Why the Negative Birth Story?
Posted by doularama | Filed under Birth Stories
I think most of the people scanning the pages of Midwifery Today understand the potential of the positive birth story—how empowering it is to know from someone else’s experience how beautiful birth can be, the trial and triumph. It is also important, however, to understand the power of the negative birth story and why it is told.
Perhaps many of the women who share stories of woe need validation or closure. It could be that they are still trying to understand what actually happened during their births. It is also possible that they are all about the spectacle. In a culture that doesn’t value women and their powerful role as mothers, a good sob story can be a source of pride.
I sadly admit that I told my negative birth story, too. I tearfully offer my public apology to the dark-haired woman at the Hale and Hearty soup shop. Honestly, I think I was jealous. I think I needed to convince myself that I hadn’t missed out. I regretted it almost immediately but it was too late. She, with her big belly, sat next to the table I shared with my baby girl and told me that she was having a homebirth.
“I wanted a homebirth,” I said, “but my husband and my mother weren’t comfortable with it. It’s good thing, too, because I think I would have died if I had been at home. I hemorrhaged right after she was born and again the next day.”
The words flowed effortlessly. At the time, I believed everything I had said, but why did I need to say it? Before the woman started eating, she put her hands together and prayed. I can guess what she was likely praying for. After, she gazed dreamily out the window while she ate. I hope she tells a beautiful birth story, and maybe includes a bit about the horrible woman she met one day at lunch.
For a long time after my daughter was born, I mourned the loss of the birth I had envisioned. There were so many things I didn’t know when I was pregnant, and only discovered after giving birth. That is why I became a doula, to help give other women in our society the chance to know.
Last year, I was saddened to receive an e-mail from a client who, at 39 weeks, perfectly comfortable in her strong, robustly pregnant, yet delicate, petite body, wrote:
Lately I have been bombarded by women who want to share with me all their negative stories, how much pain I will feel, how I will want to give up, how I don’t know what pain is until I try to labor without an epidural. All of it really disturbs me. Why would they want to transmit such images into my mind right before I birth? It seems like they think they are being helpful. Yesterday I was meditating and thought of all the thousands of women who’ve been passed these images of pain and who pass them on to others in kind. I felt so sorry that it goes like that for most of us. I want to see this as having potential to be anything, and like that woman in the video you showed us, view it like a celebration.
I apologize on behalf of this culture for the way pregnant women are being treated. I don’t know why so many women choose to share such stories. Maybe they feel a need to justify for themselves why they chose to labor as they did. Do not doubt your decisions or your body. For all the women who can tell you their horror stories, so many more have tales of victory and empowerment.
That particular client’s birth turned out to be one of the most beautiful I have ever experienced. It seems to me that, as much as we need to help spread the good birth stories, we also need to listen to the bad ones with a helping spirit. Maybe we can listen with compassion and offer to explain why so many of these births are typical, but far from normal. Mostly, though, we need to continue to help make the positive birth story the only one there is to tell.
This is a preprint of Why the Negative Birth Story?, an article published in Midwifery Today Issue #99, p. 19 Copyright © 2011 Midwifery Today, Inc. http://www.midwiferytoday.com/
Tags: Birth Story, Homebirth
In the Caul
Posted by doularama | Filed under Birth Stories, News
Caul is the term used for the amniotic sac when it is still intact around the baby at birth. Fewer than one in one thousand babies are reported to be born in the caul, and there are some old beliefs surrounding these births. Among them is the idea that a baby who is born in the caul will have good luck
I am not really superstitious- I happily believe some of the positive (things) and leave the rest behind. I’ll even go as far as saying that Friday the 13th brings me good luck because, if everyone has bad luck on that day, the good luck has to go somewhere. So, I’ll often see the positive portents in my life, and recognize nary an ominous omen.
I feel like I came into birth work in the caul. I have been very lucky. I’ve had great mentors and many opportunities for continuing education. I’m usually called to births after breakfast and get home before dinner. I get women to the hospital just before they need to push, leaving no time for interventions, and homebirths speed right along too.
The last two homebirths I assisted were attended by the same midwife. For the first one, she arrived just three minutes before the baby was born. Things were just going so smoothly and everyone was coping well, it was hard to tell that it would end so soon. For the second one, she arrived a little less than an hour before the little caul-enveloped girl emerged. The midwife told me that I am very calming and that’s why labors go so quickly for me. Well, “calm” is the one word everyone uses to describe this midwife. What a compliment it was to have her say that about me.
Now I’m on call for another client with the same midwife. Some might suspect that my luck should run out by now, I choose not to worry myself with those thoughts and just take the challenges as they come (if they come).
I don’t think there are any long- standing beliefs about the people who are present when a baby is born in the caul. Well, there is now and you better believe it’s a good one.
The midwife mentioned above had an aunt who was also a caulbearer. She died the day the little girl speedily came out in her own caul. That’s not superstition, it’s just fact, but I like to believe that those coincidences are significant too.
Check out some amazing photos and some more info HERE.
Tags: caul, childbirth, in the caul, midwife, Navelgazing Midwife
Birth of A Woman
Posted by doularama | Filed under Birth Stories
Charlotte was in my prenatal class at one of the Bronx-Lebanon Hospital clinics. Charlotte is not her real name. She is fifteen. Being her doula was not the plan for me, but it did end up being a privilege.
In the beginning of our prenatal classes, I ask the women to introduce themselves and to share how they are feeling about their pregnancies and/or labors & deliveries. Charlotte would reluctantly say that she didn’t really care or otherwise convey her indifference.
One day, she arrived very early for class. We got the chance to talk and Charlotte told me that she was unhappy. She said she was being criticized for being pregnant and that she had just moved to a new foster home. By the end of that conversation, Charlotte decided to get a doula (a free doula I would match her with,) and I saw her smile for the first time.
A couple of doulas had agreed to meet her and Charlotte never kept her appointments with them or returned their calls. One woman travelled for two hours to find that Charlotte was out, no one knew where. It was getting to be a challenge getting her the help I knew she needed. A few weeks before she was due, it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to get her a doula. At that point, I told her doctor to call me when she went into labor. I wasn’t free to commit to being on call, but I was feeling responsible for this young lady.
On Friday when Charlotte called I recognized her voice immediately. She told me that she was in labor and that she had already been to the hospital a few hours earlier. They had found her cervix to be half a centimeter dilated and had sent her home to walk. Now, the most important lesson in the first class of my prenatal series is to stay home as long as possible. I guess Charlotte had to learn that one the hard way.
I spoke to her foster mother who asked me to get there as soon as possible. I arrived shortly after to find Charlotte talking and laughing through seemingly mild contractions that were sporadic. Within forty minutes of my arrival, Charlotte became much more relaxed and focused. Suddenly her contractions were coming every three minutes. She was willing to go out for a walk with me. Perhaps because she remembered the benefits of walking as learned in my class, or maybe it was because she knew that she had spent much of the day laboring in an unsupportive environment, and this was her chance to change scenery.
Either way, out we went to walk the streets of Harlem at a time of night when I would normally be sleeping. Charlotte felt very free out there to moan and move instinctually. She was doing an amazing job. Hours earlier she had been begging for a cesarean and now she couldn’t deny the power that enabled her to cope so well. I was so proud of her.
Eventually, we all agreed that it was time to go to the hospital. Frankly, by the time we got on the road, I thought we might not make it there before the baby was born, but he did wait about half an hour and that was enough. Charlotte pushed through half a dozen contractions before we were able to meet her son. Once she saw him, she started to smile and I don’t think I noticed a time when she wasn’t smiling after that. It was truly glorious for me to witness the transformation in Charlotte. She had done such a marvelous job and I told her just that. To that she replied that I was the one who had done it, that it wouldn’t have been possible without me. Before I left her that morning, I made sure she understood that all I had done was shown her what was possible, that she had done the job all herself.
And what an amazing job it was!
Tags: Birth Story, childbirth, doula
