I wrote this post BEFORE I got pregnant, but never got around to publishing it! I have since gotten pregnant and given birth, and my birth was everything this post wanted and more. You can read my birth story , but see below for what I wrote as my “Letter to My Future Birth Attendants!”
I’m not anxious about being pregnant, or birthing, or having a newborn baby. I feel like all things are both natural magical and I will be awed to get to experience them all, with what I think of as a healthy awareness of the intense transition and challenges they can bring.
The only anxiety I have had has been over a lack of trust in our culture around pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. I dedicate my life to having each and every one of my clients feel like powerful, capable, instinctual mammals who are experiencing an incredibly healthy and normal, yet also deeply magical part of the human reproductive life cycle. I approach it with intention, and sacredness. With a pragmatic respect for biology, physiology entwined with a deep reverence for the impact the experience can have on who we are and how we feel about our bodies and ourselves for years to come. I keep having the thought of “will my community give me the same thing I work so hard to give others?”. To get out of my fear and into my strength, I decided to write down what I would WANT from my community and birth attendants in pregnancy, birth and postpartum. I would tell any of my clients “focus on creating what you WANT, as opposed to what you are afraid of”. So I’m writing a flowing letter from my future pregnant self to my community musing on what I WANT, so I can let go of my anxiety around it. Here we go:
I only get to have one first baby, and I only get to meet my baby for the first time once.
I want the body-knowing of being undisturbed, of entering the realm of the physiological hormone rush that brings me out of my intellectual mind and into my instinctual, wild-mammal, meditative state brain. I want to feel like *I* birthed my baby, my body birthed my baby. I want to feel connected in my own time to my body, my baby. To myself. To Gary.
I want quiet. Loving strength. To be sat WITH, not stared AT.
i want to be encouraged. I want there to be a trust in biology and a wariness of intervening. I want to be truly trusted that nobody cares more about my baby than me, and that the choices and beliefs I have about birth are BECAUSE I care about making the physically and emotionally healthiest choices for myself and my future family, not IN SPITE of it.
I don’t want gloved hands on me, or my baby. I want people who know us and love us to touch us with their hands.
I want the people around me counting all the things I have on my side, not all the things I don’t.
When I have anxiety, I want to be reminded that it’s normal. Say something like “Just keep that fear, because if you get rid of it, you’ll just replace it with a new one.” Or, “Your fears are just a sign of what you are committed to.” (Gloria Lemay teachings <3). Remind me why I can trust my body, ask “what would you do different with more info” if I’m tempted to probe myself or baby with tests. Tell me that babies are good at being born and that the biggest statistical likelihood is that all will be well, and I can trust myself, my body, my biology.
I don’t need to be reminded of my options, I need to be reminded that I can do it and that my body works, that biology works, and of all the reasons why I can believe that.
Keep me in my body, focused on my breath, on my baby. If I need to hear it, tell me that it’s safe to breathe, safe to open.
I promise to love my attendants afterwards, but I want to spend my birth bonding to myself, and my baby, and to Gary, in those once-in-a-lifetime moments after birth. It’s us who will be left tucked in at home together to raise a family. My attendants will trickle out and stop coming to check on us. My family is who needs the gift of the oxytocin bond that comes with birth.
Help Gary to feel loved and present and quiet, help him feel present now and curious later. Sit with me if he can’t. I need him to finish the birth feeling full in his heart of the power of women, of birth, of me, feeling deeply bonded to us and to protecting the space my baby and I will need in the days and weeks and months to come of breastfeeding and bonding and making healthy choices amidst possible family and friend pressures or judgements.
Let Piper hang out with us. We love her! She will be my best doula.
Love me, believe in me. Believe in biology. Believe in birth. Resist the urge to “fix” things, and focus on doing everything you can to support my natural physiology to work. Feed me. Help me rest between waves.
Remind me if I forget to hold my own perineum, that the stretching tells me where to breathe. To picture gently easing the baby’s head out into my hand. That I give birth with my body, not with my mind. That when the head is born “We are all just going to be very still and quiet while and after the baby comes. Everything is safe and well. Stay inside your body.”
Don’t pull my baby out or attack him or her with impatience for cries. Ask yourself “how much time has really gone by? Is the risk of interfering in this once of a life time moment for a family to feel like “we did it ourselves and it all worked” worth it? Or is everything really fine and you’re just reaching in out of habit or reflex vs true need?
Give us time. Give my baby a minute to arrive. Take pause and look for all the reasons to believe that the baby will breathe on their own. Let them arrive slowly and gently. Be still. Give me time to find my instincts.
Have warm towels nearby if I want them, but relax if the water is warm. keep me warm. I want to have a sacred and hormonal third stage. I want to sip my warm (not scalding!) tea with maple syrup through a straw.
Make my room cozy and tidy. Light me a candle and a salt lamp. Make this the most beautiful, sacred birth you have ever attended. As if it’s the only birth you will ever attend.
I want to birth my placenta peacefully and slowly. I don’t want to lose the post-birth magic in the hecticness of getting my placenta born. Give me an environment that supports my natural oxytocin so my hormones can birth my placenta safely and smoothly. Remember the more desperately we want the placenta to come, the longer it takes, and that the placenta is often born the same way as the baby.
Give my family time alone after the birth. A lot of time. Sit in the other room and bond with any other attendants. This is your time to giggle and chat and bond and relish in the house full of oxytocin. Don’t do this whispering in the corner while I’m birthing as if I can’t hear and as if whispers aren’t disruption. Make me tea and food. Pretend this is the only birth you will ever get to go to, as if it is the first and the last. Don’t be in a rush to leave. Imagine this is the only chance you will ever get to revel in the magic of birth.
Please leave slowly and one by one. Trickle out gradually. Don’t all rush out in a flurry at once. Make it slow.
Save looking at my vagina for last, before you go. Let’s maybe weigh the baby tomorrow.
Maybe burn the cord, maybe elastic band it. Either way, take so long to do it that at some point I say “hey, aren’t we ever going to cut the cord?”
Tell me to rest and stay in bed and keep the baby hogged skin to skin until breastfeeding is smooth and established. Tell me to limit visitors and tell Gary to protect me to have all of that, to keep us both safe and healthy and well. Tell me to stay in bed and tell Gary to keep me there. Tell us my only job is to feed the baby and Gary’s job is to make sure I’m fed and in bed. Tell us everyone we know has their whole lives to bond to our baby but we only have a few weeks to have a healthy postpartum and smooth start to breastfeeding without health complications.
Tell Gary to protect me to get that. I have earned it after helping so many others get it themselves.
Postpartum, tell me I am beautiful. That my body is amazing. That I can (and need to) rest. I want to feel beautiful, powerful, strong while I am pregnant, when I am birthing, and postpartum. Tell the people around me I want to hear and feel those things.
Remind me that it’s possible for me to have the pregnancy, birth and postpartum I’ve worked so hard to help others have, and reassure me I can trust my community to honour it for me, too.