What’s at the root?

Nov19

On a discussion board this week in the birth professionals section (doulas, midwives, birth educators), someone asked the question “what’s at the root of your love of birth?” I was still for a moment and let my intuitive, heart-felt, gut level response come to me and it was this:

Women.

Women’s health, women’s issues, women’s empowerment, women’s rights.

Social justice.

…..

And, that feeling. The “birth power” feeling–that laughing/crying, euphoric, climbed-the-mountain, glowing, rapture…feeling. The transformative, empowering, triumphant, powerful, I DID IT, feeling.

I want all women to have the chance to experience that.

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As I look at my list above and invert it, it becomes my “tree” of birthwork–with women as the root and then spreading up to blossom with that birth-power-feeling. 🙂

To any birth professionals reading this, how about you? What’s at the root for you?

Who is your birth link?

Oct29

There is a survey up on the Independent Childbirth blog asking who your “birth link” is—your primary connection to information about birth. Traditionally, women learned about birth from other women—informal, woman-to-woman birth sharing. Culturally, we’ve moved away from this as our primary information source (often to our detriment!).

Of course, I think independent childbirth educators and independent birth classes are great “birth links” 🙂

Thinking back to my first pregnancy, my primary birth link was the newsgroup misc.kids.pregnancy. I learned so much there and they really shaped my attitudes and beliefs about birth. I have a very birth-positive mother, but I didn’t really go to her for birth information. I felt the need for my “peers” and I found those most readily online. My other link was reading (of course!). I read voraciously and always have. It was hard to transfer “book learning” to really feeling *prepared* to actually give birth though.

I also took an independent birth class. Since I was so extensively read, I do not remember feeling like I learned many new things from the classes.

During my second pregnancy, books were huge again, but this time around my in-person friends were also a very valuable birth link. I am lucky to have a wonderful network of birthy friends who can talk about birth with me for hours on end. One friend in particular was very inspiring to me as I worked through some “issues” I had from my first birth (the birthing itself was tremendously empowering and beautiful, but afterwards I had sequestered clots and a painful manual extraction of those, a pitocin shot, and also tearing that was traumatic for me for some time to come). My friend is a fabulous example of someone who really “trusts birth” and it was so great to talk with her during the course of my pregnancy <waves to Shauna…>

Why Honey Sticks During Labor?

Oct13

I have already written about eating during labor. One of my suggestions is honey sticks–but why honey sticks and where to buy them? Honey sticks, also called honey straws, are plastic tubes of honey similar in size to a drinking straw. During labor, honey sticks can provide an instant energy boost for a laboring mother. They are especially good to pack along if you are going to be laboring in a birth setting with restrictions on food or drink intake (read more here about why withholding food and drink from laboring women is not a good idea!). They are also handy if a mother is very tired and needs some quick energy, but is not interested in eating anything more substantial. Dads who are feeling a little tired or woozy in the birth room may also find honey sticks a quick boost for themselves as well! The sticks hold about a teaspoon of honey and you can easily pop the end open with your teeth and suck the honey out.

Where to buy? Here are a couple of ideas:

Online store where you can buy individual fruit-flavored honey sticks.

Online store that carries plain honey sticks.

Online store that carries honey sticks in large quantities (perhaps you have lots of friends who’d like to share?)

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More Thoughts on Birth as a Creative Process

Oct10

I am reading a book from the late 80’s right now called Giving Birth: How it Really Feels. It is by Sheila Kitzinger and I had never heard of it until this week. Some time ago I posted a quote about birth as a creative process. I’m only a few chapters into this book and it has so much that relates to the idea of birth as a creative process that I just had to make a new post about it.

“I believe that this is one of the important things about preparation for childbirth–that it should not simply superimpose a series of techniques, conditioned responses to stimuli, on the labouring woman, but that it can be a truly creative act in which she spontaneously expresses herself and the sort of person she is. Education for birth consists not, as some would have it, of ‘conditioning,’ but aims at giving a woman the means by which she can express her own personality creatively in childbirth.”

“The point of education for birth is that childbirth becomes not something that simply happens to a woman, in which the question of how to cope with pain is paramount, but a process in which she actively and gladly expresses herself. It is not a performance to be enacted, nor an examination that must be passed, but is a profound and all-enveloping experience in which she opens herself to the creative power of the uterus…no woman should have to suffer in labour. Instead it becomes an exciting adventure that brings with it a sense of deep satisfaction, thrilling achievement, and triumph.”

“…many women looking ahead to labour worry that childbirth pain will prove too much for them, and they they will somehow ‘give way’ and reveal their true selves. The implication is that our ‘real’ selves are nastier than the images we ordinarily present to the world–and that we require a mask to hide the unpleasantness of our inner natures. But it is this real inner self, capable of the hieghts and depths of emotion, which is also the self which can relish the excitement, drama and tumult of labor and the intensely moving and passionate experience of bringing new life into the world…a woman is completely caught up in the passionate act of creation, utterly committed to the feelings of the moment and to the vivid sensations with which her whole being is flooded.”

I personally identified with these quotes in many ways. I remember feeling that preparing for birth felt like preparing for the biggest test of my life. I remember fearing losing myself and “freaking out.” And, I remember the feeling of utter trimuph and exhaltation after giving birth. It was the most empowering and triumphant experience of my life. I felt like the outer self was stripped away and my real self was revealed and it was NOT ugly, or “mean,” or unworthy, but was beautiful, strong, powerful, magical, and of fundamental worth and value. I felt better about myself after giving birth than I’ve ever felt in my life.

Trusting Women

Sep16

I love collecting quotes about birth and the power of women in birth.

The following caught my eye in someone’s email signature recently:

“We must relearn to trust the feminine, to trust women and their bodies as authoritative regarding the children they carry and the way they must birth them. When women and their families make their own decisions during pregnancy, when they realize their own wisdom regarding birth and its place in their lives, they have a foundation of confidence and sensitivity that will not desert them as parents.”

~ Elizabeth Davis, certified professional midwife (CPM)

This one is from a book I love called Transformation Through Birth:

“There are many women who delivered their children naturally who swear by [a specific birthing method]. It is sad to see so many women credit a technique rather than themselves and their own inner resources for their birthing experiences. Women who birth joyfully do so because of who they are, what they believe, and how they live.” (emphasis mine)

Movement and pain

Jun14

A brief quote from Biance Lepori an Italian architect who specializes in the design of birth rooms:

“Even pain dissolves with movement; pain killers are a consequence of stillness.” (emphasis mine)

This architect specifically designs rooms that support physiological birth–birth that unfolds accords to the natural biological processes of the woman, on her own timeline, and under her own power.

I emphasize active, normal (physiological) birth in my classes. I feel like the use of movement is one of the single most important ways we have to embrace labor and its rhythms and also to support healthy, physiological birth. Though I teach a variety of positions for labor and birth, “birthing room” yoga poses, and encourage practicing them, I believe that the movements you need during labor come from within and arise spontaneously during labor, not from specific training and practice. The key is the FREEDOM to use movement in the way you need to (many women end up being denied the right to free movement during labor 😦 ). The benefit to practicing different positions and movements prior to birth is that you gain a “body memory” of how to move your body in labor supporting ways.

Birth as a creative process

May30

I recently finished reading the book Rediscovering Birth and there was a section in it that I absolutely LOVED about birth as a creative process. The author quotes another writer, Dr. Michelle Harrison. She forms an analogy about women giving birth as like dancers on a stage and how just as routine interventions for the purpose of “just in case” would hinder the dancers in their creative process, so too, do routine obstetrical interventions hinder the woman’s capacity to give birth in her full strength and creative power:

“Birth is a creative process, not a surgical procedure. I picture dancers on a stage. Once, doing a pirouette, a woman sustained a cervical fracture as result of a fall; she is not paralyzed. We try to make the stage safer, to have the dancers better prepared. But can a dancer wear a collar around her neck, just in case she falls? The presence of the collar will inhibit her free motion. We cannot say to her, ‘this will be entirely natural except for the brace on your neck, just in case.’ It cannot be ‘as if’ it is not there because we know that creative movement and creative expression cannot exist with those constraints. The dancer cannot dance with the brace on. In the same way the birthing woman cannot ‘dance’ with a brace on. The straps around her abdomen, the wires coming from her vagina, change her birth.”

More Words for Pain

May10

A while ago I posted about needing more words for pain. I got a book for my birthday called Labor Pain (I wanted it in hopes it would have more good coping ideas for me to share with couples in birth classes). In it, she discusses the results of a study about how women feel labor pain. The most frequently used description was “sharp” (62%) followed by camping, aching, stabbing hot, shooting, and heavy. Tiring was another word used (49%), exhausting (36%, intesne (52%), and tight (44%). Other words and descriptions used were burning, grinding, stony, overwhelming, terrific, bruising, knifelike, invaded, baby in charge, powerful, relentless, crampy, like period pain, like thunderbolts, excruciating, frightening, and purposeful. Only 25% of first time mothers and 11% of mothers with other children described pain associated with labor as “horrible” or “excruciating” (the top of the pain-scale range).

Top Five Birth Plan…

Apr29

Birth plans are a topic often discussed in birth classes. There are SO many things that could be put onto a birth plan that sometimes it is difficult to sort out the most important. I encourage couples in my classes to complete two different “values clarification” exercises to help them include those things on their plan that are MOST important to them, rather than trying to cover everything on a one page birth plan. They often ask what I think is important to include. So, recently I started thinking that if I needed to create a birth plan for a birth in hospital that was as normal and natural as possible and could only include five elements, what would be most important to me, my baby, and a normal birth?

These are my top five after first going into the hospital as late in labor as possible (this isn’t included on my birth plan and doesn’t need to be on anyone’s birth plan–“I plan to labor at home as long as possible”–because it isn’t relevant by the time you get there and people are reading your plan. It belongs on your own personal plan, but not in your “official” plan):

No pitocin.
Minimal fetal monitoring and preferably with a Doppler only.
Freedom of movement throughout labor (stay out of bed, use it as an active tool rather than as a place to lie down. Stay upright during any necessary monitoring.)
Push with the urge in whatever position works best for me (NO coached, directed, or “cheerleader” style pushing).
Baby immediately to me. NO separation.