The Birth of Our Son: A Winter’s Tale

A Positive Home Birth Story

In preparation for the birth of our second child this winter I have been talking a lot about babies and pregnant bellies with our eldest two-and-a-half year old.

“Mommy’s got a big belly with a baby in it,” she would say. “Babies can only cry and sleep and drink milk from their mother’s breasts.” So far so good.

But when it came to understanding when her baby brother would come out of the belly, now that was a difficult task for me to explain to her.

I did have a date, of course, but the third of January means absolutely nothing to a two year old. Nevermind, that we were far from sure that he would come on the exact due date.

That is why I did what every parent in need of a good answer to their child’s difficult question would do: I made something up.

“When the snow starts falling, baby brother will come out of mommy’s belly.”

On the 4th of January it just so happened that we woke up to a freshly freezed landscape outside our windows. The forest was covered in snow.

Our home on the fourth of January.

So far, the winter had been a very mild one, and there had been little to no snowfall. That was up till now, the morning after our son’s due date, where the snow laid in big hills and the pine trees were standing upright with sparkling snow on their shoulders.

Herluf went outside in the cold to gather firewood and not long after white smoke would be rising from our chimney. Then our good neighbor Allan rang him up on the phone. “He thought the birth had begun,” Herluf explained after talking to him.

We had talked to our neighbors prior to the birth, since we were planning a home birth and wanted to know if they would remove any snow for the midwife in case of heavy snow fall.

“Why would he think that?” I asked.

Herluf shrugged his shoulders. “I think he just had an inkling.”

There was something in the air. I could feel it too. A sense of something long awaited finally coming. The snow, a baby, contractions.

I had felt them all throughout December, but on this very morning they felt different. They were stronger and they came more often, especially when I was walking.

And so we did. Through the wintery landscape of the hills and the forest. Herluf was holding the line for our daughter’s sleigh in one hand and had a firm grib on me with the other. When we walked home the neighbor started up his tractor and begun clearing the roads.

“You never know!” he said in passing us.

But the contractions didn’t linger. As soon as I sat or laid down, they would dimininish. In the late afternoon, as the sun dissapeared behind black trees, I took another walk by myself. A small crescent moon hang over me as I walked in the woods, carefully threading through the snow of the paths.

When I returned home by nightfall it was with the same result. The contractions were once again becoming sparser and with lesser strength. We decided to put our daughter to sleep at home instead of driving her to her grand parents for the night, thinking once again, as we had did many other nights: Perhaps tomorrow.

And so, we fell a sleep in the late night, on the couch, in each other’s arms.

It was two o’clock in the morning when I woke Herluf up.

“I think you need to call the midwife,” I said.

The contractions had returned in the night, and now they were forcefull. I lay on the couch, breathing through the pain, as Herluf greeted the midwife in the entrance at three o’clock. I heard him ask if she had been able to drive safely on the road leading up to our house.

“I think it must have been cleared just minutes before I got here,” she said. “It was no problem at all.”

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