The painful challenge of birth

Well, here I am, returning to the birth of Quaid, to expand more on the birth experience. I feel so fortunate that I birthed all three children here in New Zealand, a country that endorses Lead Maternity Care and informed choice. We can choose to be supported by a midwife, obstetrician or general practitioner and we can also choose where we give birth: at home, in a local birthing unit or maternity hospital.  It was only in 1990 that the NZ govt made women the central focus of maternity care. Isn't that wonderful?  And then to give birth in Tarakani was an even richer experience because here, all pregnant women are given TummyTalk, compliments of ActiveBirth Tarakani.

Before TummyTalk, I'd only known a couple of women to give birth drug free and I didn't really know much more about the experience. 

Thanks to this publication, I learned so much about birth, managing pain and the benefits of water during labor. Midwife Lorna Davies, "As women we are born with an innate knowledge of how to give birth. It is part of our genetic blueprint, lodged in our cellular memory... a key factor in developing a positive attitude towards childbirth is how we approach pain during labor and birth. In our lives we are not expected to 'suffer' or even 'cope' with pain but to 'deal' with it. This usually involves some form of pharmacological treatment to target the pain...it is hardly surprising that 21st century women balk at the thought of enduring unnecessary pain during childbirth". This sat with me for weeks after I read it. Did I really have to reject the pain of childbirth? Shouldn't I try to view those contractions as what they were, the act of moving my baby out of the uterus? It's easy to think you can BEFORE  you're in labor!

Janet Balaskas first developed the term and philosophy of active birth and describes it as the normal labor and birth process; the way a woman behaves when she is following her own instincts and the physiological logic of her body. In my first birth experience, an induction, I tried to be drug free, but when a drip is dictating the strength of my contractions, I found it too hard to try and cope naturally, so I inhaled a lot of gas and had a shot of pethidine over the course of a seven hour labor. My second birth experience was a spontaneous labor, albeit 4 weeks early, but I could feel my body's ability to cope, yet remembering the first experience I opted for a pethidine shot at 3cms thinking I would take ages to get to 10cm, no gas though. If I had known Ashley would make an appearance only an hour and a half later,  I would have been ok without the pethidine because it wasn't going to last a long time. For the third birth, while contractions were fast and furious, I chewed on rescue remedy pastilles, paced the floor, leaned over the bed, and told myself to BREATHE....BREEEAAATTTHHEEE, BRRRREEEAAAATTTTTHHHE, as the intensity ramped up. When I reached the moment that I wanted to ask for pain relief, I opted for the hot bath instead. What a relief! Weightless! My pelvis felt buoyed. As the pressure in my pelvis increased I was able to get into positions that made the most of gravity and as I felt I was getting closer, I remembered a visit years ago to my osteo...

I had been having really bad migraines and hadn't yet found an cranial osteo in Taranaki. I went to this appointment where I not only got my cranial osteopathy, but also a lesson in natural pain management. He hoped that whenever I next had a migraine that I could use a breathing technique to remind the cells of my body how to relieve the pain. He believes everyone uses one of three sounds to cue their body into treatment, OH, AH, or EH. He held my ankles as he put me through each of the sounds, eventually deciding OH as my sound. (I did try this with future headaches, while it didn't take away the pain, it did make me calmer.)

So back to the peak of my labor pains, I remember my OH sound, and there in the bath, moments from pushing, I start to ooooooohhh through my contractions. I wasn't aware of it so much at the time, but my oh's varied in length and tone depending on the strength of the contraction. I had high pitched ooohhhs and low, throaty oohhhs. It all depended on where I was at with my contractions.  This went on for a few minutes before the urge to push overtook everything else and I went to that place women go to survive such an effort. Later, after Quaid was born and I was settling into my room, my midwife said it was amazing to hear me 'singing' Quaid out in the final labor stages. She said my voice changed from gentle and soothing to demanding and impatient. Some were short, some were long. And that in between OH's that I talked to Quaid, telling him it was time to meet each other and hold him in my arms. (I didn't know it was a he, so I referred to him as BABY throughout the labor). So there it is, how I came to sing my baby into this world! 

And now...that sweet little boy can sit in my lap and hear me say Ohhhhh and he goes very still and serious and repeats them back to me. If he's unsettled and I do the ohhh sounds for him, he snaps right back to me and makes eye contact. I believe Quaid