A lot of this stuff has been coming out in bits and pieces over the past several weeks, and I've been processing it, but I wanted to share with you all some of my conversation with my 79 yr old grandmother about our homebirthy plans.
Grandma is a country girl who has a lot of faith in nature in general, but she also had her babies during the era of twilight sleep. My mother is so anti-homebirth we're not even telling her to avoid the fuss, so I assumed my grandma would have a problem with it.
We ended up talking about little things--just to see how she would react. The first thing I mentioned was that if it's a boy we're not going to circ. I was shocked when she and my aunt both imediately congratulated me for doing the best thing and for being ready to stand up to my parents (my parents are both Jewish, my grandma is not--long story).
When we told her about planning homebirth she asked all kinds of intelligent questions--not the kind of panic driven questions a lot of more mainstream types ask *at all*. She asked aobut natural pain relief, and what happens if our midwife is at another birth, and sensible questions like that.
Then, on Thanksgiving, we were talking about nursing, and she was telling me and DH about the challenged of attempting to nurse in the late 40's and early 50's. Her doctor told her she couldn't nurse at all until her milk came in and then she had to bind her breasts. Of course she was always plagued by low supply, but she tried so hard. The doctors told her it was better to not nurse, but she said "I didn't want to fight with them, so I told them we were too poor to afford anything but nursing."
I've been so pleasantly surprised since we started talking about all this stuff. I'd always assumed that like in so many families all the mothering instinct in mine had been destroyed by years of mainstream medicalization, but not so after all. Now I'm wishing I could invite my grandma to the birth, but she's so frail and old and lives two hours away, so it's probably not a good idea to have her 'on call' so to speak. It is so nice to know that I do after all have a woman in my family I can talk to.
Grandma is a country girl who has a lot of faith in nature in general, but she also had her babies during the era of twilight sleep. My mother is so anti-homebirth we're not even telling her to avoid the fuss, so I assumed my grandma would have a problem with it.
We ended up talking about little things--just to see how she would react. The first thing I mentioned was that if it's a boy we're not going to circ. I was shocked when she and my aunt both imediately congratulated me for doing the best thing and for being ready to stand up to my parents (my parents are both Jewish, my grandma is not--long story).
When we told her about planning homebirth she asked all kinds of intelligent questions--not the kind of panic driven questions a lot of more mainstream types ask *at all*. She asked aobut natural pain relief, and what happens if our midwife is at another birth, and sensible questions like that.
Then, on Thanksgiving, we were talking about nursing, and she was telling me and DH about the challenged of attempting to nurse in the late 40's and early 50's. Her doctor told her she couldn't nurse at all until her milk came in and then she had to bind her breasts. Of course she was always plagued by low supply, but she tried so hard. The doctors told her it was better to not nurse, but she said "I didn't want to fight with them, so I told them we were too poor to afford anything but nursing."
I've been so pleasantly surprised since we started talking about all this stuff. I'd always assumed that like in so many families all the mothering instinct in mine had been destroyed by years of mainstream medicalization, but not so after all. Now I'm wishing I could invite my grandma to the birth, but she's so frail and old and lives two hours away, so it's probably not a good idea to have her 'on call' so to speak. It is so nice to know that I do after all have a woman in my family I can talk to.
