A Creative Collective Experience
For most of my career, I’ve been involved with pregnancy and birth. First, as a labor and delivery nurse and childbirth educator and later, as a midwife having attended about 1500 births. An archaic and patriarchal educational and medical system has led to a system of birth that seeks to homogenize the experience of pregnancy and birth in order to efficiently streamline this natural event for the convenience of nurses and doctors serving large numbers of patients in the hospital setting. Protocols and standards are imposed upon the birthing population and do not accommodate individual differences, let alone preferences. Efficient use of scarce healthcare resources is mandated in a system as expensive as ours. There’s no evil intent to deny you your “perfect birth”. Everyone wants a healthy mom and baby but humans differ in their expectations of what constitutes a good birth. Natural processes can be messy and time-intensive - two things western medicine abhors. Spirituality is personal and often private and therefore hard to accommodate (but not impossible) in births in institutionalized settings like hospitals (hint, hint: this is why one might choose an out -of -hospital birth if one is healthy.)
What I came to accept through the years of waiting for babies to be born, in their own time, most of them, in settings both inside and outside of the hospital, is that labor and birth are messy, time- intensive, and acts of nature. It’s not science, no matter how much we want to impose science upon it. Its Nature and Mother Nature is a Zen Goddess. Just when you think you have seen it all, have it all figured out, she shows you some new possibility. Efficiency is not part of her paradigm, or at least not the efficiency that drives capitalism.
Spiritual and Transformative is part of her paradigm and labor and birth are clearly transformative (and spiritual) experiences.
Typical labor scenario: The mother has been in early labor for over 24 hours. She’s tired but she’s coping. I check her cervix and she’s finally 6 centimeters dilated. The excitement of this news brings renewed energy to the exhausted first-time parents. “OK we’re getting somewhere! Let’s do this!” they proclaim. Then, 3 hours later, her water breaks and there’s an urge to push that heralds another cervix check. I break the news that she’s now 7 centimeters dilated but the baby’s head is not quite lined up correctly. I reassure them that babies are born this way all the time, but it does take a bit longer for them to squeeze through the pelvis in this position.
Resolutely, we start a round of position changes, trying to shift the little guy’s head. Hours later, at 8 centimeters, we decide on an epidural to give our laboring mama a break and some rest, hoping to also give the baby a little more room to rotate if there’s some spacing of the contractions for a bit. But then the epidural has slowed the labor too much and the addition of a pitocin drip, a drug to make stronger contractions, is required to bring back the labor. The earlier excitement has now turned to “when will this be over?” and what seemed pretty straightforward, initially, has turned into what’s known in the obstetrics world as “a dysfunctional labor” thats “not following the labor curve”. On this trajectory, the possibility of a c-section hovers on the horizon unless we can course- correct somehow, changing the diameter of the pelvis or the position of the baby’s head and achieve a vaginal birth. Fortunately, we midwives are experts at Newtonian physics, and this baby was born to his exhausted parents after a lengthy 40 hours of labor.
And here’s what I want to say about these long, challenging labors, especially: We are transformed by the act of giving birth and by the action of being born. Transformative events always involve discomfort and probably a crisis moment or two when the outcome for the protagonist is not certain. Since there is no transformation unless there is expanding outside of our comfort zone, who among us looks back at our own transformative experience and says “Well, that was easy”?
I recall, in great detail, both of my births. We took childbirth ed so we were pretty ready. There was definitely some discomfort and some nervousness about what was coming. But as that first labor unfolded, what I wasn’t prepared for was the cascading intensity of sensation, punctuated by brief peaceful intermissions where it was possible to calmly converse. Gradually, conversation became less possible as the labor became more intense.
Then, at the end, came a sense of a roller coaster roaring through the center of your very being and you can’t get out of its way and you can’t get off so you have to just let go and take the ride. Suddenly the pressure is so intense your whole body is on fire with the feeling of rushing towards inevitability, knees buckling, and you might say “wait! I’m not ready!” and then- whoosh! - like a monster wave - some force that has completely taken the wheel explodes through you and your baby is out and in your arms.
And that is a transformative experience. Even if we don’t know it in the moment its happening, we later come to see that it was a sacred rite of passage and that we were profoundly changed.
Births have become metaphors for life’s defining moments - of challenges met and overcome - of roads taken “that have made all the difference”. And yet, culturally, there is little recognition of the spiritual power and transformation that occurs at birth. Perhaps if we acknowledged and honored that connection, we would recognize that 2020 could be seen as a cosmic metaphor for Birth.
Could this year be a birth experience for the world? Plenty of mystics think so. Will we be transformed by the challenges of this year? Can we let go of the old and ride wildly into whatever is coming? Because whatever is coming, it’s likely we don’t go back to who we were as a nation and even as individuals.
When women share their experiences of birth, we bond. We revel in our birth stories and begin to feel less isolated. We build communities for ourselves and our children. As a nation we’ve lost a quarter of a million souls to Covid-19. How can that story of loss, shared by nearly every nation on the planet, not be transformational? Many have lost jobs and businesses and some have found highly creative solutions and economic opportunities that make possible a new way of living. Perhaps that can transform the way we work post-pandemic.
If we can lean a different way, or at least not resist, during the critical moments when the rollercoaster is exploding around the last turn, we may be transformed by this experience and never be the same human race again. I like to think we will forgive and evolve and be better; more resilient for the experiences of this year. I envision the universality of shared grief and challenges helping people to move away from divisiveness and toward healing and helping one another.
In my calling as a midwife, I have witnessed birth as a solitary and frightening event for some and as a gathering in the company of loved ones and community, filled with joy and celebration, for others. The latter experience is a blessing that can give a new family the stamina to endure another sleepless night (or four), can reveal to them the depth of their commitment to each other and the family and lend them the courage to persevere no matter what surprises may await.
This is how we build resiliency. These are lessons that show us who we are and who we can become.
So if this year is a long, challenging collective birth experience that ends with my transformation, and perhaps yours, I’m so grateful to those supporting me and I have incredible compassion for those trying to do it alone. If we support each other through the chaos, and find forgiveness and compassion in our hearts for ourselves as well as others, at some point, there will be a triumphant, joyful moment of birth when we all get to say “We did it!”
We’ve got a lot of rebuilding to do. Lets do it together.
Here’s to Birthing the Future!
Allison
