So I am in post recovery from a birth yesterday as a Doula. This entire last weekend I have been pondering the birthing process and the journey it is. How we treat it in our world. So here is a the story of the birth....
I had a client begin laboring on Feb 11th and on the 12th was 3cm 60% effaced... She lost her mucous plug and so we all thought soon... I told her to rest, hydrate and eat. She took walks with her mate and looked forward to the day... Well time passed and she would have periods of regular contractions that by bedtime when she was tired would just slide away... By the 22nd after losing two mucous plugs and having bloody show off and on for a week. she began contracting at 1am (Friday) 5 min apart, she rested, ate drank and just hung through them.... This continued through the weekend... intensity building... Monday the 25th 5:30 am I get a phone call that they are pretty intense 2 min. apart... so it's time to go to her home.... We labor at home till I see the dilated pupils and wild look in her eyes, her water had broken 30 minutes before... time to go Transition has arrived... At the hospital she is 7 cm and goes to 10 within 30 minutes... Beautiful chubby baby born 90 min. later... With a thick healthy placenta... Oh and her caregivers honored her plans (push in whatever position, late cord clamping, mother/baby/daddy bare skin contact without time limits, no Vacc or interventions etc...)OK so my client knows that without me to sound her out and reassure her she would have gone to her caregiver and would have been in the hospital many days before this one... She was being seen by two CNM's and a OB in practice together. She knows she most likely would have ended up on Pitocin and much more had they known about her pattern of labor...This in a 90% epidural rate hospital....
None of the books really talk about labor and birth looking like this... So how are mothers to know that what their body is doing is perfectly normal. This woman happened to be highly attuned to her body and baby. More so than most woman, I truly believe that is part of what let her slowly labor her baby out. She labored for hours and hours over the weekend and would sleep when she needed it, her body and adapting to those needs...
She did so much of the work of labor calmly, relaxed, smiling... The intense part was very intense, but also very short in comparison to the whole process... In all this woman and her mate had an experience full of respect and beauty without fear and manipulation.
This is a pattern we need our caregivers to honor, that we need to write about and teach... I believe even midwives need to really look at this, and learn to trust and honor the birth process. I see many who fear the process that is not "normal". So what is normal? That is not a simple answer, normal is as different as each individual person is.
This journey I shared in was natural and very normal, not maladaptive... Instead of seeing the normal pattern, most see problems and look for reasons why the baby isn't popping out in the 14 hr medical time plan...Of course back in the 60's normal labor was thought to last as long as 36-38 hrs... In the 80's it was knocked down to 24hrs, we now expect it to last 14 hrs... Have our bodies changed so much?
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