I can’t tell you how you’ll know you’re in labour. I’m not you, and there’s no one feeling that all women feel. Watch out for an increased urge to clean things. That’s a good sign. Go with it. You won’t get another chance for quite a while. Take your time. Steady yourself. Be private. Be calm. Eat if you can. If you can sleep, sleep. If you can’t, doze. You have an ocean to cross. You will need your strength. So now you are standing on the shore of your labour, and the waves are swelling through you. There are things you can find yourself that will help you… Walking is good. Music is good. Breathing is good. You don’t need to learn special breathing exercises ahead of time. Labour isn’t something you learn in your head. It’s something you do in your body. Just breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. There, another wave has passed. That’s one more done of all the many you’ll do. Your womb just worked a little bit more. You can find the power of loving… holding… stroking… kissing. Orgasm in early labour is a very good idea. Or you can hide away somewhere alone, and not be touched at all. That’s OK. This is your call. When the waves are coming, strong and steady, and they will (BRING IT ON!) you can sink under them or you can float with them. Fear. Tension. Humiliation. Shouting “OW!” and” NO!” “I don’t like it!” Wanting it to be over. Timing your “contractions.” Interruptions. Strangers. “I can’t bear it.” “I hate you for doing this to me.” These things drag you down. Love. Trust. Support. Encouragement. Breathing. Movement. Privacy. Massage. Shouting “AAAAH!” and “YES!” Being in the moment. Surrendering to the timelessness of the experience. Breathing some more. “I LOVE YOU BABY!” Anything that makes you laugh. These things bear you up. This isn’t about “learning to cope with the pain” of trying to distract yourself from the sensations. If you try to hold it down, to minimise the feelings, your labour will be longer. This needs to become stronger, more powerful, more present, more now. There are places you can go that make it more intense. Go there. Kick away from the shore. Swim. Use your animal strength. Use the panting, sweating, shaking, biting, scratching, licking, puking, pissing, pooing, shouting, swearing beast within you. She will help you birth this baby. Feel down into your depths. You are becoming more open. … As each wave comes through you, let yourself expand… BRING IT ON! Remember your baby loves you. Close your eyes and journey in your mind to somewhere beautiful with your baby. Talk to your baby. Tell them it’s time to come through. Remember this is the right place to have your baby. Even though it probably isn’t exactly how you planned it would be. There will be the most tremendous waves. This is what labour is. You might think that you can’t do this. Ask for strength and you will find it. You are doing it. You are really doing it. BRING IT ON! There is no future. There is no past. A new life is about to begin. But now, time stands still. A new life. A new narrative. But now, you are beyond words.
Crossing the Sea
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Think of me like an agony aunt. Except we're not going to talk about agony. Whoops! We just did.
Will my lovely lady-parts tear?
It’s possible. There are things you can do that make it less likely. But it won’t matter.
What do you mean? OF COURSE it matters!
No, it really doesn’t. That’s how overwhelming it is having a baby. It makes something that would ordinarily matter a lot (really a lot) seem utterly insignificant.
Will I poo myself?
Maybe a tiny bit, but midwives are handy with a hygienic wipe. You’re actually meant to! There’s a reason for the anatomical proximity of anus and birth canal. Your intestines contain billions of good digestive bacteria, and when a tiny trace of poo gets mixed up in the birth process, your baby’s digestive system is primed with them. Babies born by caesarean miss out on the good bacteria they are meant to receive, their gut flora is different, and this could be why they are more prone to allergies and obesity.
Really, don’t worry about your body doing whatever your body needs to do. There was a point when I was in labour where I was sick over myself and peed myself simultaneously in a hospital car park. Ordinarily, I would feel a modicum of embarrassment about this, but its significance was eclipsed by the memory of giving birth to my daughter later that day.
So forget about a smudge of poo. If you can get through the birth of your child without simultaneously throwing up and wetting yourself, you’re doing better than me.
Will my partner still fancy me?
Yes. My experience is with men. Men fancy everything.
Will my fanny ever be the same again?
It will be better! It will still be the lovely sensitive flower that you have always enjoyed, but you can also be proud that it has done something useful.
Seriously?
Well, it might change shape a bit. Post-birth vaginas tend to be a little different to pre-birth ones, but neither sort is more beautiful or functional than the other.
Let’s apply the ‘what would it be like if men could do this’ test to genitalia and childbirth.Imagine if, when a man fathered his first child, his balls dropped a couple of inches. Would men be rushing off to plastic surgeons for uplift surgery? Hell no! They’d be boasting about it! They’d all be wearing MC Hammer trousers and claiming they could swing theirs into their socks.
OK, I’m not helping. Don’t worry. Nothing’s going to drop a couple of inches! But what’s important about your pleasure garden is not how it looks, but how it feels.
Will that be different after birth? Here’s a selection of quotes from an astonishingly frank internet chatroom:
“Way better. Way, way better.”
“It feels so incredibly good. The sensitivity has heightened.”
“I have more control over my vaginal muscles.”
“The best sex we had as a couple was trying for our second child.”
“A good lube will help.”
“I can’t recommend Kegels [pelvic floor exercises] highly enough.”
“Your body parts are elastic. Your free time after having a baby, not so much.”
And from their male partners:
“There has been no real change in terms of tightness or cosmetic appearance... [but] now when my wife as an orgasm it feels about ten times stronger than it used to.”
“My wife had a caesarean. Sex is somewhat different. She reports that certain positions are more pleasurable.”
“Forceps delivery with stitches, but sex now is not noticeably different. Just considerably less of it.”
The consensus here seems to be that your lady parts are likely to recover just fine from the rigours of childbirth. The passion-killing part of having a baby is having to look after a baby. All the time. Still, what you miss out on in sex, you make up for in love and cuddles.
Will labour hurt?
Hmm. There are two ways I could answer this question.
I could tell you that there are documented cases of women giving birth without pain. I could even mention that women can orgasm during birth. I could explain that there is a theory that fear and tension in labour produces pain, and so, telling you it is going to hurt could make it more likely that it will.
Or I could give you the honest answer.
Yes.
Probably.
But, uniquely among your life experience, this is good pain. You want this pain. This is pain is doing something incredible.
So maybe ‘pain’ isn’t the right word. In our society, we treat painful feelings as inconveniences, to be erased by the judicious use of painkillers. We use the same words, ‘painful feelings’, to describe negative emotions. Birth is a time for positive feelings, not negative ones.
This pain isn’t something you can pop two paracetamol for. It’s a marathon to run... a mountain to climb... an ocean to cross...
So labour hurts. So what?
This is labour girl! This is work! This is where your body goes to places you’ve never been to before and you be all you can be. It’s not fun. It can be hard. It can push you past what you thought you could endure. But in the extremes of the experience, a new person is forged.
A mother.
Bring it on!
