Ep 349: Student Interview episode: Abby Johnson/Carley Overbey

0:00Welcome to the Happy Homebirth Podcast, your source for positive natural childbirth stories and your community of support, education and encouragement and all things homebirth and motherhood. Because that's what really matters in the birth is that's what your body is doing. My brain is not allowed to be around during birth. Well, hey there, Happy Homebirthers and welcome to a bonus episode of the Happy Home Birth Podcast. I'm your host, Caitlin Fusco and I help mothers prepare for homebirth as whole women, mind, body, heart, home and marriage. So that when labor starts, they're not scrambling for what they, quote, should have learned, but they're leading their experience. And today's episode is a little different. I've got two mothers who went through my course, home mother homebirth and I asked

1:01them the questions I most wanted answered before the course, what were you actually doing to prepare and did any of it make you feel ready? Their answers are the reason I built this thing in the first place. First Abby. I'm Abby. I have four babies actually. Our first we lost up like seven and a half weeks. His name is Jadaia. Our oldest is four now. His name is Arlo and that's who we started doing your course for and then our oldest daughter is two going on 20. I feel like she's so old. And then I'm doing a few weeks with our fourth. When we found out we were pregnant with our first, I was doing all the research and growing up in a medical family was like home births and not an option. That's like for crazy people, I had a friend growing up who had some home births and everything went well. My parents were very anti that so I chose to have hospital mates midwives that were supposed to be the best in the area.

2:02Long story super, super short when we lost our first they treated it like, oh, this isn't real. You should really wait another cycle before you get pregnant again. Here's some hormonal birth control and I was like, this isn't how it should be. So then I really started to like go down the rabbit hole and found out that home birth is actually a great option for a lower risk woman. What were you actually doing to prepare? Yeah. So I joke a little bit that I became a doula before I actually became a doula because our midwives are pretty hands off and like really want their clients to know what they're choosing and why they're choosing it. So they encouraged us to do a ton of research. So I did a ton of research and I was listening to a whole bunch of podcasts and birth stories and that's how I found you out. So I didn't feel super prepared but I didn't feel unprepared and I knew why I was choosing everything. But honestly the biggest reason that we did the course was so that my husband could download

3:05all the information too. I was like, you know, a sponge soaking everything up and he was just like, he's an engineer of very sweet supportive and generous. I felt pretty prepared but then he was like, I need somebody else to tell me. But basically before the course it was like me saying, hey, these are all these things that I'm excited about and he was like, okay, cool. That's great. I'm happy for you and he didn't really know what other questions to ask and I didn't really know how else to like get him involved if that makes sense. And so then starting out like, oh man, I think we were probably 28, 29 weeks pregnant. We every week would sit down like on a Wednesday, okay, we're going to watch our thing tonight. Then we would pause whenever he would have a question and it was really sweet because then there was like a guidance, you know, of like, this is where this comes in and this is what this means and oh, you don't understand what that means. Let me explain that to you.

4:06Just like, yeah, he didn't know what he didn't know. I didn't know what he didn't know. It was really sweet to just like be able to kind of put the pieces together as a unit versus me just knowing everything. That last part, sitting down together every Wednesday from 28 weeks is the thing I hear most often and it's the thing I would most want for you. Here's Carly on the same subject and she puts it better than I could. My husband became a lot more confident because he was supported the whole time, but he was more of like a blindly supportive, like anything you want, sweetie type of a thing and then with the course, he was like, this is awesome and he was feeling more confident and then that just kind of gave me some more renewed energy. That was definitely the biggest thing for us. I also just had a lot more peace of mind going through how competent your midwife should

5:11be like in the portion that's finding a provider. That gave me the reassurance that I really did do all my due diligence this time around and finding somebody who was the right fit for me. Back to Abby, I asked her whether anything happened at her birth that she'd have panicked about if she hadn't known what it was. Listen to this one. Was there any moment where something happened that you would have maybe been panicked or concerned about had you not known what it was? Yeah, so actually with our oldest, he was a big boy and I had a bit of a mental block because I needed the pool in my brain to be ready in order to actually progress. I think that I caused a couple of issues with my uterus actually doing what I was supposed to do. We had a bit of a bright red gush in the pool so they made me get out and I was like, okay, I know that this can happen because we had talked about the different situations

6:14in birth and I know that I'm close, which is great. They did a cervical exam at that point and I was just a cervical lip so they pushed it out of the way, which I had known was something that we could do. When he was born, there was this pretty significant hemorrhage but I knew that there could be extra bleeding anyway and so I wasn't super concerned. Obviously, I wasn't watching the lung temperature. My husband was over in the corner half asleep but again, part of the thing was the midwives were great because they were calm and just like gave me extra herbs and then medicine but also my husband and I knew that bleeding is part of birth and so it was like, oh yeah, okay, we know that this is going to happen and that's going to be okay but I would have been really freaked out, I think, if beforehand I was like, oh no, I have to get out of the tub because I'm bleeding but what is this? And then with our previous miscarriage, that's all I had never seen was the blood really

7:18and so that would have been really, really hard for me mentally and emotionally but in this situation it was like, oh, I think he's okay. We're going to everybody's going to be fine because we knew the different, like, these are the things that can happen and these are the things that the midwives are going to do for you because they're educated humans. Yeah, so that's definitely the biggest thing that I would have definitely panicked if I hadn't known. That is one thing that I loved about your courses, they had the relaxation exercises, right? And so I practiced those religiously and so then when at 9 p.m., my husband needed to go to sleep, I just turned on those tracks and went inside the bathtub and just like took a nap basically between contractions and so that's something that I've been continuing throughout, the subsequent pregnancies is like, okay, we're going to just practice in my body. Yes, because that's what really matters in the birth is that's what your body is doing.

8:19My brain is not allowed to be around during birth. What is something that you would say to a woman who has read a lot, you know, you said you did a lot of preparation, like what about this mother who she's read a lot, she's watched the Instagram reels, she's listened to the birth podcasts and still has this uncertainty of like, what if there's something I don't know? What would you say to her? Kind of a little bit weird, but I would say turn things off. Maybe talk to like get one source of information, really, and that's what you're going to go with. Even after the birth, there's going to be a ton of people saying, oh, this is how you should nurse your newborn. This is how you should use your laundry detergent. This is, and getting into that practice and pregnancy is really helpful just to be like, okay, this is my guiding post. And so yeah, like for me, I don't get that overwhelmed. This pregnancy actually I have felt like, oh no, there are more things that I don't know,

9:22but I'm also doing more on my dualist side with Instagram. And so I've been scrolling more and I've seen all of the different like, wow, there's more things that could be known, but there's always more things that we can learn. And we need to just stick, stay in your lane as they say, but honestly, just like choose one thing and go with that and go like all in there because that's the way that you're going to feel the most confident. I keep coming back to what Abby said. She would have panicked. She'd already seen blood ones in the worst way. And she knew what she was looking at this time. So she didn't. That is not information. She had plenty of information. That's preparation and they are not the same thing. Home other home birth is open until Friday at midnight Eastern time. If you want to see what's inside or watch Monday's workshop while it's still up, everything is at myhappyhomebirth.com forward slash next.

10:24That's myhappyhomebirth.com forward slash next. Thank you Abby. Thank you Carly. And I'll see you next week. Thanks for listening to this week's episode. Are you looking to extend the home birth support, encouragement and education? Join us in our Facebook group Happy Home Birth Podcast Community and check us out on Instagram at Happy Home Birth Podcast.