Birth Stories: The Instinct of Birth
by Candace Whitridge
© 1994 Midwifery Today, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Editor's note: This article first appeared in The Birthkit Issue 1, Spring 1994.]
When a woman is in labor, a little fight goes on in the woman's brain. One part
of her brain, the intellect, will tell her that she should do certain things. Perhaps
those are things that we learned in childbirth classes; perhaps those are things
that other people have told her that she should do to cope with birth.
But from the other part of the brain will come an urge so deep within her that
it will compel her to move her body and to use her voice in a completely different
day.
Those are her deep instincts about childbirth, but we have buried these for so
long that most of us have forgotten that knowledge. Occasionally, though, I see women
who remember...
Very early in my practice, a young 16- or 17-year-old girl came to see me when
she was very, very pregnant. She thought that she was getting close to give birth,
so I gave her a very lengthy exam and we talked for almost two hours. She was in
good health, so I made an appointment to see her the following week.
But the next day, she returned with her husband. She smiled and said, "Well,
here I am. I'm going to have my baby today." I looked at her face and body
for some evidence that she was in labor, but say nothing. "Well, let's take
you back to the room and we'll give you an examination," I said.
"Are you having contractions?" I asked her. "Oh, you bet I am,"
she said. I expected to find a very closed cervix—but she was 8 centimeters!
She wanted to deliver in our clinic's birthroom. So we went into the room and she
jumped up on top of the bed. She began to order everyone around. She said to her
husband, "Now I would like you to sit in that chair." And she said to me,
"I would like you to sit on this bed with me." I still saw no evidence
that she was in labor.
I got our sterile bowl of instruments and put it down next to me on the bed. And
this woman sat there and continued to smile, looking like an angel. She closed her
eyes and pulled up her skirt. "Well, as I said, the baby is coming," she
said. I sat there with my silly little bowl.
She opened her legs and the bag of waters appeared at the opening of her vagina.
The water broke like a little river and the head appeared. She took the baby's head
in her hand, and when the shoulders turned she took her baby out and put it on her
tummy. Then she said, "I would like my husband to cut the cord, please."
I showed him what to do, he cut the cord, and the family enclosed themselves. And
I still sat there, and had done nothing so far. Then she said, "Oh, excuse me,
but here is my placenta now." She pushed it out into the bed so I gathered it
up, and my little bowl, and everyone was fine so I just left the room.
I talked with her later about why birth seemed so easy for her. After all, she
was only 16. She told me that her mother, who had many children, told her that when
she was in labor, she would feel God's power coming through her and she should do
anything possible to welcome it. So that was the attitude that this woman had about
birth. There was no doubt in her mind that she would know what to do. Her knowledge
and courage impressed me immensely.
Two days later, I had another young woman in labor. She, too, had never taken childbirth
classes but she was very different from the first young girl.
She was very noisy and moved all over the room. She strutted like a big rooster
and threw herself on the bed and on the floor. She roared around and moaned loudly.
She and her young husband did "high fives" because they were both very
proud of what they were doing. Rock music played in the background.
She had a very fast labor, and she told me later that she just did what she felt
like doing. She did not think about it. There was nothing to think about—she was
just going to do the work and birth her baby.
Women, when they are in an environment that supports them and are with people who
trust them, will birth exactly as they need to in order to birth their babies. We
have forgotten that we remember. I have also learned that women have a very strong
desire to be among people who are happy and who have a lot of trust in them. I live
and work in a place where women say that birth is so important they should not waste
the opportunity. And they say that birth is something that one should "get into,"
and is not something that one simply must "get through." Imagine a place
where women talk about their stories over and over, because they had such a great
time, instead of a place where women fear birth.
A woman came to me to have her second baby. She had her first baby elsewhere, using
the breathing techniques the childbirth classes had taught. She said, "I felt
like I had to huff and puff and blow my baby out." All through labor, she said
she felt an urge deep within her that was very wild, almost like an animal. But people
kept telling her to be quiet and to stay in control. Well, she said she absolutely
did not want anyone at this birth to tell her to shut up and stay in control. She
said the feeling in her was so wild—she didn't know what it was—but she wanted
to do as she pleased at this birth. And she wanted me just to be her guardian, to
watch over the safety of her and her baby as the baby was being born. So, I agreed
to her wishes.
When she went into labor, I was called to the hospital. The lights were very low
in the room, and my friend, a nurse, was sitting on the floor in the corner, very
quietly watching. The woman and her husband were dancing cheek to cheek, with their
eyes closed, all around the room. The music was her moaning ...aah, aah, aah. I sat
quietly in the room and watched them. When my friend had to listen to the baby's
heart rate, she crawled over quietly with her little machine and listened, than crawled
very quietly back. Finally, the husband opened his eyes and looked at me for the
first time. He smiled and said, "Oh, this is just like the dance at our wedding."
The woman really didn't even notice I was there. During contractions, she pulled
away from him, threw herself on the bed, grabbed the pillow in her mouth and rolled
around. Then she came back together with him and he held her, and they continued
to dance together, everywhere, all over the room.
Finally, she bent over and squatted by the bed. She had a startled look on her
face and she said to me, "Oh, no!" "What's the problem?" I asked.
"Well, I'm pushing already and I was having such a good time!" She did
not want to be finished. I thought, "Every woman and her husband should have
the opportunity to birth in this way. Unlike most women, who can hardly wait for
labor to be finished, this woman was just beginning to get into it."
If we can understand that the best things in life do not come to us without our
effort, and if we can discover a different understanding of childbirth pain, then
we will find that we do not need to pull away and run for it, as if we are frightened.
Only then, can we emerge from the other side of birth much bigger than we were
before we started.
Candace Whitridge is a nurse-midwife and farmer in Northern California.
These stories are from a talk she gave in Poland.
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