I know this might sound cliché. I don’t mind it one bit. I honestly feel I owe everything that’s good in my life to my mother. I am currently 30 years old and will soon be a mom myself. I am happily married and have a wonderful job in which I am very successful. I am healthy. I have many friends and hobbies that I enjoy. Basically, life could not be better.
I am sure that I would not have accomplished any of this if it were not for my mother. She was a wonderful role model who treated me with the exact right mixture of love and discipline it takes to raise a successful daughter. Most importantly, however, she gave birth naturally to me at home. My mother felt every contraction without pain relief, setting me on my current path to success.
It was the most empowering and validating experience of her life. In contrast, for the women who gave birth in the hospital, it was a day of humiliation, bullying, emotional and physical abuse. I was allowed to remain with my mother after birth, not taken away and vaccinated against a sexually transmitted disease or given an unneeded vitamin K shot. Those irreplaceable, initial bonding moments, set me on a lifelong course of emotional trust and love, which would have never been present had I spent my first 24 or 48 hours in a hospital.
Sometimes I fantasize what my life would have been like had I been born in a different century or in a different country. That is fun. Sometimes I imagine what my life would have been like had my mother received an epidural in the hospital. That is scary.
So thanks mom. I know that having an unmedicated, natural childbirth at home was the most important thing you ever did for me.
