FURNIS HING
T HE HOMEBIRTH
By Brian Goedde
After a long hug and a series of giddy pictures holding the pregnancy test stick (later deleted because we agreed the association with pee was “kinda gross”), Emily gave me pause by saying that she wanted to give birth at home. She had mentioned this before,
but I had only smiled and nodded in response, as if she had said something in a different language.
Which, in a way, she had. Homebirth? Doula?
“But we don’t own our home,” I said, avoiding the point. “It’d be a rented-house-birth.”
“What’s with ‘owning a home’ these days?” Emily said. It’s true that it had been on my mind. We
had just gotten married, and especially now with a child on the way, wasn’t a man supposed to provide?
“It’s like some male version of the biological clock,” she said.
Touché. But a homebirth sounded like it would have a significant role for me, and no man was supposed to deliver no baby. Or—some of them were, but they’re called doctors. In hospitals. Where babies
are born. Plus, what would we tell our landlady?
