You’re now 33 weeks along. Our first few talks focused on our birth; giving solutions to two frequently asked questions by Dad’s, how do I know when she needs my help? And how do I help her? Then we switched our focus to learning about our birthing body and last week about the importance of doing the internal work.
As women we must never lose sight of the simple dynamics of childbirth, conception, pregnancy, giving birth and becoming a parent are full of great awe inspiring mysteries. However the process of giving birth is a simple, perhaps not glamorous exercise in plumbing.
We are a three dimensional container and our baby is a relatively large object that has to come out of our container. Our baby must pass through a hole in a tube (the pelvis), open a diaphragm (the cervix), and finally open an aperture (the vagina).
If we as women were in control of birth then we would plan the day, we’d go into spontaneous labour. We decide how long we’d like labour and delivery to last and more important we’d never have a contraction that was too painful, well reality check, we don’t control our labour, then who does? Our baby.
Remember we all were babies once and when old enough to come out of the container, we make every effort to do that. Sure we can come out early like my son or stay in longer than average, no child stays in forever. We have to work in co-operation with our baby.
Our body and baby both prepare for birth by increasing our birth hormones, these increase up to and right through labour and delivery. When we’re preparing our body, we’re telling our baby that we’re preparing our container to make its passage as easy as possible.
We’re telling our baby that the birth skills we, both Mum’s and Dad’s are learning, will help us work with our baby’s efforts even if we have much more pain than we’d like. By working with and through the pain we are educating ourselves how to work with and through all the endurance issues of parenting. Even if we’re planning a caesarean delivery, our bodies still preparing for giving birth, even if we plan or need a caesarean we can still use BirthingBetter skills at every moment of the birth of our child, through the recovery and into the rest of our lives.
Today you’ll begin to teach yourself how to stay open in labour. Every moment of life is spent in some position or posture, humans sit, stand, lean over, lie down, walk and stoop, in any posture of position we can be aware of how open or closed our lower space is.
One way to stay open throughout labour and delivery is to keep the space between the bones we sit on as open as possible. Spend this week experiencing how different postures or positions open or close you down there. Always keep in mind how big a baby’s head is and always keep your tube (the pelvis) as open as possible in labour and delivery.
Besides staying open in the lower tube or pelvis we have to think about whether the top part of our container from the hips up keeps our baby aligned to the tube.
Delays in labour can be caused by bending the passage, leaning over, compressing the inside space, applying pressure on the sacrum or closing the space off, sitting on the sacrum or being tense inside. And next week we’ll talk about the importance of taking time to learn good childbirth skills.