Hannah Brennan

I lower myself, heavy and hot, into my favorite yellow armchair.

As I sit, my very large, very pregnant stomach weighs heavy on my thighs.

I am huge.

I haven't been able to see, let alone reach my swollen, tingling feet for weeks.

and it is a hot, humid, sweaty, sticky July in Virginia.

I'm at home waiting to give birth to my first child.

My midwife is soon to arrive with her senior student for what has become her daily visit because I am three weeks past my due date.

Three weeks.

What are they going to say today?

When I first became pregnant, my husband and I did some research and spoke to other mums.

It was 2017, and we discovered that in the USA, medical intervention is common in hospital births, and one in three ends in cesarean section.

That is major abdominal surgery.

Some people said that it wasn't advisable to have a home birth at my ripe old age of 41.

But I really wanted an undisturbed, unmedicated birth at home.

And my husband was in full support.

At around four months pregnant, we found our midwife.

This woman had been delivering babies longer than I had been alive.

It's no exaggeration to say that I loved and trusted her from our very first meeting.

My husband and I began monthly prenatal sessions with her and each one was over an hour.

We focused not on charts or measurements but on conversations about my life.