Four home births. Five babies. One woman who was in the room every single time — my mother. She’s a doula, a Bradley Method childbirth educator, and the reason I trust my body enough to birth at home, unmedicated, four times over. Here’s some of what got me through it: She was my childbirth educator, the teacher I sat in class with for months before I ever labored. The visualizations and breathing she taught me for birth were the same ones she’d been walking me through since I was a kid, for a stomachache, a bad day, a broken heart. None of it was new. It was just finally being applied to the biggest thing I’d ever ask my body to do. She got all five of my babies latched correctly within an hour of being born. No lactation consultant on call. She already was one. She was always just a phone call away, ten minutes from me, and she moved in with me for two weeks after every single birth, closing her practice each time so I had her undivided attention. She could read my face and te...