Have you ever lost something so specific that the people around you didn't even know to name it?
Marley Collins is a wife to her husband Clayton, mama to Maren and Lenora, and an engineer in Temecula, California who's currently doing part-time consulting and teaching herself to sew. Her family is from the Netherlands, where several of her aunts gave birth at home, so she knew she wanted a homebirth before she was ever pregnant.
In this episode, Marley shares two births. Her first, in Texas: her water broke at 39 and a half weeks, and what followed was the better part of two days of labor and pushing against a cervical lip that would not move, an unhurried transfer, and a cesarean. Her second, in California: an HBAC at home in the water, with her mother's hand in one of hers and her husband's in the other, and Marley reaching down to catch her own baby herself.
She's honest about the very specific grief that sat between those two births — not the surgery, not the transfer, but the fact that she missed Clayton becoming a father — and honest about the exact moment it lifted. She's also wonderfully clear-eyed about choosing her birth team, switching midwives mid-pregnancy, and knowing precisely where she stood.
In this episode:
- Why finding a homebirth midwife felt like a dating app
- Switching from a midwife trio to a solo midwife at 20 weeks
- What a cervical lip is, and everything her midwife tried
- What an unhurried, well-handled hospital transfer actually looks like
- The hardest part of her cesarean, which wasn't the surgery
- Finding her HBAC midwife through a raw milk co-op
- Why she hired a doula for her VBAC and then let her go at 35 weeks
- Learning to catch her own baby at a 37-week birth class in her own kitchen
- The dime-sized reality check she found funny instead of discouraging
- Her midwife's husband charting every word she said while pushing
Shey Munoz has given birth to both of her boys at home in South Florida, and both times her baby came faster than anyone planned — under five hours the first time, under two the second. Both times her husband set up the birth pool, and both times she never got in it.
In this episode Shey shares the midwife who made the decision simple, a first labor that was over by 8:18 in the morning, the fear she carried into her second birth after her twin sister gave birth in under two hours with no midwife in the room, and the one question her midwife asked that shrank that fear down to something she could actually answer. She also tells us about her mother's twin cesarean in India in the nineties, what she counted on to get through her contractions when she had nothing else in reach, and the work she does now helping mothers understand what's actually normal in the first year after birth.
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