January 25, 2010
When a baby wants out, does the journey really matter? If you make it to the grocery store on a bus or in a Lamborghini, does it really make much difference when you return home with the same old chicken? Honestly? If you spring out in the back of a cab, in a hot tub or in a hospital, should anyone think twice? You got here and that's the point. Whether the process really influences your development, your growth or your life is little more than conjecture and not worth the speculation. Unless you're Kip.
Relative impact depends on your views about the fetus, bonding, hospitals and childbirth. Loving parents, regardless of birthing methods, will always trump the unloving ones. But what about Kip, the first-grader, the one out of every 100 kids, who comes home crying because his classmates ridicule him when he blurts out that he was born at home? Kip is that increasingly rare, American freak of nature who gets told that he wasn't born at home. That's a lie, the first-graders tell him. You were born in a hospital, they explain. The week before those insults, Kip found out about Santa Claus and two days before that someone spilled the beans about the Tooth Fairy. Now he's depressed. Was the 'born at home' fable another shtick? Another way to pretend that real dollars, purchases, bank accounts and cash registers don't exist?
Homebirths in America are so uncommon that their makers (moms, dads, doulas, birthing coaches included) are considered eccentric types who still believe in Rudolf and the North Pole. The rest of the planet, it seems, has scheduled a delivery date and time at Cedar Sinai Hospital and many will have major surgery (the old C-section) not because they had a medical emergency going into the hospital or because a medical emergency occurred naturally while in the hospital but because being in the hospital created a medical emergency. That's not so bad — to each his own and may everyone be comfortable with his and her preferred choice. Except for Kip.
Kip's mom wipes away his tears and tells him he's part of a different club. While its members have been steadily shrinking over the years, its membership is pristine and can never be taken from him. She tells him he's just like Charlie with a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka's factory. She gives him a chocolate bar. You earned it, she whispers to him, because you came into this world on your own terms and on your own clock.
So what? screams Kip. Word has spread and now he's known as the School Liar. His mom tells him not to worry and that eventually, perhaps when his classmates mature, they'll learn the truth.
Homebirths in America are so uncommon that their makers (moms, dads, doulas, birthing coaches included) are considered eccentric types who still believe in Rudolf and the North Pole. The rest of the planet, it seems, has scheduled a delivery date and time at Cedar Sinai Hospital and many will have major surgery (the old C-section) not because they had a medical emergency going into the hospital or because a medical emergency occurred naturally while in the hospital but because being in the hospital created a medical emergency. That's not so bad — to each his own and may everyone be comfortable with his and her preferred choice. Except for Kip.
Kip's mom wipes away his tears and tells him he's part of a different club. While its members have been steadily shrinking over the years, its membership is pristine and can never be taken from him. She tells him he's just like Charlie with a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka's factory. She gives him a chocolate bar. You earned it, she whispers to him, because you came into this world on your own terms and on your own clock.
So what? screams Kip. Word has spread and now he's known as the School Liar. His mom tells him not to worry and that eventually, perhaps when his classmates mature, they'll learn the truth.
Flash forward: one of Kip's hecklers, who later converted to a friend, has completed his Ob/Gyn residency at a local hospital. If he's one of the residents in the Ricki Lake-produced documentary film, The Business of Being Born, he's never seen a natural birth. In fact, he probably still believes it's somewhat fictional, dangerous and eccentric.Kip, on the other hand, gave up on convincing anyone about his strange origins. He carries with him the hidden membership card, cloaked in his cells, shared by the vast majority of the world's population. He and his mom and dad share a smile. These days he's hoping to develop some kind of Vulcan salute, hand sign, signal or handshake to distinguish himself and the Others. Whether he's any smarter, healthier or more connected to his birth mother because of his natural delivery is irrelevant to him. What he wants is equal footing and if he can't get equal footing, he wants Star Trek cult status. He wants his birthing background to be cool and hip and somehow 'transcendent'. Transcending what, he doesn't care. He wants some respect and some street cred for the hell he went through on his birthday.
He asks his mother if she would do the natural homebirth thing all over again, knowing she would be completely spared a day of pain and he'd be completely spared a week of elementary school abuse. You'd be different, she tells him. So the answer is 'no', she confirms.
Kip is still wrestling over the fact that it's a lonely club, that he adores his eccentric mom and that it's the small things in life, like him being born the way he was, that makes the big difference. He is who he is and if that means he didn't get homogenized like his hospital-born mother and father, then that's just the way it is. Next up: foreskin issues. NewsSip
