You’re about 35 weeks pregnant. Each week you’ve been learning another skill, thus increasing your birthing confidence. As your due date approaches, you can look back and ask yourself, how would I feel now if I didn’t have these skills?
Obviously these skills can be used in any birth situation. We can’t always control the outside world, but we can control our internal capabilities. Our doctor/midwife may not be aware you’re using BirthingBetter skills; they’ll see us coping well with labour and our partner being a great birth coach.
In fact they may think we had an easier, good birth or even a lucky one. As one woman said, ‘They don’t know how hard we worked for this good birth’. All humans love to feel skilled and it’s best to learn the skills before you have to do the skill so you have to do the task so you have them at your beck and call. Since our body and baby are preparing for the birth from twenty weeks on, that’s the right time for us to learn or freshen up on the Pink Kit skills.
Childbirth is very often associated with pain, lots of it, during contractions and sometimes between. If there were no pain associated with dilation, all women would handle labour just fine. Less than 5% of women experience painless childbirth.
A natural response to pain is to tighten up. Your birth coach can’t see your internal tension but you can feel it. Tighten up your lower belly now, your bum muscles, and your rectum and inside and feel what it’s like. Birth plans, birth choices and loads of information should not take the place of good, practical usable skills.
Now let go of all that tension, feel the difference. In the tenth talk we discussed how bending, compressing, closing or tensing the space your baby needs come stop labour from progressing, this leads to long labours, tired Mum’s, frustrated doctors and midwives and more medical assistance. By listening to each contraction, you can get a clue as to whether labour is progressing.
This is the job of the man coupled with his ability to notice whether positions are bending the passage or closing the space. Contractions are like a bell shaped curve with the intensity of the breathing following that curve like this (inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, and exhale).
That’s a progressing sounding contraction, if a contraction sounds like this (inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, sigh, inhale, sigh, inhale, sigh, inhale, sigh, inhale, sigh, inhale, exhale, inhale, and exhale). Then that shows that there’s flatness at the top of the contraction and that’s not a progressive contraction, that’s your baby telling you that one or more of these four factors are in play. So use your skills, align your baby better, reduce the inner tension, and find ways to stay more open. We’ve discovered some of these in previous talks.
When you change position for whatever reason, your baby has to adjust as to how the change affects the inside of the body. If you’re walking your baby has to adjust to all the changes of moving one leg forward and then the other leg forward. Do that now and pay attention inside. Sitting, standing, squatting or laying down all impact your baby.
During the intense part of labour, it’s particularly important to find positions that your baby likes and you have a bell shaped curved contraction. Whenever you change positions, it sometimes takes the baby three or four contractions to let you know how they feel about the change, so listen for that bell shaped curve. Know that you’re skills will help every step of the way toward a positive birth.