Stay-At-Home Mom, Indeed

Home-birthing isn’t only strange and magical—it requires some covert-operation skills, Madeline Holler writes in Babble. After finding she preferred an attending midwife in the birth of her first child, Holler found using one for her second to be illegal in Missouri, where she'd moved. As such, she found, "there were trade-offs in going off the grid to have a baby."

“Sure, flaxseed oil and white oak bark alleviated constipation and hemorrhoids," Holler writes. "But for a rash on my breasts, why yogurt in my bra? Couldn't I just use an ointment?” After a successful birth, the fate of the placenta also took unexpected twists: "Most of my moms bury them," the midwife said. "Placentas are great fertilizer." (More midwife stories.)