In this episode of The Birth Pause, midwife Chloe Campbell sits down with Nora just weeks after a home birth, to revisit the labor from the inside out. What she'd expected to be an 18-hour labor stretched into 36, moving in the \"spiraling\" pattern Chloe describes — contractions tightening and loosening in waves rather than climbing in a straight line, partly, they suspect, because Orly had been breech earlier in pregnancy and needed to negotiate her way into position. They trace the turning points: a breakdown into sobbing that let go of tension she hadn't known she was holding, an hour on nitrous oxide that softened the edges without touching the sensation itself, and a shift in company mid-labor — one support person's steady presence giving way to a friend's playful energy — that Nora ties back to something she calls her \"mother wound.\" They talk candidly about what labor actually felt like against the online narratives that frame birth as blissful or psychedelic, why she chose a home birth not out of fear of hospitals but a wish to keep things as uncomplicated as possible, and the disorientation of pushing without quite letting herself anticipate meeting her baby. It closes on the birth itself — her partner catching Orly, the first cry, and what it meant to become a mother on her own living room floor
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