Pregnancy, Labour and Birth - sounds like fun doesn't it?

The first book I ever read on childbirth was about magical mothers who squatted in the fields to give birth and then blissfully went back to picking corn. I don't know what planet the author was from or why he bothered to tell me such ridiculous stories, all I know is that if I had a gun in the labour ward with me, I would have used it. I'm sorry, it's a really harsh thing to say and yes it probably isn't true, but you get the point - and that was with my fifth baby.

Pregancy
Pregnancy is a trick. Hormones invade you body and make you believe that you are privy to the best and most precious secret in the world, and that you are completely fulfilling your life's destiny as a woman on this planet. Believe what you will, it's a trick. Biology, G-d, whatever you like to call it, it's designed so that you will be lulled into a false belief in a meaningful fantasy that will enable you to willingly and lovingly host the little undeveloped zygote of your partners loins in your body only to have his little fingers play handball with your kidneys and his little toes play Rollerblade with your liver. Later at night when you're trying to go to sleep he will plonk himself down right on top of your bladder so you feel like you have to go to the loo twelve times but will probably only get up to go four.

Suddenly you find yourself with a digestive tract, something you never knew existed, but here it is, full of acid rising every morning to remind you that you are not alone...and of course there's the nausea and the vomiting and the extra 2 degrees heat – that permanent hot water bottle attached to your belly, and the swollen legs and the veins and all that stuff that no one really talks about, and no it's not like in the movies where you crave a pickle and then you pop out a baby – it's a whole year of your life – ten months not nine, waiting and watching and carrying. You are a delivery truck, doing a long distance delivery which you get to keep forever, well until you get seriously rejected by a revolting teenager with a metal ball bearing through the centre of his tongue.

First pregnancies are probably easier in terms of body symptoms because everything is still yours, but by round two, you are public property, you have been camped in already and are usually more sensitive to everything much sooner. By baby number three, you will have no romantic notions about anything, (frankly you probably just weren't that happy with the first two so you're trying your luck again). Everything softens, ligaments, tendons, muscles, everything. You feel everything much sooner, and much more intensely.

Braxton Hicks contractions - yes, contractions start early on in pregnancy, you just don’t feel them when you're twenty three, but when you are thirty seven, you feel like you're going into labour with each and every contraction. Of course you're not, but neither are you going to deliver this annoying resident in thirty five minutes on the way to soccer practice. It's a myth that labour gets easier, maybe it gets shorter but I can personally vouch for the fact that IT DOES NOT ALWAYS GET EASIER. You should know that. Unless of course G-d is on your side, but we're talking about the rest of us here.

OK, and if it is your first, then darling, it's too late, you've joined the circus, you may as well sit back and enjoy the ride. First pregnancies should be spent shopping. This is the last time you will have to shop on your own or without someone elses agenda tugging at your conscience. Shop for underwear you will need when you're forty, shop for kitchen knives that last more than three years with very sharp edges that could slice your man in two if he just breathed at you in the wrong direction the first time you get your periods again. Yes it may well be a relief that you are not pregnant again, but it also means you are no longer in the privileged mother zone. You are now expected to resume all former duties, no more excuses not to take the dog to the vet or have the car washed or fill out your own script for Vicadin.

We'll get back to knives later.

Labour
Now let's just get some facts straight here about labour. It hurts. Ok, you probably already know that, but what you probably can't begin to imagine is how much and for how long and why. Truth is I have no idea why? It makes no biological sense at all, other than perhaps a way to keep the population down, but parenting is enough to do that I think. Perhaps G-d really is mean and doesn't like women or something, I have no idea why it hurts so much, but it does. Not always, not for all women, not for tall Scandinavian women or women who pick corn for a living, but for the rest of us, it hurts, seriously, for a very long time. It's not just when the baby comes out, (called 'crowning' by fantasy deprived midwives), but it hurts when the uterus contracts as the cervix thins and an opening is created for the baby to come down through. This is a slow and lengthy process and even though it should feel like a strong stretching, it doesn't. It feels like your worst period pain ever, multiplied by a hundred thousand, and did I say, it lasts a ridiculously long time.

There's not much you can do about it – other than USE A SERIOUS CONTRACEPTIVE and get a really BIG TV in your room. It's just what happens. You can't take pain killers because let's face it in the greater scheme of things they are completely useless. You can do the whole hot bath, massage, soft light and music thing, but that will keep you amused for about three minutes and then when the cervix starts to thin again, and all hell breaks loose, you will be the first to shove the scented candle somewhere totally unacceptable for these pages...

The problem is that this process can actually take three days or even three weeks. It's called Pre-Labour, and you probably never heard of it till you called the hospital and told them you were in excruciating pain and you couldn't handle it any more. "How far apart are your contractions dear?" an annoying sister asks. " I don’t know, seven minutes, twenty minutes, twelve minutes, who cares I can't do this anymore" and then she tells you that you are probably in Pre-Labour and that you should to try get some rest and call again when they are three minutes apart and regular. As you throw the phone across the room, keep in mind that you might need it to call social services one day when all this is over and your Valium script runs out.

So what can you do, absolutely nothing and that's the hell of labour. It sucks. Actually I'm wrong; there is something you can do. You can feel the pain. There's this little exercise you can do which does actually work. It's more of a meditation so you really need to be in a space that's quiet where you can concentrate and not be too distracted. Chances are you've spent the last twelve weeks creating that space, so this is the time to go there.

When the contractions come, feel them. Don't label them in the way you normally would. Don’t say to yourself – this is sore, this is painful, this hurts, rather try identify something different, something specific about the exact sensation. Describe it more specifically – you almost have to get right into it, in your body, be fully in the pain. It may be short and sharp or long and crampy or tight or stretchy or thudding or tender. It may move around, flickering or be a dull tightening or a burst of prickling or a throbbing or a pushing or a piercing. Get right into it, feel it and describe it to yourself silently. You should find that this takes you into a place of deep meditation and your resistance to the pain is changed. It won't take the pain away, but it will just change it.

You can do this for as long as you like, and even when true labour begins you can use this exercise to get through as much of it as possible. At some point for me, the pain always broke through my concentration, but that's a personal thing. Some women may use this technique to take them all the way through their labour. At some point you may have to do something serious about the pain, and the options are well known, but not without effect.

I have no judgment about what mothers do, whatever works, say, but you should know that everything has consequences. It's a cause and effect world. Do your research and do it well. The rate of Cesareans is 1:3 with more and more women choosing elective Cesareans every year. What effect this is having on our babies or on our ability to give birth, I have no idea, but removing the primal experience of giving birth from our lives must impact on the way we see ourselves as women and it may even effect the health of our children.

Of my five children, the three who are undeniably the healthiest and strongest are the ones I delivered naturally. The other two, for both of whom I had an epidural, were difficult babies with digestive issues and allergies and are constitutionally weak, though physically strong.

Without an emergency Cesarean, my sister would not have survived the birth of her first, and many women have no choice but to deliver that way, but fully elective Cesareans seem to me to be a whitewash way of dealing with a part of reality we continue to shove under the rug of civilization. Childhood disease, birth, old age and death are parts of our life that we remove ourselves from further and further with each generation. I'm not sure that it's a good thing.

Birth
Its messy business birth, it's raw and primal. It's far removed from our everyday lives and it comes as a great shock to most of us. Even if you're in a squeaky clean hospital bed with your hair up in a pony and your man standing next to you looking tired from a long pregnancy and an even longer pre-labour, its messy business. So is changing nappies and helping the first solid poo out after baby starts solids or moves from breast milk to bottle milk. So is cleaning children's bleeding and infected itchy bites, and pulling out wiggly milk teeth rotting on their last tendon, and scraping food scraps out of a dirty sink and taking out the garbage and
planting trees. It's all messy business.

Things nobody tells you about

STITCHES AND TEARING...a glorious aside
OK, about stitches, no-body even mentioned them did they? Yes, your baby's head may be too big to get through your vagina and either they are going to cut between your vagina and your anus to make room, or you're going to tear...I know, it's charming. If they cut you, it may take longer to heal, apparently tearing is better – more natural and the healing is faster. The theory is that you will only tear as much as is absolutely necessary and where you need to tear, if you get cut, it's estimation, and the cut is often deeper and longer than necessary. Either way it's hell, but you've come this far and this baby has to get out somehow, so whatever your preference, it really doesn't matter at this stage...either way, when you next pee, it's gonna sting like hell.

After you've puffed and pushed and stopped breathing and started pushing and stopped pushing and started breathing and started and stopped and stopped and started , eventually, after about fifteen hours, the head comes out, like a big poo. Then you get to rest for about thirty seconds before pushing out the body. If all goes well, the baby won't have its own cord wrapped around its neck – go figure, I mean talk about intelligent design?

At this point, the hard work is over and it's just blood and guts from here on. If placed on high on your belly, baby will find your breasts, but not before staring at you wide eyed and freaked out for a good few minutes. This state only lasts an hour before babe goes into a deep slumber which can last seventeen years or more. This is NOT the time to let anyone take your baby away – to be cleaned, wiped or weighed. Unless there is very sound medical reasons why your baby needs to be interfered with, everything can wait. Upon immediate arrival, (before belly time even) the midwife will take a score of baby's colour, response etc. It's an observational score requiring little intervention.

Afterbirth - sounds obvious right ? Yes there are a few more contractions to get through at this point and if the afterbirth doesn't just come out easily with the tug of the chord, it can be a big problem and you can be whisked away and spoken about like you don't exist for a long time and have all sorts of nasty things done to you to get this damn afterbirth out ! When it's all over, you can take it home and keep it in your freezer for a very long time until you next clean it or forever or you could bury in in the garden for the dog to dig up. Or you could donate it to science and maybe one day your afterbirth will have provided us with cures for diseases we are yet to invent. You probably won't think about it much because by now you should have junior climbing up your belly making his way to your internal milkshake makers.

There's no need to wash the vermix off baby's skin, it's full of good oils and can be gently massaged in. You can gently wipe blood off with a soft cloth or your husband or partners sleeve.

Now you will be moved off the blood bath and onto a clean bed, whether at home, in hospital or in a birth centre. This is called recovery. Enjoy it. Maybe someone will take your temperature or come and check out the baby's grip or something like that, but insist that you keep your baby with you at this time, later when she sleeps, you can pass her on to your partner to wrap her and put her in the bassinet while you get yourself up to go to the loo. It's gonna STING – especially if you has stitches.

You can ask for an alkaline drink, so your urine is less acidic, in fact creating an internal alkaline environment is a really good idea anyway – if you can bear to drink bi-carb of Soda (Sodium Bicarbonate) diluted in water throughout your pregnancy, you'll save yourself a lot of heartburn.

There's a culture of disempowerment in the medical model that generally assumes mothers are idiots and trained nurses and doctors know everything. ITS A LIE. Of course there are many parents, mothers included who are idiots and a few doctors and nurses who know lots, but if you know that you are a well informed human being, don’t be afraid to stand your ground in the hospital. Mostly procedure happens because it's just set up to happen and few push up against the system. If you have a particular need, request, issue, concern or an unresolved opinion and are not ready to embrace the expected, you are fully within your rights as a free human being to say NO, or to say NOT YET.

Some examples : Not all parents immunise their children. Not all parents give their child a shot of Vitamin K. Not all babies are given the heel prick tests. Not all jaundiced babies go under lights. Mothers may chose to bath or NOT bath their newborn babies, one, two or three days after birth, some mothers don’t bath their babies for weeks, though many babies love water. You do not need to stay in hospital unless you have a fever, an infection or the baby is not thriving. Many babies lose weight in the first three days. You do not need to breast feed, though it is recommended that you try. Breast size bears no relationship to milk production.

There are low intervention tests done in hospitals that are harmless and worth doing. Some time after the baby is born the pediatrician will come around to check babies' hip rotation and grip instinct. Babies should grip on like little monkeys gripping onto a branch if they feel like they are about to fall. It's quick and most babies don’t mind being woken up for these non invasive checks. Wake a baby up to shoot it up with hepatitis, diphtheria and tetanus...well, your baby might just get back at you by rocking solidly in a corner for the next thirty years of its life.

Immunisation
You are well within your right as a mother to say No to immunisations. If you are undecided and have not done enough research to feel well informed about your decision, tell the staff at the hospital that you will be immunising your baby through your private doctor which you can always do later if you decide to. There is no need to shoot up a newborn baby days after arriving on the planet. Take your time and make informed choices.

TIP: Read past the first few pages of Google, and remember that anti-immunisation bodies are not as well funded or slick as the well oiled pharmaceutical companies and medical sites. Also watch testimonies on biomedical and Pfeiffer sites of parents who are convinced that immunisation directly effected their chilrens behaviour. These testimonies will always be refuted by the medical establishments who are only interested in facts and numbers, but intuitive parents may be interested in real live stories and testimonies.