Entry #15 • December 16th, 2025

Before I start, I want to say this clearly. My birth experiences are not a judgment on anyone else’s experiences, choices, hopes, or desires. Birth is deeply personal. There is no “right” way to do it. What I’m sharing here is simply my story, told from my own lived experience.

I’ve been spinning my wheels trying to get started on this entry. Distracting myself every which way. Not for any specific reason, other than I knew this one was going to be a long one to work through.

Over the past couple of entries, I asked you to fill out a short survey. Thank you so much to those of you who took the one minute to answer it. It was incredibly helpful in understanding why you keep opening these emails.

I’ll be honest. Had I not made the hires I did for the store back in the spring, I wouldn’t have the time to dedicate to this Just Me series. This is something I’ve thought about doing for years. I just wasn’t sure what form it would take. Written, video, podcast. I knew I wanted to do it, but I didn’t have the bandwidth to execute it.

I am so grateful for the four new people I was able to bring into the store to help run the sales floor. It freed up time I desperately needed, and time I didn’t even know I would need with all the changes our family would end up walking through.

I’ve mentioned this before, but putting an entry together takes a significant amount of time. Anywhere from six to twelve hours, depending on length. So it really helps to know where these entries are landing well and where they may not be. Thank you for the feedback. Truly. And if you still haven’t filled out the survey, here’s the link one last time. I really want to hear from you more silent readers...please. Then I’ll leave you alone.

This past week was one of my kids’ birthdays ❤️

My kids are the absolute sweetest when it comes to celebrating one another. They hype up the sibling whose birthday it is. Everyone is excited for that kid. It’s one of those simple things that feels incredibly special.

The reason I’m even mentioning the birthday is because an overwhelming number of you replied “yes” when I asked if you’d like to read my birth stories. I love that. I love that there is an interest in learning about other people’s birth experiences. I love that our society is becoming more open about something so monumental in every single life. After all, we’ve all experienced birth at some point, considering we were all born.

As I’ve sat with that resounding yes, I’ve played out different ways I could actually share these stories. Would I share them one after another for the next eight entries? One per month? Share a story only when it’s that child’s birthday?

Part of this Just Me series is about bringing you through an experience in storytelling, so I don’t take lightly how or when I share things.

At first, I was convinced I’d simply share a birth story on the child’s birthday. Which means I technically owe you one for this past week. But as I started to think through sharing this particular story, it felt out of order. I can’t start with my seventh child’s birth. There are six stories that led me there.

It only feels right to start at the beginning of my story, not jump in mid-chapter.

So here’s the plan. I’m going to walk you through my kids’ birth stories one at a time as birthdays come up over the next year. The story won’t necessarily match the birthday we’re celebrating in the house that week. It will simply be the next story in order.

Nineteen and Newly Married

Let’s turn the clock back to May of 2005.

I had just turned nineteen three days before I said “I do” to my husband. My partner in this crazy life. My best friend. The one who has been there through every up and down. I know, it sounds cheesy, but he truly is my favorite person.

One day, you’ll get that story too. But that one is way off in the future. I need to see the Just Me series grow a whole lot more before I dish that one out. It’s basically the making of a Hallmark movie, and it deserves a wide readership.

A month after getting married, I got pregnant. I figured it would happen fast. That was real fast. Which meant that ten months after getting married at the age of nineteen, I would be having my first baby. Also at nineteen. Wild.

At the time, we were living in Mexico. My husband is from Monterrey, and we had planned to spend the rest of our lives there. I “found out” I was pregnant purely based on how I felt. Around week five, I was nauseous and suddenly couldn’t handle certain food smells. I never peed on a stick (took a pregnancy test). I didn’t understand why I would. It was very obvious I was pregnant.

And man, was I sick.

The heat in Mexico made it worse. I felt exhausted from the heat, the pregnancy, and the constant nausea. Cooking dinners was miserable. The smells alone would tip me straight into throwing-up land. I’m a puker. I learned pretty quickly that I “felt better” (and that’s debatable) if I just threw up instead of fighting it.

We were young, carefree, and kid-free, and I definitely took advantage of the incredible food around us. Alberto and I went out to eat almost once a day. It was awesome. No pressure to cook, and the food in Mexico is endlessly delicious.

However, quick aside...there’s a story that still makes me laugh to this day.

Early in my pregnancy, I wanted Taco Bell so badly. Which is especially funny considering Taco Bell is very much not Mexican food and absolutely does not exist in Mexico. But wow, did I want it.

Around that same time, due to some immigration complexities, one of my sisters-in-law (who was in middle school at the time) needed to get back to the U.S. She had to cross the border with an American adult chaperone. I volunteered as tribute…on one condition.

Taco Bell.

My in-laws promised to compensate me with all the Double Deckers (long-live my 90s childhood) I could consume. So I hopped on a bus with my sister-in-law, got her across the border, back home to Dallas, and then indulged myself in Taco Bell glory.

It was everything I wanted it to be. And it put a whole new twist on the Taco Bell slogan: Make a run for the border.

Back home in Mexico, I moved through the pregnancy kind of free-floating. I didn’t fully know what I wanted, and I definitely didn’t know what I was doing. But that’s okay. You’re not supposed to know what you’re doing when you’ve never done something before. I understood that, even at nineteen.

I didn’t get amped up about things. I could exist inside my reality and be content there. Looking back now, twenty years later, I realize what a gift that is. There is real peace in simplicity. Yes, there was ignorance, but it wasn’t all ignorance. I truly could be content living simply.

Around fifteen weeks pregnant (for those of you, Dear Readers, who aren’t well-versed in pregnancy length, the average pregnancy is forty weeks, so fifteen weeks puts you early into the second trimester, heading toward the halfway mark at twenty weeks), I figured I should probably find a medical provider and start getting a feel for what labor and delivery might entail.

By seventeen weeks, we found a doctor and went in for my first appointment. I can’t recall her name. Dr. Z something, maybe. I didn’t know much about birth at that point, but I did have a very short list of expectations:

1. I wanted a female doctor.
2. I wanted a natural birth without medication.

I honestly don’t even know how or why that second one mattered so much to me. I think part of it was that I’ve always kind of bucked the system. Whatever was considered conventional, I tended to lean the other direction. I suppose you could call it counter-cultural. That applied to pretty much everything in my life. I don’t know why, but considering I’m still wired this way, I’m guessing it’s just an innate personality trait. We can unpack that in future entries.

So here I was: nineteen, married, living out of the country, pregnant with my first child, seeing a doctor for the first time already in my second trimester, with just those two expectations.

The appointment itself went fine. For some reason, I was convinced it was going to be a violating experience, and I don’t fully know why. I just knew it wouldn’t be comfortable. Somewhere deep inside, I believed that as a woman, as you grew older or moved into more “mature” phases of womanhood, you also lost privacy and autonomy along the way.

It’s interesting to write that out now. I’ve never really tried to put words to it before, but I can still feel it clearly. That belief is honestly why I put off going to the doctor for so long. It all felt invasive.

And I want to say this clearly: I have never experienced sexual trauma. I’m naming that because it would be reasonable to assume that’s where this fear came from. And if that is part of your story, I am so deeply sorry. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t your fault. I wish it had never happened to you. I’m proud of you for continuing to get up and keep going. I don’t say that lightly. I truly mean it.

The doctor scheduled us to come back monthly, and that became the rhythm. Each visit included an ultrasound. Today, I would never agree to that many ultrasounds. That’s far more interference than I’m comfortable with now. But back then, I thought it was kind of amazing. I got to keep seeing my baby.

She even recorded one on VHS, which is hilarious to think about now. I wonder where that tape is.

I remember the first time we heard the heartbeat. That was the moment it really hit my husband. I remember thinking, Yeah…this is real. I feel it every day in the sickness and the exhaustion. I was glad it became real for him in that moment.

Seeing our baby at those appointments was surreal. It was hard to wrap my mind around the fact that there was an actual person growing inside me. Like…what? The mystery of pregnancy, especially the first time, is just unbelievable.

As each month passed, probably around our third appointment with the doctor, the question of birth came up. I told her (really, my husband told her, since my Spanish was still pretty limited) that I wanted to have the baby naturally.

She responded with, “Okay…but why? Why would you want to do it that way?”

Oh boy.

The moment she said that, my heart sank. I knew instantly this wasn’t going to work. She wasn’t asking out of genuine curiosity. It felt condescending.

At that point, my husband and I were already trying to decide where we would have the baby in Monterrey. There were a few hospitals, and we were leaning toward the one where he had been born. But after that interaction with the doctor, and as we started digging into how the billing process worked for hospital births in Mexico, we grew more and more uneasy with the idea of delivering there.

We weren’t deciding between “home birth” and “hospital birth.” That question hadn’t even crossed our minds. We were simply trying to figure out whether we should have the baby in Mexico or in the U.S.

The more we researched, the less sense it made to give birth in Mexico. I didn’t know what labor and birth would actually be like, but I knew I wanted to do it without medication. Being in a hospital where all the care providers spoke Spanish, combined with a tight time clock and rising costs by the hour, felt like too much pressure.

Experiencing something already intense (thank you, Hollywood, for wildly misrepresenting what birth actually looks like) in a foreign setting felt deeply unsettling.

So in the third trimester, we made the decision to come back to Colorado, where I’m from, to have the baby. My mom had already started researching my options here, knowing I had no U.S. income and no established care outside of my Mexican doctor.

My due date was March 2nd, and I came up to stay with my parents in early February of 2006. My husband would follow later in the month, since he needed to work as long as possible.

We were entrepreneurs from the very beginning of our lives together. There was no vacation pay. No maternity or paternity leave. It’s funny to even type those words like they might have been an option. Yeah…right. 😂

We had started our own English school, teaching English as a foreign language. Our students were incredibly dedicated and came every day for an hour. We had just over fifty students. We were both teaching, plus a third teacher who worked with us as well.

To make the trip work, we had to bring in an American friend who lived in Mexico to help cover our classes while we were gone. Alberto made it to Colorado on February 21st, and we had return tickets back to Mexico on March 10th.

Did you catch that?

We had return tickets for a week after my due date.

Absolutely laughable.

But I had no idea. I genuinely thought it made sense. Of course I’d have the baby by my due date, and then I’d just hop on a couple of planes back to Mexico. Easy. *snort laughs*

Things Start to Narrow

As soon as I arrived in Colorado, I started seeing a midwife named Janet at a local clinic called Mesa Midwives. This group was a pillar in our community. They delivered babies at the local hospital, which at the time was the only hospital doing deliveries, making it my only option.

My initial appointment with Janet went well. She was kind and had a wealth of experience. Because I was in my final month of pregnancy, they had me come in weekly for quick checkups to make sure everything was progressing normally.

Ironically, I received a jury summons with a court date in February. It worked out perfectly since I was already home.

I’m one of the weird ones who actually gets excited about jury duty. I want to sit on a jury. So I showed up at the courthouse on the scheduled date and…my number got picked. WHAT.

I was called up to the jury box, where they start asking questions to rule people out. Keep in mind, I was about thirty-eight weeks pregnant. Very much full-term. Very much in the “this baby could come at any moment” window.

The judge asked, “Does anyone here have a medical condition that could keep them from serving on the jury?”

Reluctantly, I raised my hand. “I’m nine months pregnant and due to have a baby any day.”

And just like that, I was dismissed.

I was sad. But also…relieved. I was nervous about being on a jury while expecting my first baby any day. I had no idea what labor would feel like or how fast it would happen. I kept imagining how mortifying it would be if my water broke while I was sitting in the jury box. Honestly, nightmare fuel. 😂

Now though? Eight kids in? I’d absolutely serve on a jury at thirty-eight weeks pregnant. Sounds like an exhilarating challenge.

Around that same time, at one of my midwife appointments, they decided to do an ultrasound. They were concerned because I was measuring small for my gestational age. During the ultrasound, the baby measured just fine, but they said my amniotic fluid appeared low.

They told me they wanted to check again in a few days and also do a non-stress test to see how the baby was coping. These were all brand new phrases to me. I didn’t really know what to think, but I figured they knew what they were talking about, so I went along with the plan.

A few days later, I went in for my follow-up appointment. That day, I met with a midwife named RuthAnn instead of Janet.

As we were sitting there, RuthAnn said I looked really familiar to her. I honestly don’t remember how we figured it out, but somehow we did.

Ten months earlier, I had my wedding reception at a friend’s house. It was May, the weather was perfect, and the reception flowed both inside and outside. We wanted our wedding to be a cross-cultural experience, weaving together Mexican and American elements. While traditional dancing isn’t our thing, we did have folklórico dancers perform in the front yard during the reception.

At the exact same time, the neighbors next door were hosting their annual Kentucky Derby party.

The folklórico performance caused such a stir that a bunch of neighbors wandered over to watch from the sidewalk and nearby yard. If you look closely at this photo from my wedding, you'll see in the background there’s a woman in red with her arms folded.

That woman is RuthAnn.

Really.

She was at the Kentucky Derby party next door. That’s why I looked familiar to her. She recognized me from my wedding reception ten months earlier. I didn’t even realize she was in my wedding photos until I went home and looked closely after that appointment.

And in that moment, I knew. I wanted her to be the midwife who attended my birth. We had this instant point of connection, and it just felt right.

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Okay. I’m going to pause the story here.

Not because it’s finished, but because this feels like the right place to stop. The pieces are set. The midwife is chosen. The waiting has begun.

It’s late on Monday night as I’m writing this (actually, it's 12:50am on Tuesday), and I like these entries to land in your inbox on Tuesday mornings. Rather than rush the next part, I want to give it the space it deserves.

So we’ll pick up here next week.

With labor. With birth. With the moment everything changes.

Thanks for being here and reading along.

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-Just Me[gan]

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