Instead, she passed the baby through Laura’s legs and laid the baby on soft pads covering the floor below her.
After Neil and Valeriana caught the baby, Valeriana did not hand the baby directly to Laura. What I witnessed would forever change the way I view birth. Laura pushes on all fours as her husband and midwife prepare to catch the baby.Īs I photographed the moment Riley was born, I realized I was capturing something I’d never seen before. I knelt in front of her, her arms wrapped around my thighs, her camera in my hands. Valeriana Pasqua-Masback, her midwife, and Neil crouched behind her to catch the baby. She was on all fours, kneeling in the warmth of a brilliant, winter sunlight. Finally, Laura birthed her baby on her living room floor. She climbed out of the birth pool and soon she was pushing, hanging off the edge of a table, and even walking up and down stairs. Neil’s eight brothers and sisters had all been born at home in Ireland, and home birth had made immediate sense to Laura when I raised it as an option months earlier as she mapped out elaborate plans to arrive at the hospital as late as humanly possible.īut now, after 5 or so hours of strong, active labor on a cold, January morning, Laura’s contractions changed, and it was clear that she was pushing. I first observed this pause at a home birth last year in the Bronx, where I helped first-time parents Laura, 30, and Neil, 35, work through a rather zippy labor. I have been deeply affected by what I have been seeing with a simple shift that allows a baby and its mother to find their own way to each other, unhurried, through the moment of birth and the minutes and hours following. And literally it is a pause, a birth pause, if you will. And while I fully honor and appreciate the victory and beauty of the quick delivery of my babies onto my chest, I am now thinking rather differently about this typical midwife-passes-to-mom moment as I prepare to birth another baby in the coming months.Īs a woman who supports other women in labor now-a doula-I have been witnessing something lately that has given me pause. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined wanting to meet my children in any other way. I will never forget those crazy, slippery, stunning moments in which I first held each of my sons.
1 Both of my sons were born into the hands of midwives and passed directly to me. For more information about this article by Mary Esther Malloy, including birth pause birth stories, visit her website ( and blog ( I am a mother of two children and am now expecting my third child.