If we trust… trust ourselves and whatever our word is for the mystery — great spirit, god, goddess — if I can trust that and also realize that I am that, that’s the gift of Freebirth. I liberate myself from the idea that I still need somebody else — that I still need a mother — to come and take care of me while I give birth, because I’m the mother now.

– Jeannine Parvati Baker

I want to tell you about a movie Rom and I watched in the last few weeks before Mica was born. It is called A Clear Road to Birth, and I ordered it from Laura Shanley’s website for Unassisted Birth.

Writing about Mica’s birth story got me thinking about this movie, so I watched it again. It is a nice movie to watch, and I like listening to old-young witchy-beautiful Jeannine Parvati Baker talking. She lived an amazing life as a woman and as a healer, and she says amazing things.

If you want to see women giving birth to their own babies, catching their own babies, the only sound their own voices, crooning welcome songs to their babies; if you want to see men catching their own babies and holding video cameras, crying; if you want to see children jumping up and down and saying “baby! baby! baby! the baby is here!”; and if you want to see some totally mainstream women tell you why they chose to birth unassisted, you might want to watch this movie.

I’m putting this out there knowing full well that the first (and maybe even the second and third) times I heard about unassisted birth, I was all “Hm. Whatever. Click (as in the mouse clicking).” But maybe this is your first or fourth or hundred time hearing about it, and like me, something will go click inside of you, and you’ll end up spending hours reading online birth stories, and then like me, maybe you’ll accidentally on purpose wait too long to call your midwife to your birth, because something inside of you has changed.

The thing that’s changed is that now you trust.