Has someone who loves you ever told you what your body would and wouldn't be able to handle? And did some part of you file it away as true?
Emily Lewenczuk had already done the research — for a client — and found that nobody in St. Louis would take twins at home. A few weeks later she was looking at two positive pregnancy tests of her own.
Emily is a wife to Josh, a mama of three, and a birth and postpartum doula and childbirth educator who was working in birth long before she had babies of her own. In this episode she shares her first homebirth — gestational diabetes managed through diet, a Christmas Eve baby ten days after her due date, and a postpartum transfer for a tear — and then her twin pregnancy: MoDi twins, a velamentous cord insertion, biweekly scans from sixteen weeks, and an MFM ready to induce her at thirty-eight weeks.
She also shares what she said back to him. The top goal of healthy mom, healthy baby, Emily told him, is the floor. It isn't the ceiling.
Her boys were born at home on the one day her midwife had said she couldn't come, with three midwives, a student midwife, a doula, her mom, her husband, and her almost-three-year-old in the house. Baby A arrived in the caul in about four pushes. Baby B came an hour later. Emily is honest about the bleeding that followed, about the fear she carried into that morning, and about what it meant to have her daughter in the room singing Jesus Loves Me while the midwives joined in.
If you've just found out you're carrying two, or you've been told there's only one way this can go, this conversation is for you.
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