An old friend gave me a huge gift last week. She game to Philly all the way from Oregon to help me with the baby. I was surprised and pleased that she volunteered to come, as we haven't spent much time together over the last 10 years or so.
My friend, Margaret, was a huge part of my daughter's life. When I moved to Oregon when Jade was 6 months old -- homeless and not knowing anyone -- I looked up Margaret. We grew up in the same hometown, and my mom heard from Margaret's mom that she lived in Oregon. Margaret welcomed Jade and me with open arms. When she met Jade, they instantly connected, and she became Jade's "other mom." She was always there to help me out when necessary. And gradually Jade and I became integrated into Margaret's group of friends. Without her, I would have had a lot more trouble making it in a new place as a single mom.
When I moved to Oregon, I was a big advocate for home birth, because I'd had such a great experience delivering Jade with midwives in our small trailer in Northern California. Of course, I was 21 and healthy then. Birth was truly a trippy experience for me. A couple years later, when Margaret and her then-boyfriend became pregnant, she decided to have a home birth as well. She too became a home birth champion. She later worked as a doula (labor coach and postpartum helper), a midwife, a childbirth educator, and a lactation consultant. Basically, Margaret became a baby guru.
Margaret and her husband (they got married after the first one) had two more kids. The second two also were born at home, in water in birthing tubs. In her late 30s, Margaret delivered a 10 lb baby in a tub, basically by herself. She is a true believer in empowering women to take charge of the childbirth experience, rather than meekly following the orders of risk-adverse doctors and hospital nurses.
We've kept in touch over the years (mostly through our parents), but I haven't spent time with Margaret for a while.I spoke to her when I was pregnant -- this time managed by "high-risk" doctors in one of the country's premier teaching hospitals. The docs were making it clear I was looking at an interventionist birth -- induction or C-section. It would be a far cry from my natural home birth in the cow pasture with my cats and dog as labor coaches.
And, sure enough, the docs did intervene, inducing me into labor at 38 1/2 weeks. The anesthesiologist eagerly pushed the epidural. Before I knew it, I was pumped full of drugs, attached to the hospital bed by tubes and wires, with a team monitoring every peak and valley of the baby's heartbeat, my blood pressure, blood sugar, anything measurable.
But I did manage to push Jericho out myself, avoiding a C-section. And I insisted on breastfeeding him when he went to NICU for a day, due to a low blood sugar. Small victories against the American health care system, which would rather treat everyone as a statistic, usually the product of a risk-benefit analysis equation.
I spoke to Margaret about all this. And I was happy when she volunteered to leave her family for a few days to come help me with Jericho. It was good to have a visit from a verifiable Oregon earth mama. She taught me the double-swaddle, which is helping Jericho sleep in his bed. And when Jericho was up one night because his nose was stopped up, she told me to drop some breast milk in his nostrils. It miraculously unclogged his nose, acting like a saline solution but with those natural antibodies. Mostly, she calmed my jittery everything-old-is-new-again mom nerves.
What goes around comes around. It's something to be thankful for.
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