Up the Duff!

In the first ten weeks of pregnancy, your body does something absolutely amazing. You grow an entire person.* It starts from a single cell, and ten short weeks later it has eyes and ears and the ability to suck its thumb. Not only that, you also grow some customised packaging (a balloon of amniotic fluid) and a specialised life-support system (the placenta and umbilical cord).

Don't be surprised if this makes you want to go to sleep a lot.

*Don't worry. This book is resolutely pro-choice.

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"Wow. This was just what I needed to read right now!"

"I totally love every detail, incorporating all those great scientific references! Super simple and effective descriptions, while the pics add an extra loving touch.’"

"Fantastic! What an easy-to-understand explanation of all aspects of the process."

"Such a lovely way to describe how your body is designed to birth. I felt relaxed just reading it."

"This work was done with soul."

"Wow! Love this!!! Love the drawings!! I really want to share this book with my daughters."

"Awesome! Could these be the best cartoons I’ve ever seen?"

"Beautiful! It made me cry! (I may be a bit hormonal.)"

"As a midwife, can I say I love love love how you normalise birth, demystify the process and reassure women that they too can do it! Nicely done!"

To enhance your emotional preparedness for the arrival of your child, I have also assembled answers to all the questions about natural childbirth that you may be too embarrassed to ask...

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!

Transcript
Transcript for accessibility readers

Up the duff.

It says: "Hold in the stream of urine for five seconds. Like it's that easy." [image of positive pregnancy test]. For most women, this is the first definite sign of pregnancy. But there are other signs too, if you look for them.

The glow. If you put your hand down low on your belly, just above your pubic bone, can you feel a tingling, glowing energy? (Maybe you can’t. Maybe I imagined this. I’ll have to ask my friends if anyone else felt it too.) The physiological explanation for this pregnancy symptom (if it’s real, and I didn’t just make it up) would be that a large amount of extra blood and hormones are now coursing to and from your vital organ. You may prefer a spiritual explanation. We can’t scientifically measure the existence of the soul.

The ‘contented cow’ feeling. Oestrogen is powerful stuff. Remember, just the mini-dose that ovulating women get is enough to make them go dancing in low-cut dresses. Now you’re high as a kite on the stuff, plus, your pituitary adds surges of prolactin and oxytocin, hormones that you will previously have only experienced immediately after orgasm. In the last months of pregnancy, you get some free endorphins in the mix as well. Lots (not all!) pregnant women therefore feel mildly stoned much of the time, with a sense of contented rightness about the world. You can feel like this even if you know you’re not going to keep the baby. It’s bizarre. It’s a cunning stunt on the part of evolution to drug pregnant women up with feel-good hormones. And, given that birthing and raising a child involves a lot of effort, we deserve this. It’s our bonus. Enjoy!

The ‘psycho-bitch-from-hell’ feeling. There is a flip side. Not all the emotions you experience when you’re pregnant are pleasant. You might, for example, discover a new-found talent for bursting into tears with absolutely no warning. Or you might unexpectedly pluck phrases from the reservoir of ‘things I should never, ever say to this person’ and shriek them at full volume to their face. ‘This person’ possibly being someone you love dearly, you live with, and who was looking forward to having a baby with you. Oops.

As a feminist, I wasn’t sure if the Sisterhood would approve of me letting everyone know that women can be biologically primed for extreme emotions. Then I had a think about patriarchal society in more detail. There is an assumption that, when people (women in particular) show extreme emotion, they are being irrational. They are not. This opposition between ‘rational’ and ‘emotional’ is a false one – every truly intelligent decision is underpinned by emotional and intuitive understanding. We’re suffering a hangover from Victorian values, where what masqueraded as a model of masculine ‘rationality’ was a psychopathic level of emotional repression, which was used to justify some extraordinarily widescale socially abusive behaviour. We still feel the need to apologise for having emotions that are ‘too strong’ (at least, here in England we do). Whatever you feel, it isn’t wrong to feel it, in all its intensity.

Let’s have a look at the personality changes some (not all!) pregnant women are prey to. There are rational evolutionary reasons for them all: (1) Getting violently angry or upset when you are hungry. This makes sense. It is extremely important for the unborn baby to be adequately nourished. Rage is a valuable resource to make darn sure that you, and consequently your baby, get some dinner. (2) Getting incredibly upset or angry when you are tired. Your energy is being diverted to the creation of another human being, so you will probably become more tired, more quickly than ever before in your life. Becoming tearful when you’re overdoing it is a good warning strategy for you, and people around you. Ideally, rather than being embarrassed or discomfited by this, they would do something useful for you, to make your life easier. That would be in the best interests of the survival of the species. (3) A newfound interest in babies, or a willingness to tend plants or animals. So, pregnancy hormones might make you more nurturing. That’s a good design feature. Well done, God (or whatever deity you prefer). (4) An inability to watch horror films. Your sensitivity to the stress hormone cortisol is very different in pregnancy, because it has a direct effect on the developing foetus. Watch a gardening programme instead. (5) A heightened interest in hygiene. Presumably, there has been evolutionary selection in favour of the offspring of pregnant women who washed their hands properly. (6) A nesting instinct. This tends to kick in in the later months of pregnancy. Like every mammal, we are biologically driven to prepare a safe place to give birth. Because we are humans, this gets subsumed into deliberations over wallpaper samples.

We are gradually emerging from several hundred years of oppression when women were only allowed to be mothers, nurses, nannies, cleaners and homemakers. We were regarded as crazy, oversensitive delicate creatures, unsuited for battle. That’s sexist bullshit. Women are capable of everything men are, plus some, namely, the ability to bear children. However, we have a way to go with sexual equality. Only women get pregnant. And all pregnant people are deserving of extra physical and emotional support. They are having babies for all of us. Think about it. If none of them does, we all die out. It’s OK to have mood swings when you’re pregnant. It’s society that’s crazy, not you.

The smells. Stop! Don’t open the peanut butter jar! This is how peanut buttery it smells. You don’t understand: when you open the jar...

The hunger. Pregnancy induces, in me, a very peculiar attitude to food. I know I need to eat, right now, but it’s a particular, specific food that I need, and I’m not sure what that is. At this point, a kind of mental fruit machine starts whirring in my head, and a series of foods pass through my mind in succession. It goes like this: ‘Apple? No. Banana? No. Orange? No. Cherries? No. Radishes? YES! Definitely. Lots of radishes.’ Unfortunately, there is no way to predict the outcome of the fruit machine in advance.

The sickness. ‘Morning’ sickness is the clichéd sign of early pregnancy. It doesn’t just happen in the morning. Eighty per cent of pregnant women experience some nausea, and it’s most likely to be severe in the early months of pregnancy. Opinion is divided about morning sickness. Some scientists believe it has evolved to protect the developing foetus from possible harm from dangerous toxins in food. Other scientists, the pregnant ones, who are currently throwing up, believe what the rest of us also think – that there can’t possibly be an evolutionary advantage in making a pregnant woman eat everything twice, and that God is probably a man. There’s starting to be a strangely comforting familiarity to this toilet bowl... maybe I could move a duvet and some pillows into the bathroom... Blech! Peanut butter!

The bosoms. Cor! Thanks for the breast enlargement, Fertility Fairy. Bonus bosoms are another early pregnancy sign. They get bigger, tingly, and can be incredibly sensitive. I have no way to know for sure, but I think that pregnant breasts are as vulnerable to pain from crushing or hitting as a man’s testicles are. And breasts are much larger. And many pregnant women have toddlers to look after, who have hard little knees and elbows, and like to use their mothers as climbing frames. Ouch. This is not the only way your pregnancy starts to show. Nipples become darker, larger and more clearly defined. A dark stripe of skin, the ‘linea nigra’, may show down the middle of your belly. Some women also get darker skin on their face. The skin on your vulva also changes from pink to dark purple. The medical profession knew this back in Victorian times, but this simple pregnancy test was never widely used, because… you’d have to look! Instead, doctors spent much of the early 20th century injecting animals with pregnant women’s urine and slaughtering them to study their internal organs, which was more morally acceptable.

The sleeping. Apparently, some women sail through pregnancy without any appreciable drop in their energy levels, gaily getting things done. And there are women who find in pregnancy a source of untapped creative inspiration that they channel into writing novels, or other mammoth projects. I was not one of those women. Quite possibly, you’re not either.

I’m not denigrating women’s abilities if I say that pregnant women can find it difficult to get stuff done. In fact, the opposite is true. In the ten weeks following conception a woman takes a single cell and transforms it into an entire, miniature human being. In the following 30 weeks (or so), she incubates it to sleek, fully functioning perfection. This is a job in itself. No one else can do it. Men can’t do it; it can’t be done in test-tubes, in labs. So, any time you feel like you’re not getting stuff done when you’re pregnant, remind yourself that you are. You’re creating a person. Technically, anything else is multitasking.