My favourite books about pregnancy and birth: Pam England's Birthing from Within
When I was pregnant, I never quite found THE birth book (or indeed the antenatal classes or practitioner) that totally suited me. I LOVED Ina May’s Spiritual Midwifery but I was always a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to translate its lessons, based on the fact that I was not in a commune in Tennessee. A lot of the hypnobirthing material, though its methods seemed sensible to me, was so saccarine in flavour that I could never connect with it, with its panpipes, breathy yoga voices and platitudes (I have no doubt there are a lot of great hypnobirthing resources out there and I know for sure there are some great teachers, but sadly I never found the right one to suit me).
Nothing captured the awesome power, struggle and opportunity to meet yourself in all your complexities that I knew on some level was at the heart of this rite. There was little emphasis on the fact that the details of birth (physiological or with pain relief, home or labour ward, intervention or not) often matters less than how you feel in birth. I don’t think anyone ever told me it was ok to feel afraid. I internalised the idea that fear was bad and prevented the oxytocin flow necessary to birth, so I must stay positive on all counts.
When it came to it, my greatest struggle was my perceived inability to cope with the pain I experienced during a long, slow labour. Ever the good girl, I had done all my school work, homework AND revised it many times. I felt like a failure (I have discovered since how endlessly creative us mothers are at finding new ways to cast ourselves into the role of failure) because I felt I’d “lost control” of managing the pain and I was shocked by the at times dark emotional place I had to go to in order to birth my baby. Those who had “beautiful” births, whose hard work “paid off” triggered me deeply. I had read material in certain books which refused to talk about pain, only “surges”. I get it, pain makes us afraid. But does calling it something different truly help us face our fears? I’m not so sure.
I wondered many times about this delicate balance - preparing women for the reckoning birth can be without frightening them. Years later, enter Pam England’s Birthing from Within. I cried when I read it because it spoke so much truth to me. No sugar coating but kindness and empathy amongst the realism. She calls birth a rite of passage, because it is. She talks about power and she talks about pain but she encourages us to face our fears and consider the difference between pain and suffering.
Her approach is unconventional and the old school font and images won’t necessarily speak to “modern women”, but great wisdom lies here. She advocates drawing images of birth and journalling to access unconscious fears and beliefs and this is absolutely key to me - the way so many of us prepare for birth from our conscious minds, determined to absorb information and educate ourselves into having a “good birth”.
She tells us gently that information alone is not enough, that we need to come deeply down into the body and out of our heads, and relinquish control. She says “Birth does its own thing”. Music to my ears. We have tools but we are not in control, and we don’t have to be. Should learning to trust (ourselves, the process?) and surrender be the real work of birth preparation?
Here’s Pam on a load of things birth-related:
The essence of childbirth preparation is self-discovery, not assimilating obstetric information
Pregnancy and birth outcome are influenced by a variety of factors but can’t be controlled by planning
In order for parents to mobilize their coping resources, it is critical for childbirth classes to acknowledge that unexpected, unwelcome events may happen during labour
Pain is an inevitable part of childbirth, yet much can be done to ease suffering
Pam on writing a birth plan, which she argues encourages us to ease fear of the unknown by attempting to control birth:
“labour and birth are not events conducive to being planned … In writing a birth plan, a woman focuses on fending off outside forces which she fears will shape her birth. This effort distracts her from trusting herself, her body, and her spirituality.”
“When you know your ship is unsinkable, you don’t worry about icebergs”
Pam in a chapter entitled “Labour means hard work”, asks an experienced midwife how she prepares women for labour:
“There are three things that are givens about labour: it’s hard work, it hurts a lot, and you can do it. That’s the bottom line. All the rest you learn about is icing on the cake”.
On labour having its own clock:
“… forget everything you learned about stages of patterns of labour. Labour is simply a series of contractions that ease open the mouth of your womb and push out your baby.”
On getting out of your head early on in labour, she suggests a good labour project like sewing, cleaning, baking. Any flow activity that’s appropriate for a pregnant person is probably not a bad idea for the whole of pregnancy - look up Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow activities to find out more about these kind of tasks.
On how we need to stop thinking and “do nothing extra”, an idea from Zen:
“It’s much easier to manage labour’s intensity if you’re not intellectualising what’s happening or obsessing about what to do. Other mammals birth instinctively simply because there is no thinking about the right way to do it or what stage they are in. Nature has its own ways of anaesthetising a human’s brilliant intellectual development to allow birth to happen naturally. Labour works better when you’re out of your mind.”
On losing it and how you don’t always have to be “calm, confident and controlled in labour”:
“… For some mothers, moaning … groaning … wailing … rocking … may actually be the key to getting their baby out”
“I was so in my head with my first birth, trying to think my way out of this painful dilemmma … It occured to me a lot of my pain was caused by resistance to surrender. I was fighting it, trying to get away from the pain. I was judgemental of myself, wondering why I couldn’t do it “right”.” (from a testimonial)
Some general birth wisdom:
“to give birth with power, without drugs, means having to go to the edge, and beyond”
Mothers don’t have to “birth normally, but to give it their all, moment by moment. Once they’ve done that, then to be okay with whatever happens.”
I’ll keep writing about the materials I’ve found since I gave birth that I feel hold true wisdom, but please do tell me your favourites.