Musing no. 9 Hooray for Home Birth!!!

Before I share this story, I want to say this clearly and from the heart:

Whatever birth you choose …home, hospital, birthing center, medicated, unmedicated ~ I wish you blessings for a swift, supported, and healthy birth. In the end, what matters most is a healthy baby and a healthy mother. The process itself is deeply personal, and every woman deserves to choose what feels safest and most aligned for her.

What follows is simply my story ~shared not as judgment or doctrine, but as inspiration. Every woman’s comfort, intuition, and circumstances are different, and all are worthy of respect.

As April and May arrive, I find myself reflecting on birth in a very personal way.

My youngest turns 20 in April, and my eldest will be 26 in May. Watching them move through the world as the women they’ve become fills me with awe. It also brings me back to the moment each of them arrived and to everything birth taught me about trust, power, and belief.

When I was 19, long before I became a mother myself, a friend & a radical,hippie mama nurse RN/midwife .. invited me to my very first homebirth to take pics,and welcome her baby…

I had never seen a baby born.

Let alone at home.

Watching that birth changed my life.

Years later, another dear friend invited me to her homebirth … this time to be there as spiritual support. She was tiny - a little fairy of a woman, maybe 100 pounds at nine months pregnant ~and she literally chanted, sang and  ommmmed her baby out. No fear. No force. Just breath, sound, surrender.

Witnessing babies being born became one of the greatest gifts of my life.

So much so that I went on to complete a weekend-long doula training. But after only two home births under my belt,and my own 2 homebirths, I knew I needed more experience. I wanted to learn by witnessing, by being present, by serving.

So I put an ad up on Facebook that read:

Newly trained doula & home birth Mama 💗 looking for a seasoned doula to train me.

Only one person responded.

She focused primarily on hospital births ~very much outside my comfort zone. But I’ve always learned the most from people who don’t think like me, and I saw this as an opportunity to grow and to better support women wherever they chose to give birth.

So I did it.

I volunteered. I didn’t charge. I showed up to hold space, to ground, and to support women through one of the most intimate journeys of their lives. I would walk in as a stranger… and leave having shared something sacred.

My own path to homebirth was deeply personal.

Growing up, my dad was a western physician..a pediatric hematologist ,and I spent a lot of time with him while he did hospital rounds. To me, hospitals were places of sickness and death ~ not where new life wanted to arrive. So when it came time for me to give birth, a hospital simply didn’t resonate with me.

I had 100% belief in myself that home was my place.

Birthing centers weren’t nearly as common then as they are now, and where I was living ~ in Marin county up in Northern California & homebirth wasn’t a trend. It was a choice rooted in trust, intuition, and sovereignty.

I had both of my girls at home, with the same extraordinary midwives.

With my first, we had a water tub ready  but as an earth mama carrying an earth-sign baby, I ended up delivering squatting by candlelight, surrounded by redwoods. I had no fear. No doubt. I knew my body was made to make and birth a baby.

At 5’4”, I gave birth to an 8.5-pound, 21-inch-long baby — and I did it.

I even invited my dad to be there a doctor who had never seen a baby born at home  so he could witness what a non-violent, sovereign birth could look like.

My second arrived quickly .. a little firey aires born in front of a roaring fire in just four hours. Ashley said the fire was reflecting in her eyes as she was coming out in our living room… It was incredible to feel how the body remembers… how it knows exactly what to do…and my labor was only 4.5 hours!

We are miracles!!!!!!

We literally build a baby’s body a brain, a heart, eyes, lungs without consciously directing the process. Life knows how to life. Birth knows how to birth.

If you feel called to explore this wisdom more deeply, a few books that shaped me:

 

• Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin
  
• Birth Without Violence by Frédérick Leboyer
  
• Birthing From Within by Pamela England
  

 

These are simply references that inspired me.

This season, I’m honoring birth in all its forms ~physical birth, creative birth, personal rebirth and the remembering of our innate power.

Hooray for home birth.

Hooray for trusting the body.

Hooray for women honoring themselves.

With love and reverence,

Dara 💗🌹

 

P.S. My daughters are now 25 and 19, and the wisdom and empowerment within these books still stands the test of time. There are so many beautiful resources available today — I share these only as part of my own journey.

Whatever birth you choose, I wish you blessings for a swift, supported, and healthy birth. In the end, what matters most is welcoming a healthy baby always.

P.S.S. Somewhere along the way, I also took a hospice training. It felt like the natural counterpart to everything I’d already witnessed. Birth and death are mirrors …thresholds we don’t cross alone. I’ve learned how to hold space at the beginning of life and at the end of it. How to help you be born… or help you die.

I guess I’m really letting you all get to know me now — here we go. 

These are my two daughters, my greatest creations,my most sacred designs✨