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Regrets.

Article Excerpt
THIS SUMMER I MET WITH several wonderful Canadian families at the Hollyhock Retreat Centre, on Cortes Island in British Columbia. I gave a five-day workshop in "Parenting: Finding Your Way," and parents came to the workshop understandably expecting to discover the essential rules of natural parenting. Instead, we talked about something much more difficult: becoming an authentic parent. We talked about the inevitable contradictions between our high parenting standards and real-life events.

Birth is one of those events. Mothering regularly publishes articles on homebirth and on midwife-attended births because these are the standards of care in countries with the best infant and maternal mortality statistics. When women don't receive this standard of care, it is not their fault. Often, they are simply not attended by practitioners who believe in normal birth.

Sometimes, however, even when everyone believes in normal birth, even when all the right attendants are in place and the best plans have been laid, emergencies happen. This can be hard to accept. A woman can at once feel glad that she is alive and wonder if there was something she could have done to prevent the emergency. She may feel that her body has let her down. She may even feel responsible for something that was out of her control.

Even when a woman understands that a birth situation was out of her control, she can still feel a great sense of loss that things did not turn out as she had hoped and planned. She may also be very angry at the situation and at the people who were present. Following the...

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