When our first child was born a few years ago — and what a wonderful son he is — we employed a midwife for our care and the delivery. This was a remarkably fortuitous decision as hospitals have always made me uneasy. In contrast to the sterile hallways and the smell of bleach (something that has always put me off) we were able to spend the labor and the birth in a home with a nice bedroom, plenty of room to move, and zero pressure to do anything we didn’t want to do. I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. We are planning to do it again. We’ve been meeting with a midwife for a number of weeks now and it has once again reaffirmed our decision to work with these wonderful women to bring our children safely into our arms.
Like our first midwives, we meet with our new midwife at her own location, a beautiful building behind her home. Our young son is very welcome to come along to our meetings and has a joyous time playing with the toy babies all around in many shapes and sizes. We take a narrow and winding staircase to an upstairs portion of the building which he very much likes. When we’re leaving he always makes sure to run very fast to the staircase to climb a number of steps unaided until we pull him down again for the sake of safety. I’m not entirely sure if he understands what is happening but we’re trying to communicate that there is a new, real baby coming to see him soon and that he’ll be a big brother. Let’s be honest: this is a weird concept to grasp. A tiny human growing the stomach of your mother? Despite the language gap, this is a tough pill to swallow. Normal activities for our son don’t involve the idea of babies emerging from mothers. He’s far more likely to understand a crayon emerging from a crayon box, but not even that approaches the wonder of a real live baby. Perhaps the time spent at the midwife’s is preparing him. Time will, as always, tell.