Episode 8: My Mother’s Birth Story

This episode is a little bit different. I'm in Perth at the moment visiting my family, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to sit down with my mum and talk to her about her birth story.

In the lead up to my son's birth late last year, my parents came over from Perth, and I remember asking my mum about her birth story. I found it a really empowering thing to listen to, and it gave me a lot of strength going into my own birth, because she went through something that was really hard and got through it. And I thought, that's in me. That birth story is in me.

Her mum had five kids, and my mum will tell you more about it, but she got through some really hard things as well. So that was a real sense of strength for me going into my own birth. And I thought, what a cool thing for women to talk to their mums about how they were born.

So I thought let's record my mum's birth story, and how I was born, and put it out there.

SHOW NOTES

What my mum remembers about her own birth, and what she was told growing up

• The long road to falling pregnant with me, and the blood tracking that finally got us there

• Finding out at nine weeks there were two heartbeats, and what happened at the sixteen week scan

• A pregnancy with no internet, just thick library books, and not really knowing what was going to happen to her body

• What she didn't want, more than anything, going into labour

• Waters breaking at a wedding, in stockings, with no panic at all

• A long induced labour, and the moment she was told it was caesarean or epidural

• Meeting me for the first time, and the eye contact she still remembers

• Going up to the ward the next day in her grandmother's pearls to talk to the women who were about to give birth