Labor Pains
I am currently thinking about an article about the pain (or lack of?) in labor. It’s for ABN’s newsletter, Arizona Birth Connections which I proudly hold the title of Feature Editor (don’t ask me what that means…).
I decided that instead of the old black and white composition notebook I use to jot down messy and mostly illegible notes, I would use this forum to think through this article. This is probably one of the more important articles I will write regarding birth and I want it to be smooth, coherent, fair, poetic. I figure I could log on here for a bit everyday and write down some ideas (and perhaps even questions that you who have experienced labor or those awaiting your first contraction can help me work though) so it will be easier when I sit down to tackle the actual article. So bare with me. I am sloppy, lazy, and all over the place when I start to write it all out.
Pain in labor. We’re all told it hurts to have a baby. We grow up under the impression that it hurts so much yet it can’t be that bad since we all keep doing it. I remember being little and asking my mother (who vaginally birthed 7 kids) if it hurt to have a baby. She looked at me thoughtfully and replied that it was “hard work and it sure didn’t feel ‘good’”. I expressed to her how scared I was because when I grew up I wanted lots of babies. Her reply, I think, was: oh don’t worry, you can do it, its not that bad. there are drugs….” Her mother’s mother was a midwife in Austria and rural Pennsylvania and until my mother’s birth everyone in the family was born at home because of social status (working poor). When mom had her first four kids in the 1950’s it was unheard of to birth at home if you could afford to go to a hospital. It certainly was unheard of to birth without drugs at the hospital. Luckily her mother passed on some sage advise to her and told her to stay at home once labor started as long as possible. My mother labored her first two girls at home, got to the hospital, was stapped down, knocked out and when she awoke she had babies. Her second baby, a boy, came fast. She had no time for drugs…but she was still shaved and strapped down. Her fourth, a boy, was posterior and she labored long and hard drugless and then when it was time for him to come out, they drugged her up, took him and handed him to her hours later. Her last two where babies of the 1960s and I was born in the early 70’s. She said she barely remembers anything about our births. Come to find out she was given The Twilight Drug, a drug that basically takes NO pain away, causes the woman to hallucinate and then afterward messes with her memory—basically supresses any memory. As I grew up I always asked her to tell me about her births over and over. And the more I heard the stories the more I questioned whether ‘drugs’ actually take ‘pain’ away from labor. It didn’t sound like those drugs she spoke of really helped her. To me it sounded all the more painful to be gassed or injected. Stapped and shaved. Her most positive memories of labor where the moments she was at home, contracting and surging her babies closer to her.
Once I became sexually active I understood the meaning of pleasure and began to question how something so pleasurable could end up with such a ‘painful’ experience (labor). Was it true about that slutty Eve? Are we not suppose to enjoy sex, that delicious juicy apple from the tree of life? Did she doom us with her witchy ways so that we must be put through pain in childbirth? I don’t believe it. But have we heard the story (or translations of it) so many times we collectively and unconsciously programmed ourselves to think it? Childbirth hurts because we deserve it to hurt. Or does childbirth hurt because the pain is a journey in life to experience? Or does childbirth not really hurt at all yet we expect it to…so we create the pain?
With the birth of my first daughter the pain came and went. I can’t really explain what I did in the moments when I felt ecstatic and light, but I think I just stopped to enjoy what was going on…a baby…a real baby…what a celebration of love. So I would smile, feel sexy, breath down into the fibers of muscular soul and let loose. When I would think about how it felt, when I would think about what ‘could be’ scarry about birthing…the pain came and it came on hard and heavy. This birth was warrior-like. My path was to feel the pain and fear and learn to walk through it.
With the birth of my second daughter it was different. I had already done this once before and survived. And now I was in water. Throughout Sula’s whole pregnancy I concentrated on gentle, peaceful, graceful and easy. And that is what I got. I will have to get into this more later, I have yet to write her birthstory down because it is so special to me and I am still so utterly wordless for it’s beauty and gifts. Sula’s birth was more pleasure than pain. I really experienced a wild ride of ecstacy and rapture. I did. I am not saying I did not have to work towards that in each contraction, but almost every contraction I had ended in pleasure. I rode the water like I was a mermaid, Bill held me in his arms, my midwives moaned and ohhhed and ahhed with me and gently, ever so gently, I sat and breathed open my body and reached down for Sula to be born. Pain would be the LAST way I would describe her birth. Intense? Yes. Deep? Yes? Freeing? Yes. Orgasmic? Kinda. Do I crave to feel it again, just like that? Most definitely. Not a reason to have another child, but it says something. I want to feel labor again because it felt so good.
So am I different than 90% of the women who choose to have epidurals because it is too painful? No, not at all. Are my friends who enjoyed non-medicated births different? I doubt it. We just made different choices, internally and externally.
I like to tell my yoga students during class not to worry if they are not able to “do” a pose the way they envisioned or expected to. It’s not about getting to the asana, it’s about enjoying each moment on the way to the asana…and when you think you have reached into that asana…you will realize you will never be there, so keep enjoying each moment of the stretch, the pull, the breath, the inbalances…enjoy even the fear because by celebrating the fear and the pain…may be the way to feel the pleasure.
This is how I see labor, as well.
Whose to say the pain should hurt?
Can pain be pleasurable?
Does anyone know of or had an orgasmic birth? Or simply a pleasurable one?
Anyone out there with an experiences they want to share? I am specifically interested in those who have have medicated births as well as non-medicated and would like to hear how they compare.
