Trust

I promised that the next post would be about choosing a midwife and meanwhile had future plans for another post about trust...then I realized they were really the same.
This pregnancy I have had to learn to trust my body, my baby and pick a birth team I can trust. As a first time mom, I trusted my doctor and nurses and hospital. That trust fell a bit misplaced as my birth experience turned out to be more traumatic than enlightening. I felt blessed to have a healthy baby but it began a long string of events that caused an unhealthy mommy; a mommy that wasn't certain if there would be another baby. As I mentioned in my previous post, it took awhile but I finally came to terms with what happened and how to make it better. I knew I wanted a homebirth this time and set out to find a midwife when I found out I was pregnant.
Now, trust began before this point because we were right in the middle of a big move and my parents had just moved out of state. My son had hit the terrible two's and I felt as though the stress alone might damage my chances of having a healthy pregnancy. I didn't actually begin looking for a midwife until I was 10 or 11 weeks along (if you know me, this was NOT my style at all) still waiting for the other shoe to drop, so to speak.
I began with the midwife that was at my monthly birth circle meetings. She is one of the main people that helped me realize what had gone wrong in my previous labor and a friend. We had a great interview and I was planning to stop there. I literally went to bed one night and woke up the next morning with the idea I needed to keep interviewing, like maybe someone I had known for awhile and knew my whole story wasn't what I needed for this birth. My husband had been encouraging me to "be sure" and I thought I was...until I wasn't. I had to trust my instincts were right and I contacted 2 more midwives. As it so happened, the very next midwife I interviewed was calm, reassuring and warm and I exactly needed that at that moment. I hired her. I trusted that my first interviewee would understand my decision to go with someone else, and she did. In birth, everyone seems to know that instinct rules and I find my wishes have been respected all along the way.
Like when I had my initial appointment with my midwife and she went down the long list of tests performed routinely by OB's. She didn't simply draw my blood, she ASKED me if I wanted these things done. When we discussed each test, I realized that a majority of them were related to STD's and the others were things that would have come up during my blood draws during my first pregnancy. I declined. All of them. For now, anyway. This week I will do a gestational diabetes check (no glucose drink!) and an anemia check. Do you know how empowering it was to simply say "No"??? It was awesome. Again, I trusted my midwife to let me know what was important and she trusted me to choose right for me and my baby.
The whole pregnancy I have been quite calm about labor, trusting that my body had the right idea the first go round and that I fouled it up by intervening, trusting that I know what I need to do and that is to respect the birth process and let my body and my baby lead. I also trust that if there is a true emergency or problem, I have set the right birth team in place to get me through it and handle the situation or get me somewhere I can receive the help I need.
I find it sad that in a traditional OB/Hospital birth situation we are expected to let others lead us down the correct path and stop trusting ourselves. We follow their timeline for how quickly birth should occur, we listen to them when they say to get the epidural because we won't be able to handle the pain and we just nod our heads when they say we need an "emergency" c-section but it takes an hour to get an operating room. In recovery we are told our baby is hungry and we should supplement til our milk comes in, even though we though we read that the way to get our milk to come in and increase supply is to keep feeding baby on demand and that they can live on our colostrum the first few days... we stop standing up for ourselves and blindly do as we are told. Only later do we find out that most of what was said or done was unnecessary. Then we can choose to get educated or get defensive. (Oh how many people I have met that just get defensive!)
I'm so glad I decided to get educated and decided for this pregnancy, to trust me, my baby and my body. All 3 will thank me later.