Home

As I am writing this I am looking at my suitcase ready to take a trip to Germany in the wee hours of Friday morning and this has me thinking about what 'home' means to me.

When my blog hits the world wide web at 8 am on Saturday morning I'll probably just be blinking my eyes open. 

I love waking up in my parents’ house. My mum and dad have a spare mattress that they put in the cosiest spot in the living room. It's in a little alcove. My mother always gets up first and she puts on the coffee maker. I can see her from my corner, my parents’ home is open plan. Observing her familiar frame, her posture, her walk and the sequence of actions that produce the perfect cup of Joe fills me with such love for my mother.

As the years pass by I am painfully aware that this won't last forever.

She loves spoiling me when I’m there.  At almost fifty years old, when I am having a sleep over, I am her baby again.

I get up from my cosy soft nest (there’s nothing like Mutti’s soft terry cotton winter bedsheets) and I join her in setting the table. 

Three placemats.

Three cups and saucers.

Three breakfast plates and knives.

We gather the homemade bread, butter, jam, sugar beet syrup (delicious), cheese and sausage meat (not for me).

A German breakfast table is something to behold.

Our movement wakes up my dad and he sits down with us. Breakfast time is my favourite, we ease ourselves into the day ahead. An hour can pass quickly with none of us having to be anywhere other than here - now. This time of the year there’s an Advent wreath on the table. The first of four candles will be lit and the shutters at the front of the house stay shut until after breakfast time.

Meantime in Belfast my baby will be opening her second advent parcel.

My parents live in an area of outstanding beauty. The facades of the houses are protected and the old fashioned shutters must not be changed so that the street right next to the monastery looks like it belongs in a different time. The back of the house has automatic roller shutters, quite the contrast. Those are open and look onto the most beautiful garden which is one of three gardens situated in the square-shaped courtyard framed by the houses in the neighbouring streets. Underneath the gardens there’s an underground parking lot that doubles up as a bunker in case disaster was to ever strike. The bunker can be sealed with a steel door about a foot and a half thick and bolted shut with bolts that have the circumference of a wine bottle. The doors that lead from the parking area to the living area are also heavy duty metal doors that can be locked shut. 

It’s incredible, truly!

Would it make a difference? I don’t know. It might just be one of those fixtures of modern society that help us evoke the illusion of safety, like an ultrasound scanner or a CTG monitor. 

For many years this trip represented a visit 'home'. I could say without feeling conflicted in any way that Germany was 'home', even though I had made a family of my own and in many ways because of it. 

I had never intended to settle in Northern Ireland. I came in 1998 for one year and I met Gerald. Within five months of knowing him I was expecting his baby. We just rolled from there. We promised each other that the baby would never be the reason to stay together and that we would take it day by day. We never got married but I have often thought of this promise as something akin to a wedding vow. Being pregnant in Northern Ireland was hard. I felt like a fish out of water. I longed to speak my own language and I missed my family. My two best friends were in Germany and I wanted nothing more than hang out with them. They understood me without me having to explain myself. 

Being pregnant also meant that I was in my GP practice to see the midwife regularly. I was in disbelief at the standard of the health care service. 'At home' I already knew that I would have wanted to use the local midwife led service and have a homebirth. Midwife practices in Germany are typically bright, open and clean spaces maybe with beautiful wooden floors, big windows, a garden space and birth pools for MLU births.

It wasn't like this in Northern Ireland then and it still isn't. The worst space I have ever seen here working as a midwife was a tiny stuffy box room with no windows, a desk that had the drawers hanging off and smudged walls. This is where we did our antenatal clinic, this is how pregnant women and their babies are valued.

'Just get on with it!'

I contribute this discrepancy to the fact that in Germany midwives can have their own private practices and you wouldn't get away with this type of substandard environment if it was your private business. 

A homebirth wasn't really on the cards for me either. I considered it briefly but didn't find much support from the community midwife. In all honesty the apartment I lived in didn't feel like 'home'. It wasn't comfortable, it was a sh***y rental with Superser mobile gas heaters and I was due to give birth in November. I am not sure that the benefits that are normally attributed to homebirth would have applied to me given that my living situation was so far from making me feel safe. 

As I saw it at the time nothing was good enough 'here'.

I remember making an antagonising comment to a bus driver once about how awful the bus service was 'here' and he suggested that I would take myself back to where ever I  came from. 

The man was right. If you don't like it, just go! My comment was rude and I had overstepped. The option of going home had always been available to me and I chose to stay. As long as I was here I would have to accept that things are just different here. I stopped complaining and appreciated the differences...until we would finally get it together. We  just had to sort out x,y or z and then we would wave Northern Ireland goodbye to find a better life. Besides, I wanted my child to grow up close to her grandparents and to my extended family.  

Gerald was on board in principle and he committed to learning German when Lena was just starting primary school. We decided to all try to speak German at home so that Gerald could learn. Lena's response was so funny. Every time her dad spoke German she cried hysterically. 'Noooooo!!!!' She insisted that German was my language and that her dad was not allowed to speak it.

There were other reasons to stay 'for now' and I decided I would pursue my dream of becoming a midwife. I applied the first year there ever was a direct entry program but didn't get in. My crowd was the third ever 'Direct Entry Midwifery' intake in Northern Ireland. 

I have often thought that describing this program as 'direct entry' was somewhat dismissive of all the experiences we had had prior to embarking on the journey. Most of us were mature students who had had a career prior to this and though we didn't have any experience of nursing, we all brought many valuable experiences to the profession. 

As I was going through my training, I was making friends. Midwifery forms a bond between the women who practice it and I finally started to feel a sense of belonging. All that was missing was a permanent home, we needed to buy a house. When I qualified and got a job I was finally earning enough to start looking but...the housing boom was in full flow. We were outpriced within months. We looked at moving to Canada, Australia or even New Zealand. We thought an English speaking country would make it easier for Gerald to find work. I think the years of trying to figure out where we might belong were the most difficult for us as a family and then the housing market crashed.

In 2012 we finally moved into our own house.

Slowly our house became 'home'. I feel safe here. There's nowhere else I would ever dream of giving birth if I was pregnant now. Not just because I know that the outcomes of The Lancet Study ( ‘Maternal outcomes and birth interventions among women who begin labour intending to give birth at home compared to women of low obstetrical risk who intend to give birth in hospital: A systematic review and meta-analyses’, published by Reitsma et al. in 2020) suggest that it is safer than hospital for 'low risk' mothers and their babies. 

Women who gave birth at home are more likely to breastfeed their babies, less likely to have major tearing of their birth passage, less likely to bleed so heavily that a blood transfusion is required, less likely to have a caesarean section or instrumental birth and more likely to find their birth a positive experience.

Of course!

Many parents are surprised by the findings of The Lancet Study. For many people hospital represents safety and they are surprised that this is actually not the case. 

Have you asked yourself recently what 'home' means to you? What would it mean to you to give birth to your child in your own home right in the the heart of the family?

Now that I finally have made a home in Northern Ireland, there is no valid reason for me personally that would have me go to hospital to give birth. I associate hospital with handing over my bodily autonomy to strangers who are pushed to the limit by a dysfunctional system. Practitioners whose expression of 'caring' may mean making an effort to coerce me into compliance and they would do it with good intentions (or at least they'd be convinced that they are doing the right thing). My personal values are so juxtaposed to those of medical midwifery as a whole that I would depend wholly on finding a practitioner with a commitment to non-judgement and kindness and with a willingness to uphold unconditionally the concept of 'informed consent'. Many practitioners are afraid to do that.

In contrast, home means safety, warmth, love and joy and though it has taken a while, I am happy to report that I now no longer 'fly home' when I go to Germany. I go to visit my parents whom I love and who help me remember what 'home' used to mean to me when I was still carving out my identity and my place in the world. I feel lucky and blessed that I got to grow up in such a safe environment and I know that this cannot be taken for granted.

I am sending you love and light, particularly if you are finding reflections on 'home' confronting or if you are living in parts of the world where your home is under threat or has been lost.

References:

Reitsma, et al. Perinatal or neonatal mortality among women who intend at the onset of labour to give birth at home compared to women of low obstetrical risk who intend to give birth in hospital: A systematic review and meta-analyses. EClinicalMedicine, 2019

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(20)30063-8/fulltext