January - 17, 2025

Daryion’s Birth Story

For my second birth, I knew I needed a different experience — one where I would be supported in having an unmedicated birth. That led me to look for midwives, and I found My Family Birth Center. I wasn’t comfortable with a home birth, so the birth center felt like the safest option. I woke up at 2 a.m. with contractions two minutes apart. My husband called Loretta to say we wouldn’t make it to the birth center. She asked for our address, but she was already passing our street. She came in, assessed me, and said, ‘You’re having a baby right now.’ Ten minutes later, our baby was born at home.

We knew we’d return to the birth center. After our anatomy scan, Loretta called to say they thought they saw a cleft and asked me to come in for another ultrasound. I was devastated. My worst fear was needing hospital care and my baby ending up in the NICU. When I came in, Ellie, the office manager, reassured me right away. She told me, ‘This doesn’t mean you can’t have your baby here. We still want to support you.’ That was exactly what I needed to hear.

We confirmed our baby would be born with a cleft, but I knew I could still have the birth I wanted. The midwives connected me with a lactation consultant experienced in feeding cleft babies. Throughout my care, they treated us as the experts on our baby — asking what we needed and how they could help. We were meeting with specialists and surgeons, so they recognized that we knew our baby best.

One of my friends recently told me her birth was traumatic, but she brushed it off, saying, ‘It doesn’t matter because my baby was born healthy.’ I hear women say that all the time, and it’s so wrong. It does matter. Birth is your initiation into motherhood and your baby’s initiation into life. Trauma should never be the norm. It shouldn’t be how someone enters the world. Birth matters.