My first year as a registered nurse was spent in a gastro ward. I watched people die of bowel cancer or have so much of their stomach cut out that all they could eat was slop sucked up through a straw. The wounds were horrific, slashed across bellies, sometimes taking months to heal and the smells were like nothing I’d ever smelt. I lasted eight months before I started looking for a new position.

At the next hospital, a small local hospital close to where I lived, I worked in an intensive care unit. I thought maybe I could cope better with the acute controlled disasters than the long drawn out ones, but it only took two shifts for me to realise I wasn’t going to cope any better at all. On my second shift in intensive care, there were three patients dead before morning tea and then another by lunch time. I was involved in two of the resuscitations. Up until that point all of my resuscitations had been performed on dummies. It was a very different matter pumping up and down on someone’s delicate ribs, trying to get their heart started.

Afternoon tea saw all of the nurses from the morning shift sitting with the hospital psychologist around a plate of cakes. I remember sitting there stunned, wondering what the hell I’d signed up for. I looked around the tea room at these women who were eating their cake and drinking their coffee, they could have been any bunch of women, mother’s who’d just picked their kids up from school or office workers sitting on the train on their way home from work. There was nothing on their faces or in their posture to show that four people had died in front of them today. The smells weren’t as bad or wounds as confronting, but it had only taken me two days to know that ICU wasn’t the place for me either. I don’t know if it was then that the idea of midwifery started to appeal, the thought of gurgling babies and happy mums, or if it was something I’d always had stored away in the back of my mind. But it became clear that I was going to function much better as a nurse at the other end of the life spectrum, the beginning end.

So six months after I finished my compulsory first year of general nursing I applied and was accepted into the midwifery course at the hospital where I worked. My favourite part of midwifery was working with labouring women, coaching them through from those first early contractions to the final push that birthed their baby. It was often the births where the women tapped into their power and trusted their bodies that were the best. I’d walk away from those births on a high, often not coming down until days later.

I started to dream about home births, about looking after women in their own surroundings where they were comfortable and relaxed, where they could do things the way they wanted to. I wanted to encourage women to trust the power of their body, wanted them to be as amazed as I was with what their bodies could do. It was difficult though to keep my enthusiasm for empowered natural birth alive. The hospital where I was training worked on a high intervention rate. There were lots of inductions, epidurals, episiotomies, forceps and caesarean sections. There were emergencies, if not every day, then every other day. I saw a couple of babies die, some get very sick, mother’s who needed blood transfusions and other’s who needed to have their uteruses taken out.

My dreams of doing home births ran into a brick wall of fear. My rational mind could trace the increased rate of poor outcome back to an increased rate of intervention, but the other half of me, the side that gave into fear and intimidation started to question everything. ‘What would you have done if you’d been looking after this woman at home?’ ‘What would have happened to this sick baby if he’d been born at home?’

I stuck at my training, kept learning and getting very good at what to do in an emergency. When I finished I got a job doing night duty in a labour ward. The thought of home birth or at least working in a birth centre was still there, but it was shivering in the back ground now, scared to speak up, scared of what could happen. In the end I didn’t have to make a decision about which way I was going to go with my career, life sped up and took over as it often does. I fell pregnant unexpectedly, a condom left in a drawer instead of where it should have been. Pete and I shelved our plans for a trip to Europe and started saving instead for a mortgage. One year into our marriage and I was on the other side of the pregnancy fence.

I worked in labour ward through my pregnancy, looking after labouring women while my belly was growing. My previous focus on home birth changed to my own birth. I had it all mapped out in my head, no drugs, no forceps, no epidurals and definitely no episiotomies. Needless to say, Jack had very different plans for entering this world. His birth wasn’t the perfect natural birth I’d planned, in fact it was the opposite, calling on nearly every intervention short of a caesarean section. It was a very humbling experience which taught me a lot. It gave me both insight and empathy for the women I’d looked after who’d experienced difficult births.

After Jack was born, natural birth was still important to me, but it was no longer the be all and end all. I realised for the first time in my short career that birth, no matter how well it is planned, doesn’t always turn out the way you want it to. My passion became eduction. I wanted women to know about the choices they had in pregnancy and birth and what the possible benefits and down sides of those choices could be. And then I wanted to be there to support them in the choices they made.

Two years later I was pregnant again, this time with my eyes wide open. I was aware that babies tend to get bigger the more you have, aware that Jack had only just squeezed through my pelvis. There were no rigid birth plans written down or stuck in my head, just a conversation with Pete and with my obstetrician about what my ideal birth would be. Our experience with Noah’s birth couldn’t have been more different to that of Jack’s. It was the beginning of my journey, not as a midwife but as a mother, the beginning of my own personal discovery of empowered birth, a journey that continued right up until the birth of our fourth baby.

After the birth of baby number four I sat down to write Midwife Wisdom, Mother Love. By this time I was teaching antenatal classes and being constantly amazed at how much women didn’t know. There no longer seemed to be conversations about pregnancy and birth between the generations. Valuable information wasn’t being handed down. Stories from the heart, ones that tell the truth, tell what it’s really like are the stories that have power. When I sat down to write that was what I shared, my truth, my heart and the stories I’d been privileged enough to be a part of in other women’s lives. So that’s what I do today, I share my stories and those of other women’s through my books, my blog and public speaking, in the hope of empowering women to listen to their hearts, to make the choices that are right for them.