Why I Teach Birth First Aid
I was not trained first in emergency. I was raised first in trust. I grew up in the mountains of Ceres, about an hour down a dirt road from the nearest town. We cooked on fires. We had no electricity. If you called an ambulance, you would wait at least an hour. So we learned to take care of ourselves. My mother grew medicine in her herb garden. She dispensed remedies to the local people. We learned first aid simply because it was necessary. I remember sitting at twelve years old with tweezers, picking glass out of a man’s scalp. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just part of living far from everything. That was my first education in steadiness. My mother became a traditional midwife almost by accident. The first birth she attended was a breech. She turned the baby in labour and the baby was born well. After that, the local women called her when they were in labour… I have no memory of anything “going wrong” at those births. Birth happened in the middle of the night.And life went on. That imprint shaped me. So when I teach Birth First Aid, I need to be clear: The focus is not emergency.The focus is physiology. In most cases, birth unfolds beautifully when the mother feels safe and unobserved, when adrenaline is low, when the environment is right. But nature also teaches us that not every flower opens. Not every peach ripens. There is a small percentage of mothers and babies who require some help at birth. Over the years, and across roughly four hundred births, there have been rare moments when I needed to step in. And I have been deeply grateful for the muscle memory in my body when that happened. Not to control birth.Not to manage it.But to gently bring things back onto their path. Birth First Aid, for me, is about this middle path: Deep trust in physiology.Clear understanding of normal.And the steadiness to respond when something truly requires action. Using your head.Using your heart.Following your gut.And when needed — using your hands. That is why I teach this course. Not because birth is dangerous. But because birth is powerful. And power deserves steadiness. Join us for the next cycle of the Birth First Aid course:...
Read MoreBreech Painting
I was 23 and pregnant with my 2nd child (my first daughter) when I painted this. She was sitting breech and I painted this to honour how she had chosen to stay close to my heart while in utero. I had been surprised and shocked when I had gone for my single check up at my local hospital for back up for my home birth when the doctor who saw me told me I would need to have a caesar if my daughter opted for staying breech. It was the first time I had heard of this protocol (it was 2003 so I suppose the Hannah Breech trial was fairly fresh). On the farm where I had grown up, my mother had attended breeches and twins with no issues. It was the first time I had heard of someone saying a caesar was necessary for this variation of normal. I chatted to my midwife about it and she suggested homeopathic remedies and inversions to try to encourage my daughter to flip. I did this for about a week and one night while I was lying in bed about to go to sleep I was overcome with extreme nausea as my daughter did a big movement. When I went to visit my midwife the next day she was able to confirm that my daughter was now head down. She must have turned head down during that big movement. I don’t know if she was meant to have been born breech or if she would have flipped on her own in the end but when I went into labour a couple of weeks later she decided on a posterior position that challenged me with strong labour and was born facing sunny side. In her own way she still needed to be born...
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