Mia | Two vaginal births, birth centre, single mum to blended family, Canberra

“I’m in Canberra currently, I’m from Melbourne but I’ve lived here for the last eight years now, and I live with my partner Jared, my stepdaughter Olivia, my daughter Pippa and my son Darcy. I was twenty three when I fell pregnant with Pippa, which reflecting now, I mean I’m twenty eight now, it felt like I was a baby when I had her. It was not planned. I’d already had a termination when I was eighteen and after that I said if I ever fall pregnant again, I can’t do that again, so we always knew that if we fell pregnant we’d go ahead with the pregnancy. I’m pretty type A, so as soon as I found out I was pregnant I started reading all the books and researching as much as I could straight away.”

“I got into the continuity of care programme here in Canberra and I had one midwife for the first ten weeks or so and then I got shifted to another midwife, Mika, and she was amazing, she was my guide through the whole back end of the pregnancy. In the birth centre you can only be in that programme if you want a low intervention birth, you’re not allowed any interventions, you can’t have an epidural. For some reason my first birth I was like, I want to do it completely without an epidural, I want to feel everything. My mum had me in the Netherlands and they don’t believe in drugs over there, so I think I’d gone into it thinking, my mum can do it, I can do it.”

“I went into this with the idea that I’d go at thirty eight weeks and I ended up waiting five weeks longer than that. At forty weeks I had a stretch and sweep that didn’t do much, and then another at 40+5. My mum was visiting from Melbourne and she said let’s just get this baby out, come on, let’s go for a hike up the mountain. I was so exhausted afterwards that I went for a nap, and I felt like a pinprick burst, and I stood up and it was like the typical movie scene, gushing of waters all over the floor. I was mortified, I did not expect it to happen like that at all.”

“My contractions started about forty five minutes after my waters broke and it ramped up so quickly, she was born by midnight. I went to hospital about five o’clock and they sent me home because I wasn’t progressed enough, and as soon as I got home my contractions were two to three minutes apart and I was screaming in the bathtub. I loved the gas during my first birth, I was so high, I loved it, it was great. I remember getting to transition and demanding an epidural and my midwife just turned the gas up a little bit because she knew I wanted to avoid it as much as possible.”

“I pushed for over an hour with my first, and I do remember the ring of fire. You can’t actually use the gas when you’re pushing because it stops your contractions getting to full strength, so I wasn’t allowed to use it anymore, you had to feel it all. Once they’d got her head and her shoulder out I got to pull her out myself and put her up on my chest, which was the most magical moment. I did have a first degree tear which required stitches, a labial graze, but I didn’t get my stitches until three hours after the birth. In the meantime I got my golden hour, we did the breastfeeding crawl, it was a really beautiful experience honestly.”

“The first week breastfeeding was so painful, she took chunks off my nipple, it was bleeding and cracked, but I saw a lactation consultant on day six who did laser on my nipple and after that I had no issues, it was incredible. My ex went back to work after one day so I did pretty much the whole postpartum by myself. We ended up separating when my daughter was nine months old, and honestly I’m kind of surprised we made it to that point. My bonding with her was so incredible that I don’t even think about the separation part of it that much.”

“I met my now partner when she was ten months old, funnily enough at Pilates. There was this guy in the class all in black and glasses and we kept making eyes at each other, and we just clicked. He had a daughter, I had a daughter, both relationships had ended fairly quickly after both kids were born. Within twelve months we were living together and beginning the whole blended family life. That conversation about wanting more children happened within the first couple of dates, I made it really clear that I wasn’t done having kids.”

“For my second pregnancy I knew I wanted to go through the birth centre again, and I actually got the same team, Gabby remembered me from a home visit with my daughter. A girlfriend told me about the two home births she’d had and planted the seed in my brain that it might be something I’d like to do. It was a little bit harder to get my partner on board, he didn’t have the greatest first experience with the hospital, but we attended an info night on home birthing and spoke to other people who had done it, and I got him on board. From fifteen weeks right up until I gave birth we were planning for a home birth.”

“At my twenty eight week gestational diabetes test the clinic did a finger prick before the blood draw and my fasting glucose was 5.3. I texted my best friend who has type one diabetes and then went down a Google rabbit hole convinced I had gestational diabetes. I left the clinic in a state, crying, and spent the whole day planning to change my diet. Then that afternoon a notification came through with my actual results and they were completely normal, I hadn’t even finished the test properly, so I had to repeat it the following week and it came back fine.”

“At thirty seven weeks I had four hours of prodromal labour, over sixty contractions I was counting on an app, and it just stopped. For about three weeks after that I was having contractions every night that felt quite different to Braxton Hicks, I kept thinking it’s going to happen, and it kept fizzling out. At 40+1 I had a stretch and sweep and was four centimetres dilated, stretchable to six, and my midwife said we won’t see you next week because you’ll have had the baby. By 40+5 nothing had happened and at that appointment we realised he was posterior, his spine was on my spine, so I went home to do spinning babies exercises.”

“I’d also flagged that I was noticing slightly reduced movements. At my 40+5 appointment my midwife looked at me and said, you’re done, aren’t you, and I said yeah, I’m done, so we tentatively booked an induction for 41 weeks. I was completely done, my body was so big and so uncomfortable, I had no energy to be with my daughter or do anything. The next day, at 40+6, she called to check on his movements and I wasn’t fabricating, I was probably not feeling him as much, so she told me to bring my hospital bags in.”

“Within about twenty minutes an obstetrician came in and said, we’re not sending you home, we’re going to induce you. It was such a different experience from my first, so clinical, they said we’ll break your waters and you’ll meet your baby within the hour. One of the main issues was that my heart rate was incredibly high the whole labour, sitting between 130 and 150 beats per minute, so they couldn’t distinguish mine from his on the monitor. I went through two bags of IV fluids just trying to bring it down, and I wasn’t allowed in the pool because of it, so in the end they put a scalp clip on him so they could track him properly.”

“I had the gas for an hour and then asked to be checked because I was feeling a lot of pressure, and I was still seven centimetres, exactly where I’d been an hour before. That was a massive kick to my motivation, and that’s when I demanded an epidural, which was not in the plan at all. Everyone in the room was like, are you sure you really want one, and I was so adamant. My partner told me afterwards that normally he’s the one advocating for me in labour and he said, I didn’t need to do any of that, you knew exactly what you wanted, I just advocated for myself.”

“It must have been the relief of the anaesthetist coming into the room that relaxed my body enough, because within a few minutes of the epidural starting to work I was fully dilated and it was time to push. He came out facing my thigh, posterior, and it took an hour and twenty minutes to get him out, his heart rate was dropping after every contraction so there were a lot more doctors in the room, watching closely. I asked my midwife afterwards what would have happened if I couldn’t get him out and she said they would have cut me and probably used suction too. Once his head was out I watched with a mirror, and eventually got him onto my chest, he didn’t move from there for over an hour, we got the golden hour and the breast crawl again, and this time I had no tears at all despite him being four kilos.”

“The afterbirth cramps this time were terrible, I wasn’t prepared for how bad they were, they lasted five or six days. We kept our bubble really small this time, minimal visitors, because we went into it knowing it would be our last baby, so it was really important to us to soak up every single moment of that newborn stage. Looking back, both of my births were completely different but both positive in their own way, and that’s the thing I’d want other women to hear, that surrendering the plan doesn’t mean losing a good birth.”