by Kerrie Thomas

Our homes are the places so many of our memories are created. It's where we sleep, experiment with our cooking, enjoy wine in our pyjamas, share tender hugs with our partners, nurse our children, potter around the garden, bathe in candlelight or laugh with friends. Our homes are our sanctuaries, places we can escape the busy hustle-bustle of the world around us and just 'be'. Our homes mirror who we are. Our trinkets, lovingly placed atop shelves and mantlepieces tell stories of our travels, our framed photographs capture the joy of special moments from our past, and gifts from dear ones represent the many special occasions been and gone, perhaps celebrated in that very room. Our homes are coloured with the rich, vibrant fabric of our lives and the lives of those close to us. No other home will ever share the same history, have the same smells and invoke the same emotions as our very own.

We feel safe and secure in our homes, amongst the comfortable mess and the soft murmur of happy background noise. We feel protected by the walls which seem strengthened by our paintings, or our children's grubby fingerprints. There is a phrase 'If only these walls could talk'.. what would the walls of your home say? Would they tell the tale of each and every knotch carved in your doorway architrave, measuring your children's growth? Would they sigh with happiness, as they recall the time you wrote moving poetry on a rainy day, or stayed up late reminiscing with an old school friend on the phone? Perhaps they would remember the day you got that veggie garden going, and how proud you seemed when it flourished and you enjoyed the produce. What would your walls say if they knew they could no longer protect you?

Giving birth to a child is undoubtedly one of the most incredible, life changing of events one can experience. Yet so many of us, high on unsubstantiated fear, venture outside of the safe, living memory-banks that are our homes, into hospitals or hospital birth centres to do so. We leave our precious space, the enveloping warmth of familiarity, to embark on a battle with strange people in a strange place in deep hope of coming out of the ordeal with our babies intact.

Evidence however, indicates birthing at home is a very safe, if not the safest option for both mothers and their babies, and there are many variables attributing to this, one of which is that oxytocin flows better at home. How many times to do we hear of women in the full throes of frequent, powerful contractions, but apon arrival at hospital those contractions suddenly cease or slow, only to create frustration and disappointment? This is the adrenalin counteracting that beautiful oxytocin- the adrenalin caused by a change of venue, a sudden, drastic change in environment, an enormous seperation in what should be a natural, continuous flow of labour. Who could blame our contractions for getting stage fright?

What is it that allows those amazing hormones to flow through our bloodstream at the perfect rate and consistency they were designed to? Is there something there that can't quite be captured by statistics and studies, something that reaches our very spirit right to it's core? As we spend so much time in our homes, surely elements of our being are absorbed and reflected all around us. Our joy and sadness, our desires and sorrows, our heart's callings and the food of our souls are all wrapped up in the house that protects us. The vibrating love of all who have visited and shared time with us, the whispers and the lullabies, remain peacefully awake, swirling through the fibres of all that surrounds us.

When we birth at home, that rich, vibrant fabric of our lives that on the surface may seem purely decorative, suddenly shows great strength. Our homes, our sacred homes, are what protect us and shelter us, not only from the physical inteference of people in the outside world, but from spiritual energies which aren't our own. I look forward to granting my walls the honour of birthing at home some day, leaning on the unique fabric of memories that exist within them and feeling my Blessingway beads at my fingertips, each carrying the heartfelt blessings of the women who threaded them here in my lounge room. And as my newborn baby takes her first breath, I will feel a sense of satisfaction, that my biggest memory of all has been created here, at home, where it belongs.