Shocking the Water

Heard of that statement? We did this lately when we clorinated the well. People with swimming pools and hot tubs do it with regularity, on an as needed basis. It means putting enough strong chemical into the water to get rid of bacteria and things you don’t want. Things that make it smelly and unhealthy.

I was thinking of a different form of shock, but in a way that is what this effect does…. if it doesn’t kill you, it will certainly purge. But I speak of ideas, and not the actual kind…. just so you don’t get carried away with the analogy as this unfolds.

I used to somewhat enjoy delivering little shock values into conversations with people…. not deliberately for effect so much as knowing that what I was about to tell them was going to set them on their ear. Usually because they just totally didn’t expect it.

I was able to do this because I look fairly ordinary. Normal. (heheh, I’m laughing already). I don’t seem in the shocking category. But when you have ten children that is a number one category guaranteed to shock. I always say it very evenly, the way you say one or two…. sometimes I would build it up… “You don’t really want to know”….”oh yes, how many”…now they are expecting maybe a four or five. Then you look them straight in the eye and say simply “ten”…. Watch the whole thing drop from there as they try to recover themselves. They weren’t expecting that. Then the comments come… it can range from “That’s great” to “Don’t you know what causes that?” to sometimes a wistful ” I wish I’d had more now”. If you get enough of a conversation you can get into all sorts of avenues of communication….

And the next level of shock, which has lost a great deal of value now is Homeschooling, but it is still good for stopping people in their shoes when layered on top of the “ten”.

I reserve the last one for if I feel the person can take it, or if it seems useful, or if I’m in the mood to get them going for a laugh, because by that point we’re laughing together while they make fun at my expense or at their state of shock…. and that is …”Yes, I had the last few at home” hahahahaha. Most people are a bit bug-eyed and then a little taken back on that one. It cuts a bit close to their sense of what’s sane.

And that is what all this is actually seguing into…. home birth can be a very wise and sane choice. It just is so prejudiced against that most women can’t really entertain the thought.

I was initially the same way… which is a pity, because my easiest times and the most benefit for me would have been to have home births from early on. And that is true for most healthy normal women.

That still means regular pre-natal care, since homebirth is not simply a carefree choice. It is rather a choice in which the woman takes on the responsibility of facing that there are certain risks to birthing. They just aren’t all in the homebirth choice- in some ways a hospital birth can be more risky, but the risk is transferred to the medical environment and the caregivers. And in home birth choice you face your part a bit more squarely. It is something I end up advocating for all women no matter what birthing choice they are making. Be informed. Be prepared. Take responsibility.

You and the baby will be better for it.

I am not at all evangelical about homebirth, athough you almost can’t help sounding like it when you give any advocacy at all to that alternative. Just because you have to overcome so much mythos that the modern lifestyle has imbued it with. But having had both types, hospital and home, -the hospital was much more difficult to deal with and recover from… and I ended up becoming a high risk by the time I decided to homebirth. I only had my last three at home.

As in homeschooling when I first launched out, home birth had been-and still is- something you can be prosecuted for. I would like to see this birthing choice attain the same freedom -with the necessary, but ONLY the necessary- regulations. Of course, I live in the semi-Medieval state of Ohio. Other places in the country are much more kind to women having a reproductive right to give birth in their own homes.

I’ll write more on this later, but will end with this: if you research the information on this, it might surprise you to see how beneficial homebirth can be for the majority of women.

-I published this with typos, sorry- hope they are all fixed now.