Speaker 0
Welcome to the Free Birth Podcast, a supportive space for people who are learning, exploring, and celebrating their autonomous choices in childbirth. Together, we'll unpack truths, share personal stories, and claim our ability to birth freely and intuitively. Here's your host, Emily Saldea.
Speaker 1
Today on the show, we have Jenny Hatch from Utah, who you may say has experienced it all. From having having a full on mental breakdown after her first birth to a c section due to breach presentation with her second, she went on to fire her doctor in the middle of her labor in her v back, then had a postpartum hemorrhage with her first home birth, and finally with her fifth child gets to experience an uncomplicated ecstatic free birth. Jenny's journey is quite the wild tale offering tons of insight and wisdom into the journey of a mother.
Speaker 2
Before I begin talking about my childbirths, I would like to talk about, cautioning moms about layering, births based on what was best for her. I'm concerned that when we say, Oh, identify our children by their births, this is my C section child, that that child will perhaps feel like they're less than the child who was born at home into daddy's hands. And so I would like to start before I share my stories with just saying I know large families that have had all kinds of medications. The moms don't breastfeed. The babies are not fed whole foods. They're put in daycare almost, you know, a couple of days after they're born, and these children turn out fine. So I would like to start the podcast with that notion that when we are are searching for a way to make things better for us personally, that we not dump on other women and their choices or even the things that we did with our earlier children that perhaps may make them feel like they're less than their younger sibling who had a different entry into the world. So, I'll I'll preface my verse with that. I I believe all women who take on the task of motherhood are doing an amazing thing no matter how the baby is born. And so, with that being said, when I met my husband in nineteen eighty eight, we decided to just jump into family life. And, three weeks after we met, we were engaged, three months later we were married, and I got pregnant on my honeymoon. So we started family life just right away. And consciously so, it was very exciting to me, the thought of being a mother. And so, I did traditional prenatal care with an obstetrician. I would not even have considered to do anything else. It was in Detroit at the time. I thought it was kind of a cool idea to give birth to my oldest daughter in the same Detroit hospital where I had been born, So that was the only thinking I did about location. And, I know, come to find out, it's the, the high risk regional hospital in Detroit for all the three states, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. So babies were being flown in all the time, even back then, for their NICUs. And, fifty percent c section rate in nineteen eighty eight. So for me to achieve a natural birth in that setting was actually a miracle. But I did it. I had to claw my way to it. They, it was funny, some nurses came in while I was in labor and I was doing just typical labor things when you have a natural birth. I was, I would shake and then I would, I was getting too hot, and then I'm too cold, and I need a drink. And my body was just kinda taken over during transition. And one of the nurses remarked, Oh, my gosh. This is a textbook labor. And it was like she hadn't seen it before because they did so many surgical births or inductions. So that was funny to me. But I did end up having a natural birth, an eight pound beautiful daughter, and I was able to breastfeed her for three months. And after she was born, we moved to Ohio. And while we lived in Ohio, I experienced a nervous breakdown. And so this delayed my next child for a couple of years because I was I was so sick and so medicated. They put me on all sorts of psychiatric meds. One of them lithium, you you just can't take while you're pregnant. Yeah. And and I had doctors, psychiatrists tell me I had contact with about eleven doctors, different doctors during my hospitalizations. And the two states I was in, I was in Michigan and then Ohio. So I had contact with a lot of different people, and they all pretty much told me I was done having babies, that it would not be a good idea for me to have any more children, and that I would have to be on lithium for the rest of my life. And and it was kind of a death sentence. Wow. So, during that time, I had a really unique spiritual experience. And it's this experience that gave me the courage to move forward. And if you're comfortable with me sharing a little bit of my spiritual journey, it has definitely been a walk with God for me to come to. Of course. Yeah, absolutely. There was one day when I was nursing my daughter, and this is before I had the full breakdown, but I was on the cusp of it. I was getting manic and a little bit crazy. And I was reading my Bible, and I came to Matthew chapter twenty four. And this is the chapter where Jesus's apostles ask him the question. They say, we know that you've already come this first time during during the meridian of time, and we know you're gonna come again in the last days. We want to know what the conditions of the earth are going to be when you come the second time. And so Matthew twenty four is just an overview of Jesus teaching his disciples all of the conditions of the world. And in verse nineteen, he just sums up motherhood with these words. He says, And woe unto those who are with child and do give suck in those days. Women who are pregnant and breastfeeding, woe unto them. And as I read that verse, I felt like Heavenly Father was just sledge hammered to my head, pounding me going, do you realize that this is your generation, that is experiencing this woah? And it was like, woah, yeah, I guess, yeah, I guess I can see that. You know, I'd just gone through an interesting experience giving birth where I just literally had to claw my way to an undrugged birth. Something felt very off with it. I felt at one point when I had a vaginal exam like I was being being raped. And, and those sensations kinda coursing through my body of, of violation and something's wrong. This is not how it should be. Troubled me because I, I wanted to be a mother. I had grown up in a family with eight children. My mother was, a committed stay at home mother who breastfed all of us during the sixties and seventies when not a lot of moms were breastfeeding. And she was she was so good about teaching me the positive sides to being a mother that it was all I wanted to do. And yet I felt like, wow, something is really weird in this situation. So that was just my gut instinct that something was off. But then I read that chapter and I realized, no, this is my generation. And so I prayed and I'm like, well, what what's woah? What's he talking about? And I felt like it was two separate issues. I felt like the first was that our generation of women had become so desensitized to what was normal and natural. We, we had literally no knowledge of what our foremothers experienced with their births that that that caused a lot of unnecessary distress for us and for our children. And the second woah was that because world conditions were gonna be topsy-turvy and a little bit chaotic and crazy, that it would just be really smart for parents to learn self reliance skills so that should they be in some situation where there's a war or there's some sort of a natural disaster or just something happening that made it so they couldn't get to a hospital or a midwife couldn't get to them, that they would feel confident that they could just go ahead and birth the baby on their own. And so this is the question that throughout all of my journey, people have never really bothered to ask me. They know that I've gone down this path, they've rejected, my choices, I've experienced a lot of condemnation, bad mother, bad mother, how could you even dream of doing something like this, putting yourself and your child at risk, but they never bothered to ask why. Mhmm. And the reason why I personally have gone down this path is because in that moment of clarity around reading my Bible, I felt the Lord give me a charge to learn self reliance around my mothering. Just learn how to do it without any help. And it's so funny to me now, but back then my first response to that charge was, I don't have time to go to medical school.
Speaker 1
Right.
Speaker 2
I don't have the grades to, to go learn how to become an obstetrician and pay for all these things that doctors know. I have this baby to take care of. How can you expect me to learn all these things that the, the doctors and the nurses know? What does that mean? What does that look like? And again, it's so funny to me now that that was my first reaction to this charge. And it's so funny because everything I've learned about autonomous mothering, I have learned from other women, their books, and their stories. And so, the things that the doctors know I don't know. I probably will never take the time to learn what they know. And I respect a lot of their knowledge. There's no question that babies and mothers are protected and saved during certain birth situations. We all know that. We're not dumping on the medical model for the times when they step up and they honestly save and protect.
Speaker 1
Yeah. They're great they're great for trauma. They're great for emergency situations.
Speaker 2
But in this charge to learn self reliance, I felt called to learn how to live my day to day life in the twentieth century and then the twenty first century autonomously away from doctors, midwives, dentists, and get as, as self reliant as I could. And so I started by becoming a childbirth educator. I, I learned the Bradley method with my husband. We've certified as, as Bradley teachers. And we were certified for about eight years. And during those years, we had two more children. And I very quickly developed a desire to learn how to have an unassisted birth. I during my second pregnancy, I I did a ton of research. I read, Emergency Childbirth by Gregory White because that was something I had to read as a as an educator, and I set the goal to have an unassisted birth with my second daughter. But I did do traditional prenatal care with a regular family doctor. She was a woman out here in Boulder, Colorado, who I really connected with. I should say that I was on the psychiatric meds for about fourteen months when I called depression after delivery, and they hooked me up with a female psychiatrist who was very open to me coming off of my medications. And during the the three years after my oldest daughter, Michelle, was born, she helped me wean slowly, very slowly, off of all of my meds. And I got to where I was just taking one Prozac pill a day, and then I came off it. And, I have often said that coming off Prozac was the hardest thing I've ever done because it's very difficult to wean off that drip. But, I was off my meds for about two years when we conceived Allison. And, I had a healthy pregnancy, although I was nervous that because I had been on so many medications that she would, you know, be deformed or have physical problems. But, during her pregnancy, I received wonderful, competent care from a family doctor who, frankly, she and I were much more concerned about my mental health than we were about the birth. We spent a lot of time talking about things that I could do to prevent, the mania and the psychosis that hit after my first birth. She was very, supportive of my desire to breastfeed and to not go back on psychiatric meds. And so I'm very grateful for her and her approach. I did not tell her or my husband that I was planning to stay home during labor for as long as possible and and just give birth in my bathtub. But that was definitely the intent of my heart during that pregnancy. When I went into labor with Allison, I had, I had hit the forty two week mark and was definitely getting into the territory where they liked to induce when my labor finally kicked in. And I did labor at home for twenty hours, but my doctor had been suspecting that Allison was breech. And when I did a vaginal exam during that early labor, I could tell it was not ahead. I could tell it was a little soft butt. And so I just knew she was breached. The doctor was right. She had wanted to do an ultrasound and I'd, I'd said, No, I really don't want an ultrasound. And so, I got scared. I was nervous about doing an unassisted breach. I knew enough from my childbirth training that it was probably not a good idea for me to do that on my own. Although, I do know unassisted birthers who have done the breaches. So I'm not saying you can't do it. I just didn't feel like I could do it. And so, after about twenty hours of labor, we decided to go to the hospital. And as soon as we arrived, the nurse who checked me in, she said, you know, I think she's breech. And so we did an ultrasound. It was confirmed. And they gave me the offer to let me have a medication that would stop my labor, another medication to relax my uterus. They wanted to attempt to do a manual version and then give me another drug to start my labor and then have the baby.
Speaker 1
Do you remember how, how dilated you were?
Speaker 2
I was only dilated to a tube. Wow. And so I was demoralized by that. I did not want my baby to experience all those meds. Yeah. I felt like she would experience less medication if I just had an epidural and quickly went and had the surgery. And then I didn't want to, go through all of that and then still have a surgery. So, I made the decision to go ahead and have the C section. And, you know, interestingly enough, I, I was able to heal from the the surgery pretty well. I didn't experience a lot of the trauma that some women have, and I honestly believe because it was my choice. And I went to a La Lechu League meeting when she was about three weeks old, and I picked up Nancy Cohen's book Silent Knife and took it home, and read it very slowly over the next few weeks. And it helped me to identify some things that I was feeling that I wasn't really aware of. It was kind of like my own little support therapy group. But again, the thing that was uppermost in my mind during that postpartum was not melting down into mental illness. And so it was almost like the surgery my birth was secondary Totally. Yeah. My mental state. And so I recovered. I had these two beautiful daughters and, I don't really have any regrets about my choices around that C section. But I was determined with my next birth to have a VBAC, of course. And fortunately that same practice, that I was going to for my prenatal care, they had a doctor on that team who was kind of acknowledged as the VBAC expert in Boulder County. And he was so supportive of my choices that I knew that if I ended up having a hospital birth with him, it would go really well. And so, I once again chose that same practice to do my prenatal care with Jeff and I was breastfeeding Allison and I did not know anyone else who had breastfed through a pregnancy, tandem nursed, even my La Lechele group was a, which was a very crunchy group of women. There was nobody to mentor me through that. So how I solved the issues of, you know, what does this look like in terms of just my diet and what I do? I just decided to listen to my body and I just pigged out. I ate so much food. I figured, you know, if if the the key to this whole thing to having a big healthy baby was me just getting enough calories and protein in there and letting Allison nurse when she wanted, then I was just gonna run with that. And so I did. And, and Jeff ended up being an eight pound boy. So the breastfeeding did not hurt him at all. And, I ended up going into labor at about the thirty seven week mark. And, my doctor thought that I was forty one weeks when, when labor kicked in. She had done an ultrasound, like, the eighth month, and, we were both pretty convinced that I was forty one weeks. But because I had been breastfeeding so intently, my periods had been really wacky. And, and coming to find out after the birth that he actually was born at thirty seven weeks. So, so that labor, again, I wanted to stay home. I wanted to have this home birth. And, she had given me a deadline at Monday morning, ten o'clock. We're gonna induce you if you don't go into natural labor. So I called a local midwife and asked her, what can I do to get this labor going? I've got to have this baby by Monday. And she said, well, you just need to have sex three times within twelve hours and that'll kick it in. And it did. But I ended up having a three day, labor where the contractions were coming. Every, every five minutes, they were strong enough that I could not sleep, but nothing it was like I was spinning my wheels. Nothing happened. And during those three days I was at home. I was determined to have him at home in my bed, in my bathroom, in my own space.
Speaker 1
Did your husband know that yet?
Speaker 2
Yeah. We had talked about it, and he was somewhat open to it. But he from from first baby to fifth, my husband has been on the fence with unassisted childbirth. He really has not been able to get, even even today, he doesn't really like promoting it for other men, you know, he doesn't feel comfortable being a cheerleader or standing on his soapbox and saying everybody should do this. That's not his posture at all. He, he he did it to support me and what I wanted. And what he eventually came to is look it's your body, you are the one who has to do this, if I was giving birth it might be different, but I support what you want. And so really, all he wanted during Jeff's birth was that, you know, it just go well for me. He didn't he just didn't want us to experience any trauma.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
And so I appreciate that so much from him. And and of course, during those three days, he was my walking, talking epidural. We were walking outside. He gave me literally a three day massage, and, I'll just that birth I'll just never forget because he was just right there with me. We did end up going to the hospital on a Sunday before D Day, which was induction day, and they checked me and I was at a four, and, I was really nervous to sign in because I felt like if I, if I showed up too soon and wasn't progressing enough that I was just gonna be headed into the operating room. I did not tell them how long I had been in labor. Yeah. When they asked me, you know, how long I was like, oh, it's, it's been a couple hours. I was very, very vague about what had been happening for the previous three days, and I did that to protect myself because, as you well know, once the clock starts ticking, they want you to have that baby within twenty four hours, so they'll they'll take it. So Sunday night, I finally decided, okay, we'll just check-in and see what happens. My doctor showed up, and the female was the one who showed up first, and she really wanted to break by water and give me some some drugs to speed things along. And I said, you know, I really I I told you I wanna have a VBAC. I wanna have a natural birth. I want this to just unfold. And I'm I'm concerned that if we do anything to speed it up, that he'll go into distress, and I'll end up with another section.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
And she was so pushy about breaking my water and just kinda getting the baby out that I fired her. I said, You know, I don't want you around me. Do not come around me anymore. I don't want you in this space while I'm giving birth. And it shocked her and it kind of shocked me because I really loved her. And, you know, she's the one who helped me so much during my second birth. But she had just had a baby. She was six weeks postpartum. And I had this feeling that she just wanted to get home to her baby. And she was not willing to go where I needed to go, go the distance of my labor. And so I just didn't feel good about having her there. And so she left, and her partner came in and, there was this one nurse who was the one who really made it happen. She was my miracle because she had been a lay midwife in the Philippines, and, she just understood natural birth. And, there was one point when I had been awake for three nights in a row, and I just fell asleep. And she came in and said, Is she asleep? To my husband, he said, Yeah. She turned around and walked out. You know, who does that with a woman who's dilated to a seven? You know? She left, and I got this three hour chunk of sleep. And that was so crucial because after that I woke up and I was in transition. And I ended up having this hellaciously long transition. My husband timed it. It was four hours from beginning to end. When I was I was just in another space, I was shaking. I was crying. I was in the shower just letting the water beat on my back. And I just was kind of kind of crazy and so scared that I was gonna have another c section. I just I really was not doing very well emotionally. And my husband's like, what do you need? And I said, I just need you to sing to me. And so he sang me all these children's songs that we, we sing at our church. He's singing I am a child of God and all these songs. And it just calmed my nerves and calmed my spirit. And once I made it through those those four hours, then I felt like I was ready to push. And they came in and checked me. Oh, you're a nine. Okay. And and I did have a long push. I had a four hour push. But when he came out, interestingly enough, the very moment he was born was ten o'clock in the morning on Monday. And I have talked to so many women over the years. You know, it's been thirty years that I've been in the birth world. I have talked to so many women who've told me that their babies were born at the very hour that they were given a deadline that they were gonna be
Speaker 1
induced. Totally.
Speaker 2
And have have you heard that too? Yeah. Of course. And so that was really interesting to me that he came out and, I was able to breastfeed right away. My two year old daughter jumped up on the table and I just started tandem nursing. He was an eight pounds fourteen ounce boy and you know I had my V back and it was such a miracle.
Speaker 1
Yeah.
Speaker 2
I tandem nursed those two for two years and during that time I got my hands on Laura Shamley's book. She wrote it in nineteen ninety four and Jeff was born in nineteen ninety four. And I went to the local library and saw it on the birth bookshelf because I was always in the habit of doing that. And she had signed the book, she had autographed it, and I was like, wait a minute this woman must be close by. If she came into this library and actually signed it she wrote may all your dreams come true Laura Shanley and it was like oh my gosh and she told me later that when she heard the book was at the library she went and did that. That's cute. So I looked in the phone book and there she is Lauren Lauren David Chanley so I called her the next day because I read her book in one night and there's something about that book when I read it I knew I could have an unassisted birth. I knew it in my bones. And up until then, I really didn't know it. I wanted it. I really wanted it, but I did not know that I could do it. And there's something about Laura and the way that she writes, and the message of her book with really working on your beliefs and your faith and not allowing any negativity to enter into your mind that is so powerful. And I I kinda believed that but I hadn't really put it to the test. And so with my next birth with Andrew, I decided I was gonna have an unassisted birth. I was going to tell everybody I was planning an unassisted birth. I was going to tell Own it. You know, just everybody around me. This is my intention. This is my goal. This is what I'm gonna do. And oh my goodness, you cannot believe the, the blowback on my head during that pregnancy. It was just it was just weird. And I had odd things being said to me by people who normally are very supportive of large families. Mormons, you know, I'm I'm a Mormon, so Mormons who, Oh, yes, have as many babies as you can care for. That's the mantra. And it was like people were telling me, Oh, you shouldn't have any more children. Oh, my gosh. This is not good. This is this is just you're are you getting crazy again? They were really concerned I was crazy. And so it was just, it was just a leap of faith because of my mental health baggage that my family, especially my parents, my siblings, they took my desire to have an unassisted birth as evidence that I was losing evidence that I was losing my mom. It was
Speaker 1
like the complete opposite.
Speaker 2
No. I was finding my soul. I was finding my power. So during Andrew's pregnancy, I was breastfeeding an Allison and Jeff when we conceived, and I continued to nurse Allison for a couple of months, but I was just struggling so much with dehydration that I thought, you know, this just can't be good for the baby. It's just too much of a demand on my body. So I weaned her she was four and a half. Lord have mercy it was time to wean.
Speaker 1
Yeah. But you did your you did your due diligence.
Speaker 2
Well she did she did not want to stop but, I made her and and I let Jeff keep nursing just a little bit just like at naps at nighttime he was two and, and then I was homeschooling. I was homeschooling my oldest daughter who was in for first grade that year. And I was busy, you know, teaching childbirth, busy in my community, helping at church. But I, I went through that pregnancy without getting any prenatal care. I had told my husband that if he wanted to have any more children with me, that I was going to do it alone. And, and this was very troubling for him, just the thought of me doing my own prenatal care. And and I said, you know, Paul, I have studied more about birth than anybody you
Speaker 1
know. Mhmm.
Speaker 2
I had for seven years. I had researched nutrition and complications, and I've been to a bunch of births. I taught my class. I said, you know, I know this, and I also believe that if we need help, we will be guided to know what kind of help to get. And so kind of that was like my, my backup plan, you know? If we need help, we will be, we will not only be guided, but the help will be there, and we'll be okay. And so that was where he kind of was like, alright, alright, we can do it. But again, very reluctant, very nervous, not quite ready to to take this leap of faith with me, but, you know, he did it. He's he's my sweetheart and I love him forever for not abandon me abandoning me emotionally or you know or physically. Some some men do get freaked out enough by by free birth they're like, I'm not sure I want to be married to you anymore. But, fortunately those guys are, are few, but there are some. And so we went through the pregnancy and I had one of the most empowering, wonderful pregnancies of, of the five. I made the decision to go completely vegan and eighty percent raw. And I know this is controversial in in many circles, especially Bradley. I mean, Bradley diet is brewer, and it's all milk and eggs and, you know, but I had really been struggling with my digestion and, later learned that I had serious gallbladder disease and had I knew all my life I had difficulties processing animal foods and so I just decided to experiment with my diet and see what I could come up with eating a vegan diet. What I came up with was an eleven pound kid. Wow. And he he was so beautiful. He had little fat pads when he was a newborn. He had this little double chin and, you know, my eating that way did not hurt him in the least. Of course. But I will emphasize that I did focus on getting enough protein, especially because I was I was breastfeeding. And, I just doused myself every day with, like, I do a quart of fruit juice, fresh pressed, a quart of vegetable juice with tons of greens. I was constantly nibbling on vegetables, beans, rice, you know, just chowing down, raw veggies. And, you know, I just I gave him a fair shake with my eating. Sometimes I think people hear the word vegan and they think, oh, the mother doesn't eat anything but lettuce. No. You can eat you can eat beans, you can eat grains, You can eat, you know, all these foods that come of the earth and and still come up with a healthy baby. And so, Andrew's birth. Yeah. Take me to Andrew's birth. Forty five weeks gestation. Woah. What? I had tons of pre labor for five weeks before I was born. I felt like I was going into labor every night that for the last, you know, five weeks, I would have four.
Speaker 1
Did did you know when you conceived? No. So, how did you know what gestation you were at?
Speaker 2
Well, I knew the first day of my last period. And so that, that's the forty five week mark.
Speaker 1
Okay.
Speaker 2
But, I have, at that time, I was having thirty five day cycles. So I tend to have a slower, longer cycle. And I would guess it was still within that two to three week period after my period. Wow. If you go if you go from my period it was forty five weeks to the day. If you go from when I think I conceived like conception to birth was probably exactly forty two weeks. But, you know, it was a long gestation. And definitely outside the realm of what I had previously experienced with my other kids. And everything about this pregnancy was different. I knew I was so much bigger. I wondered if I was having twins. There was one point when I thought I should just go get an ultrasound to confirm whether or not it's twins. And that night that I had the thought, I had a nightmare that, I just knew it was not gonna be a good idea for me to go get that ultrasound. And so I didn't. I I just decided, if it's twins, I'll just give birth to them alone. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna worry about that. Andrew Andrew, you know, was was in there, and he was gestating, and I just decided I was going to take my faith to the max, you know? And so that was a difficult thing for me to decide because I had been very comfortable with getting prenatal care and doing some of the things they recommended. I didn't do everything, but I did do some of the things that the doctors wanted to do. But I really wanted to do this solo. I wanted to see if I could do it. So those five weeks before he was born though, my body knew there was a big baby coming. I could feel my pubic bone softening up and I felt a lot of pain around my pubic bone, ligament pain, like my body just knew it had to widen out and so it was. And then I had these contractions four or five hours of steady rhythmic contractions every night for five weeks. It was a marathon. And then, when I finally went into labor, it was three and a half hours beginning to end, and it was just so fast. It was almost like all that pre labor had just softened everything up, opened me up, and when he was ready to be born it was just bam, here he is. So it was a Saturday morning. We kind of started labor by making love twice. And then Paul went downstairs to make breakfast, get the kids fed, do some dishes, and I was upstairs by myself just dancing my labor. The labor kicked in hard. And, you know, when labor starts, you don't know that it's gonna be the real thing. Every time I'd kicked into that pre labor, I thought it was the real thing. You never know until the baby shows up if that was the real thing. So I was just up in my bedroom, kind of dancing around, listening to music. I took a bath, and then I hit transition, and I knew this baby was coming. And during transition, I had what we call in the Bradley method the self doubt sign signpost, which is a moment in your labor where you just think, Oh my gosh, I cannot do this. And I had that thought, and then I said, oh, self doubt side post. I'm gonna be pushing. And then I was. And I was standing up, and you should know during my my pregnancies, I did prenatal yoga. I was doing, water aerobics. I was very, very fit during that pregnancy. And so I'm standing in the goddess yoga goddess position next to my bed and all of a sudden I feel this first big pushing contraction and I pushed one push and I felt him crown. Wow. There he is. His whole head's right there. And then there was a good solid five minute break between contractions. And I felt the next pushing contractions start. And I went from a kind of standing squat down into like a half squat. It wasn't a full squat, but like just a little bit deeper. And bam, there's the head completely encased in the amniotic sac. The head's out. I'm standing there. This baby's head's out. I'm by myself. And I called down to Paul and I said, Paul, could you come up here? And I mean, we had five more minutes in between that contraction and the last one. I had three pushing contractions and that was it. And during that five minutes, he walked up the stairs. He did not know Right. That Andrew was practically born. And he walked in our bedroom and saw me standing there with the baby's head outside my body and he goes, he looks funny. He said, oh, I know the amniotic sac hasn't broken yet. He said, just a sec. Let me wash my hands. So he washed his hands and he called down to the kids and he said, do you wanna come up? The baby's being born. Do you wanna come see the baby? And they said, no. We're watching cartoons. And so the kids all stayed downstairs and, Paul came in and pretty soon after he was right there standing next to me, I felt the next contraction start. And I just knew that I had to be on my hands and knees to get his shoulders out. So I dropped down into my hands and knees. Paul took him by the head and just guided him out as I pushed that last contraction, and then he was born. And it was the most miraculous, amazing experience of my life to just have it go so fast. Mhmm. Compared to my other labors, you know, twenty four hours for my first, twenty hours for my second, followed by a c section, three days for my third. To have this three and a half hour labor with fifteen minutes of pushing, I, I was just flummoxed it. Just how fast it went. I couldn't believe it. And so that was part of the whole, you know, backstory to what came next. And I'm gonna say this kinda quick because I don't wanna get lost in the weeds of what happened next. It'd be easy for me to talk for, like, the next three hours about this, you know, post birth experience. But I just I'll just quickly give you an overview. As Andrew was born, the cord snapped by his navel. So, cord severed. He's born in the amniotic sac. It burst as he was coming out. I started to hemorrhage. And I mean hemorrhage like the blood was coming out like a faucet. My uterus inverted. Paul could not get Andrew to breathe. He started performing CPR. He started to turn blue. We could not get him to breathe. He looked at me, he said, Jen, I am so over my head. I'm calling I'm calling for help. And I said, Call, call! You know, I was not aware that I was hemorrhaging. I was focused on the baby. He handed me the baby. I started performing CPR and could not get him to breathe. I, he was just turning blue, he was limp. And it's, it's common for bigger babies to just take a little bit longer to get going. But Paul called nine one one. We had a volunteer fireman in our neighborhood who heard the call come in on his receiver in his home, his wife said, Oh, that's a baby. You need to go help. And so Sean broke the rules. The firemen are supposed to go to the fire station first, and then go to the house. But because he was so close, he just jammed it over to our house. He was there within minutes of the birth. He knocked on the door. My kids who were downstairs opened it. He said, Is there a baby being born here? And they were all confused. They were like, They're upstairs. He came running up the stairs. I handed him the baby and Sean said, Jenny, I knew what to do. He'd never heard of this, but he said, I felt guided to know what to do. He put his mouth over Andrew's nose and mouth, sucked him out with his own mouth, he hoovered him out with his own mouth, spit out the amniotic fluid, gave him three puffs of air, poof poof poof, and he said Andy opened his eyes. So, Sean was the one who resuscitated my son. And in the, in the minute, literally minute later, after that, half of the Lewisville Fire Department showed up at my house.
Speaker 1
Yeah. I bet.
Speaker 2
They sent out two fire trucks. They determined we both had to be transferred. We went in separate ambulances. We went to our local hospital. They immediately determined that he they wanted to air flight him down to Denver to a NICU that was a little bit more for high risk babies because he had been intubated by the EMTs. And so he was separated from me almost immediately, and I ended up in the ER with a hematocrit of four point seven, and, the need for a great need for a transfusion, which they gave me. He ended up being in the NICU in Denver for three days I was able to go down there and be with him, when he was about twenty eight hours old, I showed up at that NICU, and I basically put my stuff down and said I'm not leaving without my son. Yeah. And during those three days I really felt guided by God to know what to say to the staff, the nurses, the doctors, to get us out of there. Because initially, they talked about keeping him in that hospital for a month, and then transferring him back up to our local hospital Wow. For a second month. And I just kept saying, what's wrong with him? What's the problem? What, you know, and they'd, oh, you have a very sick baby. And I was like, you know, I know he's really drugged, because they gave him a lot of meds when he showed up. Home birth baby, they gotta give him three different antibiotics, and, you know, all the meds they gave him. But I was like, what what what's wrong with him? So they did all these tests. They did a hearing test and a brain ultrasound and all this stuff. And in the end, they couldn't find anything wrong with him. He was just a very large baby. And I was released after three and a half days to go home with him, and he didn't have any medications. They wanted him to be on oxygen for about a week just to kind of make sure he was okay. So we did the in home oxygen for, you know, a week, and then a visiting nurse came out, checked everything and said, okay, he's good to go. How did how did the
Speaker 1
staff treat you with your unassisted birth?
Speaker 2
At my local hospital, the every single nurse on that floor felt obliged to come in and tell me what a bad mother I was.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Ugh.
Speaker 2
Except for my beautiful Filipino nurse who had remembered me from Jeff's birth. She came in, said not one word to me, but had a hot bowl of chicken soup in her hand and started spoon feeding it spoon feeding it into my mouth because I was so encumbered by IVs and transfusions, I couldn't even hold anything. And as soon as I started eating that soup, you know, and feeling her love, this woman, she's a saint. You know, a lot of support. She didn't say one word. That was the funny thing. Not one word. But everybody else, everybody else felt the need to, to set me straight.
Speaker 1
Yeah, just some salt on the wound. Jeez.
Speaker 2
Well, their big thing was you have insurance. Why didn't you come to us for help? It's a three and a half hour labor. You could have, you know, easily had that baby here. And, and then they were talking about how they thought I was a gestational diabetic because he was so big and you know how they talk. And and it was just like, you know, you guys don't know anything about me. I don't feel the need to defend myself to you. Just tell me what I have to do to get out of here. I had one of my dear friends go over to a health food store and get me a bunch of wheatgrass juice. And, you know, if you take wheatgrass after a hemorrhage, there's only one chemical change that has to happen in the body to turn that wheatgrass juice into your blood. And so when you drink a big glass of wheatgrass juice, it's like getting a transfusion. So I had her do that, and I drink that within hours of the birth. And with the two bags of blood they gave me, my hematocrit came up to a normal level very, very fast. And so that's why the doctor allowed me to leave after such a short time. But, we made it at home. I was able to breastfeed. We did have a visit from social services when he was three weeks old. And, unbeknownst to us, whenever the police or the firemen show up in your home, they are required by law to report you to social services if there's anything off. And the big question from the firemen is where's the midwife? Where's the, where's the midwife? They thought the midwife had skipped out the back door, you know? And so we we just you know no this is a solo birth we're just doing it ourselves. So the social services guy showed up and it was really freaky that was probably in all of my mothering that weekend was probably the most traumatic. Yeah. Just in terms of fear of the unknown. Of course. Are they gonna they gonna take my kids? But the guy who came to us was pretty reasonable and I have a friend who worked in that Boulder social services office and she said of all the social workers to come out, he would have been the best, the least likely to to mess with people. And I'm in Boulder. There's a lot of people having home births, so it's not like we were just, you know, completely out of the realm of what's normal here, where perhaps in some other location it would be much more difficult. So we really didn't have too many problems. And I've got to give a shout out to my church community. They rallied around us like you cannot believe, driving my kids to school, bringing us meals. I hadI allowed my oldest daughter to go to second grade a month before Andy was born. And, the help that we had from our church community was just incredible. One of one of the men from that community came and cleaned up my bedroom. I mean, it looked like a crime scene. There's blood everywhere. Yeah. And he he cleaned that whole mess up for me. People did laundry, I mean the help we received they brought meals for two weeks. That's so amazing. It's just unbelievable how much help we had from them. So I give them a lot of credit. My family came and supported me, my sister came and stayed for a week, my mother flew out, and so it was, you know, it was wonderful that even though people were troubled by my choices, they still wanted to help. And so I, you know, I can't forget that side of the story. It's the the bullying, and the bullying. I'm sure they didn't think they were bullying me at the hospital. They were just trying to tell me what an idiot I was, you know?
Speaker 1
It's so outside of their outside of their scope of understanding.
Speaker 2
Yeah. Something like that. I don't know. So we had Andrew, and I had these four little kids to take care of. I had the two boys on the breast for seven months solid breastfeeding tandem, you know, that was a marathon of mothering because they were so big, and it just felt like during those seven months all I did was eat and sleep and breastfeed. I mean, it was like nursing twins, you know, it was just such a marathon of mothering. And, when I when I started thinking about even potentially having another baby, I would just cry. So, I was in no rush to have another baby. We we kind of felt like we were done. And, you know, it's part of our our Mormon doctrine that, these children are are everything. I mean, of course, all religion and and and philosophy, children are sacred, but, you know, for us as Mormons, when we go to the temple to get married, we do not get married till death parts of us. It's literally in the temple ceremony that we are married for eternity, and these children will be a part of us for eternity. And we don't just teach about a Heavenly Father, we also have this this uniquely Mormon doctrine that we also have a Heavenly Mother, and that she is available to us to help us in our Earth life. And so, having these four children and and being able to to nurture and love them was just such a miracle to me, even though, you know, I'd had such, so many ups and downs with, with the mental illness and the variety of my births. But, I should say that I, you know, I'll just keep going with my story. I had two eight week early miscarriages in between Andrew and, and Ben, and I believe those children are mine. I will have them in the eternities. We have another uniquely Mormon doctrine that teaches that if we lose children to stillbirth, miscarriage, they also belong to us, and that we will have the privilege of raising them during the millennium when Christ is reigning on the Earth, that they will come back and be our children and will have the ability to be their mothers. So, those kids are mine too, but they, they knew I could not handle one more thing during those six years. And during those six years, we really had a lot of time to reconcile our choices. Learn to live with the fact that we were nonconformists, and that nonconformity comes with a price. And sometimes the unintended consequences of making these choices to live outside of the mainstream do not affect the mother. We may get a snide comment here or there, from our peers. But quite often the blowback lands right on the heads of our husbands and our kids. And for me personally, that was the hardest part, about seeing the way that my re my children reacted to the people around them treating them like they were different. Because, you know, your mom's in home birth, your mom homeschools, your mom, you you know, is just not doing things the way everybody else does it. Your mom's breastfeeding that four year old kid. Why is she doing that? You know? And so, that created some tension in our home for the kids that I remember one time my daughter, she was in middle school, which is the age when they feel this so acutely. She said something like, Why do you use those cloth menstrual pads? Why do we use cloth diapers? Nobody else, I don't know anybody who knows this. Everybody I babysit for, they're using plastic, plastic diapers. Why do you do that? I don't understand. No? And it's, it's so weird to be confronted by your own children when you're, you're doing things differently. But when I conceived Ben in two thousand and one, all of that jacked up to, like, the nth degree as I once again made the decision to do an unassisted pregnancy. The people around me, like, all the ladies in my church congregation, I think every single one of those women came up to me at one time or another during my pregnancy and said something like, Jen, do you remember when you hemorrhaged last time? You know? And I was like, Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. Will you speak to that? You know, that that's how how did that decision or intuition come forth for you given a a pretty scary situation with your other birth?
Speaker 2
Like with all aspects of my life, when a problem crops up, I think of it as an opportunity to do research. I don't believe in being a victim. Okay. I had a very large baby who wouldn't breathe. I hemorrhaged. What can I do to prevent that next time? That's how I have dealt with every problem I've had in my life. I did so much research on hemorrhage, you would be shocked. So what I came to find out is that a toxic liver and gallbladder make it much more difficult for the mother's body to clot. And so when I was diagnosed by my chiropractor with this toxic gallbladder shortly after that birth, after Andrew's birth, and I mean, I was having gallbladder attacks, like, every week, really bad ones. He said, Oh, all you need to do is do a cleanse. And I was like, No. My gallbladder is not toxic. I eat the healthiest diet of anybody I know. You can't tell me this is a toxic gallbladder and liver. He's like, Just do the cleanse and see what happens. So I did. I did the classic Hulda Clark liver and gallbladder cleanse. It's very simple. It's so simple you'd be shocked. But I did this cleanse and bam out pops two hundred gallstones. Nobody has been more surprised than me to look into that toilet and see all those gallstones and be like, oh my gosh, look what's inside my body. So in between Andrew and Ben's pregnancies, I did about thirty five gallbladder cleanses. And I moved thousands of stones, which I know that may be hard to believe, but my liver and gallbladder were just chock full of all this debris. So, I had a moment during Ben's pregnancy when I had just a bit of nausea, and then I threw up my supper, you know, just typical morning sickness symptom, and I was feeling like I needed to do a gallbladder cleanse. And I was like, is it safe to do while I'm pregnant? You know, I'm praying, and I'm looking for information on the web. Of course, everybody's freaking out about any sort of cleansing while you're pregnant. Everything I found on the web was alarmist. But my own personal revelation was this. And, I mean, this is what I felt from the Lord. If you will do this cleanse, you will not hemorrhage after this birth. I was like, give me that lemon juice and grapefruit juice and olive oil. I'll do this cleanse. Mhmm. And so that that is information that was personally given to me by the Lord for my unique situation and I ran with it. And so I did. I did this cleanse. And I wouldn't say I went into the birth, and I mean my labor, feeling one hundred percent confident. We had had enough different types of births that I was like, well, we'll just see how it goes. Give it my best shot. And so we went through that pregnancy and it's so funny to me now because Ben's pregnancy was just like he was kind of thumbing his nose at Colorado birth law. There are two laws on the books. The midwives here are very regulated. You have to be licensed to do home birth. There are maverick midwives quietly birthing, helping birthing women on the side, but they're very quiet. You know, it's kind of whispered, but the, the midwives who do home births here have very, strict guidelines that they have to follow, at least in two thousand and two. I haven't done the research of what's going on right now. But in two thousand and two, there were two laws. One was if a mother hits forty two weeks, the midwife is compelled by law to hand the case over to an obstetrician. The second law is if a mother's water breaks, within twenty four hours, she has to hand care over to an obstetrician.
Speaker 1
So those two laws were there. Without significant labor. Yeah.
Speaker 2
Yeah. So I hit forty two weeks and because of what had happened with Andrew, I wasn't too concerned. You know, I knew that there was a likelihood that I could go to forty four weeks and, you know, he'd be just fine. My mom had actually had a forty four weeks babe. My little brother was born at forty four weeks. My dad was a forty four weeks babe. And so this is important for women to look in their family patterns and see what's normal for them for gestation, you know? Because it does feel like it's, you know, we've been brainwashed to think if they hit thirty nine weeks, oh my gosh, get that kid out, you know? But, we hit forty two weeks and I was at my aerobics class and my water broke. And so, I went home and I knew, okay, clock's ticking. But because there was no midwife in the situation, I didn't feel compelled by any sort of law to hand myself over to the obstetricians. Mhmm. I had gone to my doctor one time during my pregnancy just to get an iron test. That was the only interface I had with any professionals. The rest of the pregnancy, I did intuitively. Every day I'd wake up, what do I need today in terms of exercise, food, sleep? Just guide me to know what to do. I had gotten into Young Living essential oils right after Andrew's birth, my postpartum doula had introduced me to the oils. And so I used a lot of essential oils during my pregnancy, and I loved them. They were so nourishing and lush. And I've since gotten into doTERRA oils too, so I use both brands. And they're just so wonderful while you're pregnant to use them for a variety of things. I would take lavender baths and I would put joy on my ears and harmony over my heart and just love these oils. To me, they were as important to that pregnancy as the food I ate. I did not do a vegan pregnancy with Ben. And it's kind of cool because I had cleansed my liver and gallbladder so much, I felt more at liberty to eat a higher fat diet. Milk, oh my gosh, I couldn't even digest it before. I was able to drink milk. I was able to eat cheese, which I could barely stomach it before. So it was kind of fun to just, like, expand my diet and just listen. Oh my gosh. Today, I wanna get a big old cheeseburger and eat a whole pint of Haagen Dazs. You know? That was something I could not do before, because I had this sick gallbladder. And, towards the end of the pregnancy, I I was big. I could tell it was a not a really big baby, but not as big as Andrew. So that was kind of fun too, you know? Like, well, you know, maybe he just doesn't need to be that big, or maybe something's going on better with my body because of the liver cleanses. I don't know. But I went into labor, three days after my water broke. And, during those three days, I felt contractions. I had two or three bouts of pre labor where I was like, oh my gosh, is this it? We had a birth pool in our in our bedroom that I kept getting into. And, and then I felt, you know, after the water broke, I was like, you know, I just don't feel good about a water birth, knowing that with the water broken, I could have had some, you know, bacteria enter through the vaginal canal. So we emptied the tub and stuck it out on our deck, and I, I, my water birth, you know, I just let that go. I continued to just pray, what do I need? What's, what's needful for this situation? And when push came to shove, I felt good about staying home. You know? At any time we could have gone to the hospital. Yeah. But I just chose not to do it. And when I went to see my doctor when I was seven months pregnant to get that blood test, I said to him, would you be willing to take care of me if I had to do a transfer? And he said, I only will if you'll come to me for regular prenatal visits. He said, I know that if you show up at the ER, it will be becomes because something is very, very wrong, and it's just not fair for you to expect me to get out of bed and come help you, when you haven't shown me the respect for what I know to come do my prenatal care. And, you know, I got it. That's fair. I can understand any professional having that stance. He said it's absolutely the worst thing for you to go in and deal with the ER doctors because they are really not trained in emergency childbirth. You know, because of the way birth goes right now, most babies are induced. Most babies are taken by C section. So these ER docs, they get it in their internships, but they really are not. He said it's literally the worst thing you can do to expect the ER docs to come in and and fix a botched home birth. And I I accepted his wisdom and knowledge on that topic, but I still chose not to go. And at the end of the day, we were able to have a beautiful, perfect six hour labor, Two hours of pushing. First hour of pushing, I was reclining in my bed. The second hour of pushing, I felt guided to get up and stand in a full squat. I was back in the goddess position. I was scared because I wondered if part of the reason I had hemorrhaged is because I was upright. And I prayed and the Spirit whispered to me, No, you're fine. You need to squat. That'll get his shoulders out.
Speaker 1
And it was just you and your husband?
Speaker 2
Well, he had gone to read stories to the kids and and at one point in my labor I went to go see what was not going on and they were all five asleep in the other bedroom. It was straight up midnight when when Ben was born and so that first hour of my pushing I was by myself and it was great. I loved it. Just felt so right to be in my own bed, in my own space. And about an hour before Ben was born, Paul came in and said, What do you need? And I said, Would you sing to me? He had sung to me during Jeff's birth, and that felt so good. So he just pulled out the Mormon hymn book and started singing hymns. And it was perfect. I didn't need him to touch me, I didn't need him to coach me, but his singingPaul has this amazing high tenor, Irish tenor voice, and he was singing all of my favorite hymns, and it invited the spirit, it calmed me, and it produced this feeling of, I'm very musical, so that the music just it was the complete opposite of what you feel in a hospital delivery suite. No beeps, no lights flashing, no people scurrying in and out. It was the complete opposite. It was heaven. It was it was perfect. So that last hour I pushed, I was on my birth ball when I was resting in between contractions. During contractions, I would stand up. And for my pushing contractions, I do do the classic Bradley technique, which is as the contraction starts, you breathe in, and put your chin on your chest, and and hold it for a few seconds. And you breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out, and then breathe in and hold and push, but not too hard, you know? I I've heard about these women who are able to get their babies out with too much effort. I'm not one of them. I've had to push with all four of my vaginal births. And all I can think is, you know, it was a it was a big old fifteen inch head, you know? I had to push. Sure. And and because Andrew and Ben had these fifteen inches heads, it's really interesting to me how much easier Andrew was to get out with the water bag intact. There was no pain. I felt no pain. And he just slid out. But with Ben, because my water had broke, it felt like I was birthing a brick. It was so slow, and so hard, and very very painful, and he just inched down it was like he was grinding through the birth canal. But once he crowned, I had one more push, and then his head came out, and then very quickly his body just slipped out. And Paul was standing behind me, so in this standing squat he caught him, and Ben cried immediately, and we both just looked at each other and were like, He's okay. Because it was so different from Andrew being quiet.
Speaker 1
Of course,
Speaker 2
yeah. And so Paul handed Ben to me and I laid down on my bed and I looked over at Paul and he jumped for joy. He literally, he lept. And it wasn't just this little kick up your heels, this was a Oh my gosh!
Speaker 1
And he
Speaker 2
jumped, pet handed fist pump, and he's like, It it worked!
Speaker 1
I bet.
Speaker 2
So that was, that was quite a moment that I'll never forget. And then Ben latched on, and fifteen minutes later we had a placenta popping out, And one by one, my children woke up and came into the room. My daughters, interestingly enough, walked in right as the placenta was being born. And, you know, Ali, of course, she was, Oh, that was gross. She was thirteen. But, I thought it was appropriate that the girls saw that and then Jeff came in and Andy and they did not see the placenta being born. And I think in these situations you kind of have to trust your kids intuition that they will see what they can handle and not try to manipulate it too much. Totally. That that if the birth is just going to be too much for them, they'll be asleep. If they're meant to be there, they'll be awake. And don't don't get too crazy worrying about your older kids. Andrew came in last and I said Andy the baby's born and he couldn't see him because I had my back to him. He said no. I said yeah he's right here and he looked at him and the look of wonder on his little six year old face and then he said, Booyah, booyah, booyah, I have a baby brother. That's so cute. And then we had three hours from midnight till about three in the morning as a family. We sang to him, we massaged him, we gave him his first bath. We decided not to cut the cord. We just, you know, I'd heard about Lotus Birth, I'd read a few articles about it. And I was like, this just feels good for this kid to do this, you know? And so we didn't cut the cord, we just wrapped him up with his placenta after we washed everything. I breastfed him of course. I took a shower, put my night guard on him, my husband took a few pictures. And at three o'clock in the morning, we all went back to sleep. -Well. -And, you know, next to my, my wedding day, the day that Ben was born was the happiest day of my life. -Yeah, I bet. -It was so spiritual, and so sacred, to do this. And I didn't feel triumphant, truly triumphant, until he was about a year old. You know, I went through that year, kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. You know, like, am I gonna break down into psychosis? Am I gonna have postpartum depression? Is social services gonna show up? Is is something bad gonna happen? I was still I was still conditioned to bad things happening that to to get to a year postpartum and, and it was just peaceful, I was like, we did it! Totally. We did it. We totally did it. We learned autonomous parenting. Nothing bad happened. I didn't die. The baby didn't die. And And so it was when he was about a year old that I really started to feel like, you know, this feeling of just, and I'll tell you Emily, the woman who feels those feelings, buckle up world. Mhmm. That woman is going to be, for the rest of her life, a force to be reckoned with. In every dimension of her life. You mess with her kids, you mess with her life, she is going to come and get you. And this is what I've seen over and over with these free birthing moms. They are Tigresses. They are just so fiercely protective of themselves. Of themselves, their families, their friends. We are tapping into this power that has been deprived from us and from our ancestors for at least, in some families, at least four generations and going back sometimes eight and ten generations in America with with medical birth. And people need to realize that this didn't all start in the 40s with hospital births. This kind of doctor controlled, knock them out, drag them out thing, that started back in the 1800s. Even our grandmas and great grandmas who were having home births, they were being, being given the ether, knocked out, there's a doctor with his forceps and his scissors cutting a big old episiotomy. This is how these grandmas were having their babies. And so it was not that it all started in the, in the 40s in America and in hospitals. It was way back, hundred years before that, that it really got going. And so, for, for those of us who are kind of grasping this knowledge that's embedded in our genetic code, it's in our cells, the memory is there from our ancestors, and we're grabbing it back. It is so real, what we're doing. It'll just be really interesting to see what my own children decide to do. I have two who are married now and, you know, if they choose to do some of these similar things or if they just run away from me screaming like their butts are on fire, we want nothing to do with this, You know? You can't control what your children, what your in laws want to do. And I would I would never presume to tell them how to live their lives. But it will be interesting to see if there's a a new pattern that has started with my own family.
Speaker 1
Well, if nothing else, no matter where they choose or how they choose, you know, to birth, one thing that they all get to carry forward is, you know, an understanding in their family and an imprint from their mom that birth is normal and not, you know, not meant to be shied away from, and birth is meant to be leaned into and experienced, and and you have so much positivity, you know, and trust in it. You know, that that's kind of to me, that's what matters, that that's what you've imprinted into your kids. And whatever they do with that, you know, will be for their own, you know, their own life's decisions. But, you know, that I think at the bare minimum that you get to be one of the mothers in this world who passed on a respect, you know, a reverence, a love, a appreciation, a trust of birth into your children. That's huge. And unfortunately, a lot of a lot of people don't have that from their mother. So even if it's just that and they go birth at the hospital with epidurals, you know, it's okay that they got Yeah. They got to make it from a choice of of being so positively imprinted.
Speaker 2
I agree. And I I again, I'm totally open to whatever they choose to do. I just plan to love my grandchildren no matter what happens.
Speaker 1
Of course. That's that's the best part of being a grandparent. I'm pretty sure. Awesome. Well, thank you. What wild wild stories and just just such a journey you've been on. You'll have to keep us posted if if another child comes into your family, and and we'll have to do a follow-up episode.
Speaker 2
I would love to come back. Thank you so much, Emily.
Speaker 1
Thank you, Jenny. Take care.
Speaker 2
Okay. Bye.
Speaker 1
I wanna hear from you. If you have a question, comment, story to share, or an episode idea, find me on free birth society dot com and send me a message. Also, reviews on iTunes are awesome. It helps spread the podcast to more listeners. Let's build and connect this community. That's it for today, everyone. Join us next week for another episode of the free birth podcast. Thanks for joining us, and remember, your body, your choice. Lots of love.
