"Birth is not a random event, it’s the culmination of your life thus far." - Jane Hardwicke Collings
As an older version of myself, naive to the immense power of women, pregnancy, and birth, I thought about birth preparation as learning a few breathing techniques. I never even questioned or considered how birth worked, or what could be supportive to that process.
After I became unintentionally pregnant (I mention this because birth really was not something I thought about at all until I was pregnant - I wasn’t ever sure I wanted to be a mother), I became a little more interested in preparing for birth.
Following a healthy nauseating first trimester, I invited book recommendations from my sister who had given birth twice, and listened to colleagues share knowledge and experiences of hypnobirthing. I still didn’t really have a clue about birth, I just knew it was something fast approaching.
It’s safe to say that my first pregnancy was an awakening. While my preparation was mostly from books, the most eye opening of which was The Positive Birth Book by Milli Hill, and the online videos of The Positive Birth Company, something awoke within me.
I have a particular memory of walking down the thames with my older male cousin, who kindly lent me his ear to chew off with all the new things I had discovered about birth. Like how in the UK they measure your pregnancy from your last menstruation, and not from conception. Or the fact that most babies were born after this arbitrary 40-week due date.
My birth happened to be nothing like I had planned, but everything like I had wanted. I wrote my birth preferences around 36-weeks, in which I stated I wanted:
No drugs offered to me
No coached pushing
No monitoring
No intervention of any kind. In fact, I can now see that it was a strange choice to be walking into a hospital, albeit a birth centre, with those preferences in tow. Hospitals, especially big teaching hospitals like Kings, where I was registered, are designed to intervene, cover their backs, and approach care routinely with standardised interventions.
Thankfully, the pervading lack of trust in women’s bodies and their experiences, meant that after a brief visit to triage, I was encouraged to go home and wait out my labour until things ‘intensified’ - which to a first time birther meant nothing. Everything already felt quite intense.
My preferences were adhered to, and after an hour at home, breathing through the greatest intensity of my lived experience, I gave birth. With only my partner present, no medication, no coaching, no monitoring, no intervention. As I knelt on the floor, knowing my baby would be entering the world soon, I looked up and uttered the words “trust your body, trust your body”, and it did not let me down. My whole birth felt like divine intervention, and the presence of a loving god surrounded me as I birthed my baby without assistance, in deep connection to my body.
It wasn’t until about 15-months later, when I was sitting in a friend’s living room starting to teach the hypnobirthing course I was now trained in, that I realised these words by Jane Hardwicke Collings were true.
“Oh my God, birth is not a random event, it’s the culmination of your life thus far.”
Upon asking why my friend wanted to take my course, she said “I want to feel as calm about my birth as you did”. I realised, it was not a hypnobirthing course that did that, although that certainly awoke the medicine woman within me. It was the minutes, hours, days, months, and years, that I had put in prior to my birth to develop a relationship with my Self, my intuition, my body, and a loving God of my own conception.
It was because of that that I could get on my knees, and utter those words, and feel held through an unplanned unassisted birth on my bathroom floor. Of course learning about birth nourished the trust I developed in my body to birth, that was not something I had previously considered. Understanding the maternity system and my rights, enabled me to feel at least able to write preferences that were true for me, and say no when offered a membrane sweep at 39-weeks pregnant.
Birth is not a random event, it is not an individual, or single event. It is, like any other rite of passage, or great venture in our lives, a culmination of the life we have lived leading up to that event.
This week I shared a post on my instagram (@conscious_birth_and_motherhood) exploring some of the different options for birth preparation depending on your budget. As soon as I shared it, I felt it was lacking. It was lacking the truth that preparing for the rite of passage of birth includes honouring the entirety of your lived experience, exploring the beliefs around birth held by your own lineage, becoming curious about how you hold your own birth in your explicit or implicit memory, identifying how you play our your small, good girl role that society has imposed on you, and holding with tenderness any trauma or experience that may prevent you from freely surrendering and expressing yourself in birth.
Who’s got time for that? I hear you thinking. This level of preparation, or soul retrieval may not be an attractive or available prospect to many. It is not supported by societies where it is expected that women work in 9-6 jobs up until their birth, or where numbed and medicated births are the norm, or where women are taught to be disgusted by their own bodies from the time of their first bleed.
It’s a choice. Of course it is. It is also an invitation to those who might be curious in what it means to prepare for birth and motherhood from before they conceive. Becoming curious about our conditioned ways of being supports our whole life, not just our birth.
It feels important to share that this ‘work’ cannot be finished, or contained. We go through many rites of passage, transitions, and death/rebirth cycles within our lives. This is about giving birth as we live, and mothering as we live, not treating those as separate endeavours to what it means to be us.
