I inherited the belief that some labors are just “too long.”

My mother planned for home birth three times.

Her mother, and all her grandmothers before, had given birth at home.

My mother herself was a surprise twin!

But when it came to her actual births, despite her preparation and care from a midwife, she was not ready for three days of labor.

In each birth, she did what she knew to do: constant walking, castor oil, and finally: going to the hospital.

While my grandmother had a family doctor who made house calls for births, my mother was very familiar with hospitals, having worked in them as a chaplain.

I don’t know if it was her professional training that indoctrinated her into hospital birth culture, or if it was the hip thing of the time, or if it was her previous experience having her back broken and being saved by emergency medical services.

But each time, for both of my sisters and me, my mother labored for three days, went to the hospital, and gave birth surgically.

The home birth supplies stayed in the closet.

For a long time, I thought the way to avoid this fate was to just hope that my body would be different.

I believed that each of our bodies has an inherent blueprint, a standard practice for childbirth, and that we wouldn’t know it until it happened.

To some extent, this may be true.  But I didn’t know what alternatives there might have been, after those three days, to going to the hospital.

Of course, when a woman decides to go to the hospital, she should go.  Maybe there was something about her back injuries that made birth impossible.  Maybe just the trauma in that part of the body made it impossible.  Maybe it was just impossible enough, and surgical birth just accessible enough, that she didn’t have to face that block internally.

Maybe, if she’d known that days and days of intense sensations are perfectly normal in the process of birth, she wouldn’t have tried so hard to make it happen faster.

Maybe, if her midwife had known that there was nothing to worry about, she could have reassured her and let her rest instead of giving her a toxic cocktail.

Maybe, if she hadn’t been so isolated in the countryside, with no close wise women or peers, she could have received help and courage from their support and presence instead of seeking it in the hospital.

Maybe, if generations of birth wisdom hadn’t been wiped out and replaced with obstetric torture and control, my sisters and I would have had normal births.

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An undercurrent of the belief that some labors are just too long is that the medical system is always there to save you.

(A partner to that belief is that the police are our friends, but that may be an investigation for another time.)

I was raised thinking of hospitals as churches: both pure, righteous, and incapable of inflicting harm.

(The questionability of churches is another investigation for another time.)

In doula training, I encountered the need for “advocacy” in hospital births, but I still believed at my core that hospitals were places for good.

It wasn’t until I started attending births at hospitals that I understood how dangerous they are for birth.

My first time in a labor and delivery room, I arrived just after a precipitous birth, only in time to hear a doctor defending herself stoically to the enraged mother: “I didn’t know you wanted to be in a different position.”

My second time in a labor and delivery room, I arrived just after the mother had accepted that she would be going to surgery.

My third time in a labor and delivery room, I was there from the beginning and witnessed nurses scoffing and making fun of the mother as she labored around the room, calling her “yoga mom.”

By this time, I had already spoken with my doula teacher, a midwife, and decided to pursue midwifery training in the hope of participating only in the home birth sphere.  Anywhere but the hospital.

But at my first home birth meeting, the midwife brought up the same nonsensical fears that my hospital clients kept hearing from their doctors: big babies, and advanced maternal age, and pregnancy lasting beyond 40 weeks.

The fear instilled in midwives by the witch-hunting medical and legal system made them into agents of the same evil they had started out resisting.

Where was there to turn?

Although midwifery training had introduced the idea that labor and birth were really parts of the same contiguous process as pregnancy, I was also warned that clinical exhaustion was the emergent outcome of labors that were “too long.”

Everyone seemed to agree that birth was best left alone, that interventions were unwanted and mothers birthed best in private, familiar spaces.

But in practice, the hospital was the church: the ultimate authority.

Training for birth would be like training for a 50-mile hike, midwives would say.

But in practice, becoming exhausted to the point of anguish and suffering was unacceptable.

(Jesus suffered in the desert for 40 days, I was told as a child.  But did he take away our rites of passage as well as our sins?)

I see birth as a meaningful rite of passage, and parenthood as the most difficult and important job there is.  Therefore, its threshold should be difficult and transformative.

Summiting a mountain, or completing a 50-mile hike, is not absent of suffering and exhaustion.  The mind falters before the body really does.  The transcendence that comes after washes away all hopelessness.  Life is restored, and sweeter for the struggle.

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Now that I know that no labor is too long, I’m not afraid that my body will follow the same pattern as my mother’s.

I’ll know that I’m entering a portal.  I’ll call on my nearby sisters and wise women to support and believe in me.  I’ll know that time is an illusion.  And I’ll know what the hospital is for, should I absolutely need it, but not before.  I’ll willingly surrender to the container of my home and the universe to welcome the new souls through.