This is why health care costs are so high,” hissed my endocrinologist when she looked at the results of the labwork my holistic physician had ordered. To her, the additional blood tests were a waste of time and money. But the information – a full, more complete picture of my thyroid levels and antibody levels– helped me to get better. And whose fault is it that the tests cost a lot in the first place?

At the time, I was dealing with autoimmune thyroiditis. I sought help from alternative health care providers in addition to the endocrinologist. She spent a short amount of time with me, mostly hunched over her prescription pad figuring out how to alter the dosage of my medicine. By contrast, the holistic physician spent close to an hour talking to me to explain in great detail – even drawing me graphs – how the chemicals in my body were working together – or not working so great, as the case was. With his help, I came to understand what was going on in my body, which helped me to heal.

So what is a waste of money? Time to talk with a patient? Time spent to investigate lifestyle choices that might make a huge impact?

Without the advice of a nutritionist, I might have never figured out that I had both casein intolerance and gluten sensitivity on its way to celiac disease, both problems undetected by gastroenterologists, none of whom suggested I cut back on processed food, either. And both problems long in the making that could have been part of my developing thyroid disorders — Graves’ Disease (autoimmune hyperthyroidism) and Hashimoto’s Disease (autoimmune hypothyroidism).

Without the help of acupuncture and craniosacral therapy, I don’t think I could have learned how to make the kinds of inner shifts toward a calmer mind that I believe were critical to my disease going in remission and my fertility returning such that I was able to have a healthy pregnancy.

The holistic physician helped me utilize the standard medication I needed but also taught me how to rebuild my whole body health such that my body could help heal itself. He – a trained MD – and another practitioner trained in BioSET allergy elimination and other energy healing modalities both came to the same conclusions about herbs and supplements that would support my thyroid and my adrenals.

To these folks I am grateful. To them – and to other alternative healers – I paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars out of pocket. The endocrinologist’s fees were covered by insurance. All the labwork was covered at the time, but now that my consultant husband is self-employed and self-insured, I have no coverage for anything thyroid-related. None.

So far, I haven’t needed coverage. I am many times healthier now than I was before I figured out how sick I was five years ago. I get discounted tests from a holistic MD, and we (currently, luckily) have the ability to afford healthy, organic food and alternative health therapies (whenever I can get childcare to schedule them, that is).

But why is true healing available only to the privileged? Can we please get away from a medical culture that sees dollar signs in prescriptions for drugs that might not be necessary if we looked further into the whole picture of a person?

Adapted from a post that originally appeared at DC Metro Moms Blog.

I had a fabulous week last week of attending three (partial) days of the NVIC conference and then all day of “Perinatal: A Symposium on Birth and Reproductive Rights.” But now, instead of volunteering at the Holistic Moms Network table at the Green Festival, I’m home with a slight fever. I don’t feel that bad, but I’m taking the advice of the health gurus I saw at NVIC that when the body is responding to too much stimulus, you need to give it a rest. Plus it wouldn’t be very nice if the germ theory is really true and I get other people sick while I’m talking to them about holistic health!

It’s humbling to be side-lined, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my body went on strike after such little sleep (and some sugar). I ate pretty well, packing in all my food and not buying anything other than a decaf, and I’ve been good about immune-boosting supplements and tonics, but it still was a stressful week. Now I’ve got all day to roll a new batch of chicken stock (and catch up on laundry).

I might not have paid as much attention to my own health as I needed to if my son hadn’t been having a really hard time this morning. He is only a little stuffy and doesn’t seem feverish, but he was really weepy, which prompted me to go up and take my own temp. After one dose of pulsatilla, he seems to be doing better — less weepy and less surprisingly changeable in his moods. I need to buy a homeopathic kit so we have everything on site.

For more on the birth symposium, see my other blogs Crunchy-Chewy Mama on a woman being threatened with a court-ordered c-section instead of what would be a second VBAC and Mama’s Mouth on art as activism.

I haven’t been pro-vaccine for a long time, since I got the flu vaccine in my 20s and felt terrible.

Now that we’re facing a potentially bad flu year, there is a lot of talk about vaccines for flu and specifically for H1N1/Swine Flu. I’m hoping that the alternative folks are right that the best way to avoid getting seriously ill is by avoiding refined foods — especially sugar and flour — and generally eating a healthy diet, along with giving our bodies assistance in fighting things naturally by getting chiropractic work, acupuncture or craniosacral therapy.

But we don’t always get the sleep, exercise, or nutrition that we need, so I’ve ordered from Perelandra the 2009-2010 Flu Season Balancing Solution from the Microbial Balancing Program and also FSBS+, which is supposed to address pandemic strains of the flu. These bottles are $10-15 and from a farm local here in Virginia. I know some folks are hoping their homeopaths can make a homeopathic version of the standard vaccine.

I hope that we can do okay, as we did last winter on health and wellness except for the week after the Holistic Moms chapter launch (and the Inauguration, which was an exciting but very long day). The following week, my son came down with an ear infection that I’m pretty sure was his system’s response to his mom’s stress. That lasted over a week but cleared without drugs. We were still nursing at the time, though, and this year, he won’t have that protection.

This season, I hope we can find the inner balance we need and can count on the Perelandra solutions (the above, as well as the Immune and Lymphatic solutions) to stay healthy.

I’ve always intended to learn more about both homeopathy and herbalism, but I don’t get serious about either until an illness prompts me to drag out some books and to poke around online.

When my son woke the other night before 9:30, we could tell something was off. He’d had a small cough and looked a little peaked, and his dad had been fighting off a cold for a few days. E was so out of it and resistant to going back to sleep in his bed/alone, I brought him downstairs, and he snuggled in and fell asleep, staying asleep as we finished a rare night of actually watching a movie (actually, we’d started the movie the night before and were really hoping to finish it this time!). The boy had some twitching and seemed mildly delirious, as though he was having vivid dreams and thinking he was awake.

But still, it wasn’t until after midnight that I felt the heat radiating off of him and started to smell on the acrid tinge to his breath that told me his body was becoming a bug-killing cooking machine.

Even eHow has an article that explains a fever is a body doing good work. We have never tried to artificially lower our son’s fevers with Tylenol or Motrin, even when it once went up to 104.7. I’m sure we’ll have to resort to allopathic medicine at some point, but whenever possible, I hope to let his body’s immune system do its job and help it out only with natural means.

Our doctor said he thought frequent applications of belladonna might help. That I actually had at home, so we started it a few hours later when the boy woke up from drowsing on the couch with his dad. He did seem to perk up a bit, and he ate some. I put him in the Ergo and we all took a short walk in the unseasonably warm, 50-degree afternoon.

The night was a little smoother, but he still had lots of desire to be near me, and I nursed him in bed even though we’d stopped that weeks ago (we also are using diapers during this illness even though we’d had our first very successful diaper-free week).

But still, he was around 102 this morning, and the cough sounded worse. So we asked the doctor to fit us in. E ate a little bit this morning and drank some of his blue Odwalla juice that he’d randomly demanded in the middle of the night, but for the most part, he slept all morning.

The doctor was not worried about the chest sounds and saw nothing in the ears. We discussed symptoms, and he determined that gelsemium might be the new remedy to try.

I used the Ergo again in the grocery store and gave him some pellets once they’d been rung up. The boy was about to check out, too, practically asleep and drooling on my front, all 30 pounds of him.

After we got home and he wanted to be up from resting, he requested coconut juice and then mango coconut yogurt. I put it in front of him after spooning him a few bites and offered that I could feed him if he needed me to. A minute later, he demanded, “Feed me!” a phrase I never thought I’d serious hear from my almost-three-year-old, or from anyone outside of Little Shop of Horrors or a TV sitcom, for that matter.

But he only wanted a few bites and then said he needed to poop on the potty, which I took as a good sign. After that, more rest, more nursing, more rest, more nursing. It’s like I have a baby again. It’s much calmer and quieter around here than I’m used to, and I can appreciate that, but I sure do hope the little guy is back to his old self soon.