At some point we have to look back and use our creative human Mind to see how we got to the present. We did this with the father posts and now we have to do this with ourselves as women. There are two paths … skilled mothers-to-be and unskilled ones.
Women who do not become skilled through their pregnancy, do not use any birth skills during the Gateway activity of giving birth are much more likely to feel uncertain in the few months after the birth. It’s simple. Skills produce more skills OR an ability to create more skills. Feeling (and knowing you feel) unskilled keeps you from feeling skilled and hinders your creative process of developing new ones. This is true in absolutely EVERY aspect of our lives as human beings. We thrive on feeling skilled. That is why the present ‘unskilled workers’ comment feels like such a lie. Every job requires skills and even the most physical of digging a ditch, hoeing a garden, serving at McDonald’s has a full compliment of skills. And when a woman has just given birth and felt unskilled, she will head into the newborn period feeling less certain. This is of course more true for first time mothers then women who have subsequent babies. Women who have a terrible subsequent birth will still feel more comfortable with their newborn because they have developed skills for this period independent of The Birth. It’s a skill in itself to be able to move on from The Birth to The Parent.
Because the Choice-based childbirth trend has been strong, too many women carry shame, blame, guilt and disappointment with them from their birth and are unable to let it go. This has a huge negative impact on how they settle into being with their newborn.
Women who consciously develop skills during their pregnancy, consciously use skills during their birth are more likely to develop skills more quickly with their newborn.
The Choice-based childbirth trend has led to an increase in nervous, often depressed and fretful first time mothers. By the time you’ve given birth to subsequent children, you’ve been forced to learn skills and are therefore more relaxed. It is this simple knowledge that skills matter that should drive us to grow a skilled birthing population for all pregnancies and every birth.
If each of you who are an expectant mother or father now ‘choose’ a skills-based childbirth resource and commit yourselves to preparing your pregnant body to become a birthing body, learn, practice and use birth/coaching skills then you will feel more comfortable in The Birth and with your newborn.
If you know a pregnant woman/man tell them this truth. We must want people in our family and are friends to know that skills matter and that being skilled reduces or prevents many of the stresses that doing something without skills produces. This is common sense.
Women want to feel comfortable with their newborn but too many can’t move past their birth experience because it ‘didn’t happen like I wanted it to’. There is no doubt that women who feel empowered by The Birth are more likely to find solutions to issues that arise with their newborn. BUT there is an exception to this. There are women who birth easily. Birth seems to just ‘happen’. They roll with it, the birth moves along rapidly, the pain is manageable and they come away from it thinking ‘this is easy’. Some of these women feel there’s nothing more to birth then just ‘trusting it and letting go’. Women who have had this type of birth experience can’t imagine why other women struggle in their birth. It seems so easy. They then believe that breast feeding or taking care of their newborn will be just as easy. They think ‘women just KNOW how to do this’. Then they run into the realities. Breast feeding is not always ‘instinctive’ or easy. It can be a struggle for some. And once again there is NO correlation between the type of birth you have and how easy breastfeeding is or how settled your newborn is.
This is true of other aspects of taking care of your newborn. Whether a woman breast feeds or not, some babies are easy and some are unsettled. Some babies are easy yet the mother is anxious. Some babies are unsettled even though the woman seems mellow. What every woman knows is that she eventually learns the necessary skills to work with her newborn … another human being. Without skills women can feel overwhelmed, exhausted, useless, incompetent and very unhappy. When these feelings are coupled with an unskilled new father, this causes relationship problems. This is why it’s so essential we grow a Movement to advocate for a Skills-based approach to all pregnancies and every birth. We must want our families to move through pregnancy and The Birth into parenting with the best sense of themselves as skilled human beings. This makes common sense and skills matter.
There is another factor about this newborn period. Women are biologically hard-wired to know how fragile yet tough a newborn is. While subsequent mothers are definitely more relaxed because they KNOW they have a set of skills, they still know how fragile a newborn is. This means we stress more when our newborn is unsettled. When our 3 year old is crying we are less anxious … we all know this. The newborn period is a vulnerable time. Women grieve when this period is full of stress. We all know this.
Nature gives us a remarkable experience. It takes about 9 months to grow a baby inside our body and it takes about 9 months for any baby to really become fully part of our family. Just as we grow our belly during pregnancy and settle down with the changes and discomforts, joys and annoyances, we grow our capacity as mothers (and fathers) to know this new human being. By nine months the baby is known.
So as we look back on unskilled and skilled mothers we can see that bringing skills through pregnancy and The Birth into the newborn period helps women know that they will be growing and maturing skills during this newborn period. Even though there will be unsettled times, knowing you are consciously growing and using skills becomes the rock and foundation. We can see that unskilled women have less of a sense of their own capability because being unskilled leaves you feeling blown by the winds of others and external circumstances. You lack a sense of control and it is that sense that matters to each of us. We can’t always control external factors or others yet we can always/mostly or do our best to control our responses to circumstances. That in itself is a skill.
NEXT POST: Our uniqueness vs our commonality