I feel abandoned by my homebirth midwife and the more I think about how things went down, the more I’m irritated by her. Mark said she seemed completely clueless. I think I neglected to mention in my birth story that when she checked me Sunday afternoon there was some brown on her glove. Duh – in retrospect, this was meconium. She just said it was weird and asked if I had a yeast infection. Part of the reason I decided to go to the hospital was because she seemed stumped by the meconium I pushed out and wasn’t communicating to me about what that meant for my labor other than, “not good” and “baby will need lots of suctioning” over and over again. I know enough to know that a baby aspirating meconium can be a very serious problem. She did not really support me going to the hospital – her only concern was that I get the baby out of me vaginally and told me the hospital would automatically want to section me which definitely was not the case. All the staff was very vocally supportive of my VBAC until it was apparent he was having problems during contractions. Even then, I felt the choice was totally up to me and they would give me as much time as it was safe to make that decision. THEY communicated with me much more than she did, which was totally surprising.

Anyway, we called her while we were at the hospital and told her we would love for her to come see us and the baby (did not mention her coming to the hospital) and she countered saying she wouldn’t feel comfortable at the hospital, so when we were home she’d come. I’m glad I didn’t ask her to come with me in a doula role then. She probably would have holed herself up in the corner and mutter to herself like she did in my bedroom. The assistant (whom I do like a lot and feel sorry that she’s apprenticing under this midwife) did offer for one of them to go with me. The midwife never did even though she said she would if I wound up transferring.

She called one day last week and Mark reiterated we would love to have her over whenever. She said she was about to go to another birth, so maybe early next week (this week now) and she’d call us. On Sunday I got a text message from her asking how breastfeeding was going. I tried to summarize as best I could within the 255 character reply. I got a response with a bunch of useless advice. I’d already been through with her all I went through with Elias but she still treated me like I was clueless about breastfeeding because she doesn’t listen to anyone but herself speak.

That was the last we heard from her. We’ve told her twice she is welcome whenever to come visit and are met with excuses so I’ll be damned if I’m going to call her and beg her to come over.

I picked her even though our personalities clashed because of her experience and because my personality clashes with most people. Turned out to be a huge waste of $2600.

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