Digital Filmmaking

The Creation of BIRTH

February 20, 2009 February 20, 2009 My interest in childbirth began with the birth of my first son. As I lay alone, laboring in a sterile hospital room (my husband was watching Thursday Night at the Fights down the hall), the nurse screamed at me, “RELAX!” Every once in a while she’d reappear, scowl and say something like, “You’re going to be here until 2 or 3 in the morning, so just relax.” This made me even more tense, because it was only 10 p.m and the contractions were already hard. One hour later, I was wheeled into the delivery room, given a spinal and became numb from the waist down. During the birth of my first baby, the most important day of my life, the two doctors talked to each other about their golf game. They never once acknowledged my existence. As soon as my baby was born, he was whisked away, before I even had a chance to hold him. I didn’t see my son for another 10 hours. To this day, I tell my first son that he was my teacher, the one who motivated me to search for a better way to bring a baby into the world and to share that knowledge with others. During my second son’s birth, with a new doctor, I was an active member of the birth team, along with my husband, the nurses and the doctor. Immediately after my son was born, I felt an elation and a satisfaction like I’d never experienced before. Just minutes later he was handed to me and lay skin-to-skin in my arms. Neither of us was groggy because we gave birth naturally. A year after my second son was born I became a certified childbirth educator, and later started my own childbirth program in a rural setting in Trinity County, California, right by the Oregon border. Now, years later, I continue to feel passionate about natural childbirth and its importance to all of us, both individually and to our world.  On March 19, 2009, at 7 p.m. in Studio C on CDIA’s Waltham campus, I will screen my first documentary film, called BIRTH.