How I Prepared for My Dream Home Birth (And Why It Started Long Before I Was Pregnant)

I had a home birth with my first baby 16 months ago (seriously, how does time fly this quickly?!), and it still to this day is one of the most magical experiences that I've had. I promised myself when I was younger I was only having two kids. Now I definitely want three, and the other night I thought, maybe four. One of the reasons is that I'd love to give birth four times.

Whilst it was magical, birth also was the most challenging thing I've ever done in my life. I say now, "My god, it was the best thing," and my husband always goes, "Yeah, I remember it very differently during it." LOL

When women ask me how to prepare for birth, they expect me to list everything I did in those nine months of my pregnancy, and I will (it’s all below). What helped me most, though, was the nine years I spent working on myself and my ability to release control. Birth is the ultimate test. Can you actually release control? Do you actually trust yourself? Can you actually surrender?

Want to hear the voice notes version of this post? Check out this super juicy podcast episode. ↓

Firstly, I don't want anyone to think that having a home birth automatically means you'll have the best birth, because that's actually not true. What makes your body feel safe is what's going to help you have the best birth.

All of my friends have had hospital births, and there is no judgement towards them, because that's what made them feel safest. In order for your body to open, in order for you to surrender and get out of your head, you have to feel safe to let go. So if you feel safest at a hospital, you should be at a hospital.

Home was the safest place for me. That meant if I got transferred for whatever reason, I'd be okay with it, because I knew I'd put my body in the place where it was going to open the most.

And feeling safe in birth starts long before birth. If you don't feel safe asking for your needs on a random Tuesday in the office, or when your husband is crossing a line, do you think you're going to feel safe being butt naked and giving birth in front of somebody? You're obviously not. If you can't release control in small moments day to day, you won't be able to when it comes to birth.

I exercised basically every single day to increase my flexibility, open up my hips and get my baby in the right position.

I was skiing until I was about five months pregnant (Hal was not happy with that), then it was Pilates basically every day and a walk most afternoons. Even if I didn't feel like it, I'd just do a less intense workout.

If baby is in a good position, you are going to have a better birth. You want baby looking towards your spine, not out of your belly button, so you don't have back labour. Midwives call this optimal fetal positioning, and it’s one of the easiest parts of birth preparation to start early.

Tripp wasn't in the most perfect position, so I was really strict about it. On a plane I would never lean back in my chair. On the sofa I was always lying on my side. At my desk I always sat forward. I knew I'd be mad at myself if I ended up with excruciating back labour because I'd been lying back on the sofa all the time.

Most nights I also did about 10 minutes of stretches before bed, with a yoga block and a little foam roller next to my bed. And I was eating really healthy, focusing on protein, and taking the right supplements.

I will die on the hill that you need to have a doula.

Even if you think, "I can speak my truth, my husband's going to support me," you need a doula. A doula and a midwife are totally different things, and I wanted all the support I could get, whilst keeping the room small.

We also did a childbirth class, and it was more for Hal than me. We were the only ones in the class having a home birth, and Hal's biggest takeaway was, "I'm really glad we're having a home birth." The number one fear in that room was having to fight to be listened to. That feels so f*cked up, that you have to fight to be listened to in a hospital.

You want women in the room who have been through it. One of my midwives has had seven or eight kids, and it makes me emotional thinking about it, because she has been where I am more times than I have. The same goes for postpartum. I love my husband, but he was not nearly as helpful as my mum, my girlfriends who'd had kids, or my postpartum doula, because they'd look at me and just know what I needed. You are not weaker for having a village. It's literally by design that you need one.

Most importantly, I had a very strong spiritual connection with my baby, Tripp. 

Throughout my whole pregnancy I was visualising him in the right position, speaking to him and telling him about our dream birth. We were a team. Sometimes I'd ask him to kick me in a certain spot on my belly, as a little test of "Am I really talking to him?" And he would literally kick me in that spot.

That gave me so much safety and self-trust, because I knew that if something was wrong, I would know. I'm seeing more and more women become so divorced from their intuition that they outsource their sense of safety to the hospital and their doctor. And their doctor is following the book; they're not asking, "Well, what does your body say?"

Your ability to hear your intuition is directly correlated to how clear your body is of programming, dysfunctional patterns, and trauma. If you're chronically stressed, overthinking, and outsourcing your safety, of course you can't hear your intuition, let alone feel safe to act on it.

I visualised my birth a lot and constantly affirmed to myself and to Tripp that his latch was perfect and breastfeeding was easy. I put that into my body as the only available reality for me. 

If you're reading that thinking, "I can say that to myself, but then all the fear creeps in," that's why I keep saying the biggest and best birth prep you can do is to heal your trauma.

If you don't feel like you can scream bloody murder and have the most wild tantrum in front of your partner, you are not going to feel like you can completely let go when you're giving birth. There were points where I was screaming at my doula and at Hal, giving them extremely strict instructions, because I was unapologetic about what I needed.

Our throat and our cervix are directly energetically connected. If you cannot speak your truth on a random Tuesday when it feels uncomfortable, you are not going to be able to speak your truth during birth.

The whole key thing with birth is opening your body, relaxing, surrendering, and getting out of your mind. You literally have to die during birth. I told my doulas before the birth: if you feel like I'm resisting, you need to tell me to die. That can be really hard for the control freak. But if you don't feel like you can surrender to that extent, that is the prep you need to be doing before you give birth.

If you haven’t yet, I highly recommend going back and listening to my home birth story and everything my husband and I did for conception prep.

If you’re working out how to prepare for birth, start with your body: move every day, watch how you sit, get a doula, and gather women around you who’ve done it before. Then do the deeper work, because the birth preparation that made the biggest difference for me was learning to feel safe enough to let go, long before I went into labour.