Ask me about home birth, if you dare.

I'm becoming a zealot.
An all-natural-home-birth-breast-feeding-champion hippy dad to be. It turns out that the concept of home birth kinda freaks people out. But the more I learn about it, the more I love the idea - and I'm not afraid to tell you. Just ask my hairdresser.

Ever since Nicole convinced me home birth was the way to go, my feelings on the topic have become stronger and stronger. I admit it sounded a little nutty to me at first, but I didn't know anything about birth then. Like most people, what I saw on TV and in the movies led me to believe that giving birth required being in a hospital where doctors and nurses would buzz around looking at monitors - with lots beeping gizmos and flashing lights - and that there would be some life threatening complication that would require incubators and blood transfusions and we’d end up telling our story on some TLC show. Not that I ever watch that shit.

Well since then, our friends Abbie and Anthony just had their second home birth, Nicole read about 8,000 books on the subject, and we started taking Bradley Method birthing classes. So now I know that natural birth totally rocks. The problem is that everybody wants to know "what hospital are you using?" I learned the hard way that my answer to this question can lead to a sometimes long and frequently uncomfortable discussion - which basically starts with the other person asking me if I'm fucking crazy. It's like trying to sell tofu to taco bell eaters - only worse because the taco bell eaters are convinced that your wife is going to die a horrible death and that we're going to kill a baby in the process. One person I told about it ended the conversation early with a comment like "whatever man, it's your baby's funeral." (Ok, not really but that's what I inferred.) Once friend said natural child birth was "just stupid." And this was someone that I like and respect. It was really disappointing to hear that, but I couldn't help wanting to say You're the one that's stupid!!!" Which sounds pretty juvenile, but it's true. Not that hospitals and epidurals and episiotomies don't all have their place, but why do all that shit if you don't need to? Why assume that every test, probe, monitor, and injection is ok because a doctor said so? After all, it wasn't that long ago that doctors were getting paid by the tobacco companies to endorse certain brands of cigarettes. Is this starting to sound like a lecture? That's probably how my hairdresser felt the other day. He and his wife have been trying to get pregnant for three years. They're probably the perfect candidates for a hospital birth when the time comes, but that didn't stop me from going on and on about the cascade of interventions and the wonders of breast milk. By the end, he was like "ok man, that's cool, I'll check it out, I promise. Now, can I get back to work please?"

So, I guess I have to be careful who I tell what, not to go overboard when I talk about it, and not to get too upset when some people think we're nuts. The other day a friend of mine from work asked: "Did I hear right - that your planning to give birth at home?" He had that "you can't be serious" look on his face that's become familiar to me. Hoping to keep it simple, I just said "yep - that's right." He sort of shook his head and asked why. I had already given one lecture that day and it was getting late, so I just said "because we're hippies man, we're just total freakin hippies."