Maybe you’re going to be a father for the first time. Maybe you’ve been here before and are only adding a new player to the family team. No matter which, you’re effort before and during the birth can make the difference between an experience that builds a family and an experience that creates hairline fractures in the foundation of trust in your family.
No man I know wants to sit and watch while other people do things to his wife. No man I know wants to feel helpless and wait for resolution while other, apparently useful and knowledgeable people, mold his future.
What men want is to get in there and help, and that’s exactly what they should do.
Healthy birthing has more in common with team sports than it has with meditative exercises in patient isolation. In this team sport, we already know your partner is going to be the star player. Your job is to become a great coach.
The coach’s is to understand the game inside and out, to train your team so they are ready for all opposition, and to keep the overall goal in sight and mind at all times. You will get exactly once chance to score before game over. Win or lose, the clock will run out on you. So, how do how do you create a win for her, your child, and yourself?
First, visualize scoring — your relieved, exhausted, and satisfied partner holding your healthy child.
There are three ways to get to that goal — three types of birth. Remember to keep the vision of your goal in mind. Any one of the three can lead to the result you want. They are not better or worse than one another. Rather, they are different strategies for making the goal. Each strategy exists for a reason, and when confronted with the moment of choosing or affirming the correct strategy, you want to know the game well enough to be confident in your choice.
The three strategies are:
- Labor and vaginal delivery
- Labor and surgical birth
- Non-laboring Caesarean
Historically, we have only recently begun to use more than one strategy in childbirth. Before that, all children came into the world through labor and vaginal delivery. For our entire history on this planet, babies have opened a diaphragm (the cervix), come down through a tube (a hole in the pelvis), struggled down a soft passage (the birth canal), and wriggled out or been pulled out of an aperture (the vaginal opening).
The mother’s body, with or without help, changes in order to make the baby’s journey possible. During birth, the changes to the mother’s body allow it to behave in ways that help the baby travel quickly and safely. Hormones soften connective tissue in the pelvic girdle to allow it to flex and open wider. Contractions, which can be very painful, open the cervix. The pain of contractions is normal, natural, and not a sign something is wrong. In fact, the things that can go really wrong may not cause any pain at all. Talk to your doctor or midwife about them.
As the coach of your team, you can help your star player prepare her body for a peak performance. Training will help her score more easily and recover more quickly, but we’ll talk more about that in a little bit.
Relatively recently in human history, we learned skills that let us succeed in a new strategy for birthing, one that meant that many families who might otherwise have lost everything managed to make comebacks and walk away with a win before their clocks ran out.
In the labor and surgical birth strategy, the birthing team goes in with high hopes of a type-one win. Labor begins and progresses normally, but a point comes at which a coaching call must be made in order to make the goal. You might make the call as a team, but you, as the coach, might have to make the call on your own. The important thing is to keep your coaching cool and keep your eye on the goal. We’ll look at some of the things you can do to prepare yourself and your team for this toward the end of this article.
The third strategy might result from a decision in the middle of the effort, but it might also be a decision made far in advance because of any number of influencing factors. It is the non-labor surgical birth. In this case, your coaching effort is both easier and more complicated. It is easier in the sense that you might have a clear vision of how the game will play out long before it begins. It is more complicated in that you must pay special attention to the emotional impact of your star player being essentially benched while the game goes on around her.
So, what’s a coach do?
In all three birth types, up-front training is useful. No matter what strategy you use to score, you can still train your star’s body for the effort. You can’t keep your star from experiencing pain, at least not in the first two scoring strategies, but you can train her to relax effectively, reduce the pain, keep her focus, and play through the pain.
You do this by learning how your breath influences your body and helps you focus your attention. Then, you work with your star to practice breathing and relaxation skills. Train her to hear you in the heat of the effort. Train her to know what instructions you’ll be calling from the sidelines. Teach her that you’ll be there with her, helping her. Identify and discuss all the possible complications on the way to winning. Whether the birth is natural or full of medical assessments, monitoring and procedures, when your star is in the game, focused, and consumed by the pain of the effort, you will have the coach’s broader perspective. You, maybe working with others, will call the plays, let her know how well she’s doing, and make sure she never feels completely alone in her effort. Do your job before and during the effort, and she’ll give a personal best for your family. Slack off on your coaching, and the foundational trust of your team will begin to erode.
In a labor and surgical birth, you’ve done the same pre-game work as above. Your star is in the game and giving her best. You are making calls and keeping her focused. However, for any one of many possible reasons, a decision to deliver your baby by Caesarean has to be made. If you are asked to make the call, and you may be, know beforehand what your star will want and why.
In some circumstances, you may not be involved in making the call. In those cases, make sure you understand what the call means and how to support the effort rather than complicate it.
Even during a cesarean, you will often still be present during the final scoring effort. Your role as coach doesn’t change significantly. You’ll work the same important skills described above. The great pitfall for a coach once this call has been made is the tendency to relax before the clock runs out. In the face of suddenly increased medical care and professional presence, remember to keep your head in the game. Your coaching skills will keep you connected to your star and your child. After all, it is in the final moments of the game that you make the transition from becoming a father to actually being one. Both trust and your child are born at this moment. Even afterward, make sure you follow through. Your breath and relaxation coaching will help with post-operative pain and recovery.
A non-laboring caesarean, especially if it’s planned, has many of the same pitfalls as a laboring caesarean. You might think there’s no need to prepare your game plan or your player since both seem to be taken care of by others, but you’d be wrong to give up your coaching position just because someone else seems to be calling the shots.
You make all the same types of preparations because even if (as sometimes happens) your star is unconscious at the moment of birth, her body is still in the game. Build your coaching skills to help build your partnership, to help her know that no matter what happens while she can’t participate, you’ll be there for her. Train her and yourself because it’s part of becoming a father.
Become the best coach you can be. Know the game. Know your star player. Do it for her. Do it for you. Do it for the baby. When game day comes, it won’t matter which strategy leads to the final goal, you’ll have built a coherent, trusting team. You’ll be able to use your breathing and relaxation skills to calm the excitement, nervousness and anxiety on the way to hospital, during prep, and even during surgery. Your efforts will keep both of you calmer, more focused, more grounded, and more involved. In birth, as in any other physical effort, success is 90% preparation and practice and 10% execution.