The Birth Place

The place a woman chooses to birth can influence the quality of her birth experience.
For centuries all babies were bom at home. Beginning in the early 1900's birth moved from the home to the hospital. Women became ignorant of the birth process since they did not witness the birth themselves because they were usually put to sleep. Today women have many choices. Birth can take place in the hospital in a delivery room or a birthing room or birth can take place in an out-of-hospital birthing center or at home.

The hospital is the most common place to give birth in our country. Most women assume that the hospital is the only safe place to give birth. Hospitals, however, view birth as a "high risk" event and believe that all available technology should be used to prevent a complication. The focus may be on machines and monitoring rather than on the laboring woman.

Some women feel safest in the hospital where the physician, emergency equipment and personnel are right at hand. Other women prefer a birth center or home where they feel they have more freedom to create a birth environment that is uniquely their own.

The popularity of natural childbirth and the influence of many expectant parents who wanted to be present together for birth and to have contact with the baby afrer the birth has convinced hospitals and physicians to allow more parental participation and control in the birth process.

- to read the rest, go to WOMEN'S HEALTH AND BIRTH CARE

Cannon

Cannon was a big baby! He shares my sisters birthday, August 18. I always love it when days get double meanings. I celebrated my sisters birthday by attending a secheduled ceserean with a family who was trying to VBAC. I know, you are all groaning. “not another failed VBAC…”. 

But, before you roll your eyes and curse the doctor and wish for better guidelines, etc… 

Let me tell you that this is a story of triumph. 

Triumph over fear. 

This is the story of jubilation and celebration and yes, even the story of BIRTH! a ceserean BIRTH! A strong woman facing the odds, choosing her battles and making decisions and finally resigning herself to what she felt like was the best course for her and her baby. It started a long time ago. I met with mom and dad after a difficult battle to make our schedules work. 

But, we finally met. I heard the story of her first birth - with all it’s confusion and uncertainty. Mom was hoping this time would be different and maybe a doula could help. I had been doula for one of her friends. This family was so busy and it was really difficult getting together, but over the course of her preganancy we got together several times to talk about her birthplan and we kept in touch about her doctor visits. 

At about 38 weeks, the talking started….no labor signs, baby is measuring big, no dilation, no effacement….maybe we should start talking about the possibility of a repeat ceserean birth. As she moved through the last few weeks I could see her flagging. Her usual sunny demeanor was replaced by a melancholy that left me aching for her to be healed. at forty weeks….

- to read the rest, go to LABOR ENABLER

Lessons Jillian Taught: My Experiences with Birth

 By Debbie Hull

I thought she was out of her mind. My sweet midwife friend, Pat Jones, approached me about a new play by Karen Brody, Birth. She wished to produce the play and she wanted ME to read for a part. The only theater audition experience I have was back when I was in my 20's and, for the record, that was some while ago. I broke out in nervous hives all over my neck and arms and wore a long-sleeved shirt to the audition in the bone-melting heat of a Houston, Texas August. This did not auger well for my participation in a play about birth, even if birth is a subject about which I am passionate. I showed up, asked her which part I should read and yada yada, I have had the privilege of playing Jillian De Moya in each of Houston's five productions of Birth.

 I have never seen the play myself. I have only been a member of the cast and I believe that those experiences, cast member versus audience member, must be very different. It has been incredible for me to see and hear the reactions of audience members to the show. After each of the shows we do, we have a talkback panel, a time when the cast and birth professionals from the community answer audience questions and discuss possibilities for improving birth services in our community. After the very first show we did, back in 2006, we had a woman stand up and tell us in tears that she "got it." Her daughter was planning a homebirth and she just could not understand why. Seeing the play opened up her mind and heart to understanding and supporting her daughter's birth plans. Another woman who had experienced a cesarean section did not make it past the opening lines of the play before her tears started to flow. The play provided a forum for her feelings, for their airing and validation and healing. I have seen, from my position on stage, pregnant women gently rub their baby bumps, as if to protect their babies from the experiences their mothers are witnessing. An elderly father attended a performance with his pregnant daughter a while back. He spoke eloquently about the power of the message of the play, of how important was the information. A local physician attended a performance, he was invited to be on the talkback panel afterwards, and was pleased with the honesty of the stories about birth in our country.

 As powerful as the message of the play has been for such varied members of the audience, its impact on our cast has been, for many of us, life-changing. We had a pregnant woman in our group one year. She joined our cast having already planned to birth her baby at a local hospital, not knowing that the hospital has one of the highest cesarean section rates in town. Halfway through our rehearsal time, she had changed her mind and switched to a homebirth with a midwife. One young woman in our cast found her voice and began to take charge of her own health care, asking questions, seeking answers and insisting that her physicians pay attention to her when a health crisis arose in her life. Another woman who had experienced a cesarean section found a release for some of her grief when she portrayed Lisa, a woman angry and sad about her own cesarean section. Another cast member had a lovely VBAC. A cast member in a more recent production, new to our group, discovered that there were still some feelings left to be processed as she revisited her birth experiences while working on the play.

For me, personally, getting to travel with Jillian through her evolution from an out-of-control, over-the-top, just-kill-me-if-you're-not-going-to-give-me-the-epidural birth to the empowering epidural to a homebirth has been such an unexpected blessing. My children are older. I have processed and re-processed my own birth experiences and, frankly, I thought I was past it. Playing Jillian has given me the opportunity to open up to even more soothing and healing of these old wounds. Our cast is most loving and gentle and when they love on Jillian, the love seeps through to me and my soul is bathed in that love. And women, even women who USED to be in labor, need that.

I teach in my childbirth classes that pretending to be in labor, laboring too soon, is exhausting. Many parents, especially first timers, make the mistake of rushing to the hospital after one contraction, way too early and end up being subjected to interventions they heartily wished they’d avoided. Many moms-to-be feel fearful that they will somehow miss cues and not know they are in labor. I urge mothers-to-be to follow the advice of author Martha Sears, RN and author, and pretend that this is not it, until you just can’t pretend any more. I teach them not to work at labor, not to “do labor”, until their body requires it of them. I encourage them to trust the truth that labor will declare itself. But it wasn’t until I got to act out labor, to assume the posture and breathing patterns and focus of a laboring woman, it wasn’t until then that I came to TRULY understand how very much energy we waste when we “do labor” too soon. Trying to be in labor is exhausting.

There is power in the telling of a story. Jillian, and the other women portrayed in the play, had the courage and generosity and wisdom to share their birth stories no holds-barred, the bald truth, the good, the bad and the ugly. Not all of them got the care they and their babies deserved. Not all of us in the cast and not all of us in the audience were given the kind of care we deserve, either. But in telling these stories and in hearing them, there can be healing and nurturing and a way made for a better next time. Playing Jillian taught me that.

The Stories We Create

By Traci Ferris, Postpartum Doula, A Family Friend Postpartum Support

 Each person has a unique life story. As Cassandra Vieten, Ph.D. (2009) states in Mindful Motherhood, our experiences most basically consist of thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. The stories that we create about these experiences, the meanings that we give to these basic components of experience, are what make up our life stories. Stories of childbirth and motherhood are as varied as the women creating the stories, but there is no arguing that these are some of the most profound experiences of our lives. Therefore, these stories are worth telling and worth telling in the most beautiful way possible.

Often, women are robbed of their beautiful stories of new parenthood by unwanted thoughts, feelings, or sensations that cloud the beauty of their experiences. When I was pregnant with my first son, the only thought I could visualize was lying with him as he slept peacefully on my chest, gazing upon him and enjoying his new-baby scent. The reality was that, while we did have some of those moments, the moments of “baby screaming, mommy not being able to soothe” came often and I had to wonder, what was I doing wrong?? Shouldn’t a mother know how to make her baby happy? Often when fantasy does not meet reality and negative meanings are assigned to the experiences mothers have with their new babies, depression or lack of confidence can set in. These are the thieves that rob mothers of the wonderful stories of new motherhood.

Kathleen A. Kendall-Tackett (2010) defines three different “attributional styles” that are at the center of the stories we create about our lives (pp. 91). She states that mothers who look on the negative side of things tend to make “internal, global, and stable attributions,” while mothers who can see positivity even in challenging events make external, specific, and unstable attributions (Kendall-Tackett, 2010, pp. 91). 

Take these two trains of thought by fictional new mothers for example:

Mother #1: The baby is crying again. Didn’t I put her down ten minutes ago? Why can’t I get her to sleep? I must be a horrible mother if I don’t even know enough about my own daughter to help her stop crying. She is never going to be able to get a good sleep routine down, and it’s going to be all my fault if her development suffers from lack of sleep.

Mother #2: The baby is crying again. Poor thing, she must be teething. She has been extra fussy for the past couple of days. I will take her for a walk, maybe that will calm her down. I just need to have patience, this stage will pass soon.

Mother #1 exhibits the internal, global, and stable attributional styles in that she blames herself for her daughter’s crying and worse, she makes the global assessment that she is not a good mother and that this is only going to get worse for her daughter. Mother #1 is on a runaway train of negative storytelling, all based on the meanings she is assigning to what is going on in her life. 

On the other hand, Mother #2 is externally focused in making meaning of her daughter’s fussiness. She understands that babies pass through stages and that she can only do so much to help her daughter work through the stage that she is in.

Why is this important? Well, often we – mothers, in our attempts to be the best that we can be for our babies -  find that our storytelling does become a runaway train of negativity and do not realize the best way to put the brakes on this frame of mind so that we can enjoy the experiences life brings our way. Mindful Motherhood (Vieten, 2009) urges readers to understand the separation between what is happening to us and our interpretations of what is happening and learn to accept what is. Therefore, when we find ourselves spinning a web of stories about how we aren’t “good enough” at being mothers, we should take a moment to understand what thoughts and meanings we are assigning to our experiences to lead us to think this way. 

In other words, we are our own harshest critics at times and even unprovoked, we can find ways to not measure up to our own high standards as mothers.

Returning to my own fantasies about my newborn baby, I find myself thinking back longingly to those days when he cried so often and for so long and remember desperately bouncing him and singing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” so many times that I thought I would go hoarse. That was the first song he ever learned how to sing by himself. I have to smile and be thankful for that experience of desperation as part of our wonderful memories together and part of the process of helping him grow and learn.

About Traci
Hi! My name is Traci Ferris. I live in Katy, Texas, and I am the mother of two wonderful boys, ages three and seven months. I am a postpartum doula and recently began my business - A Family Friend Postpartum Support, which will be serving mothers in the Houston Metro area. I have a Master's degree in Marriage and Family Therapy and a license to practice in the state of Georgia. I moved here to Texas in September 2011 and am in the process of transferring my license so that I can offer therapy services to families dealing with depression, anxiety, or trauma in the antenatal and postnatal periods. My Facebook page can be found at A Family Friend Postpartum Support

References:

Vieten, Ph.D., Cassandra. (2009.) Mindful Motherhood: Practical Tools for Staying Sane During Pregnancy and Your Child’s First Year. New Harbinger Publications: Oakland.

Kendall-Tackett, Kathleen A. (2010.) Depression in New Mothers: Causes, Consequences, and Treatment Alternatives, 2^nd Edition. Routledge: New York.

You Know You Are a Lactation Consultant When…

…You aren’t home, your husband answers a call from a breastfeeding mom and knows what breastpump to recommend to her.

…Your son’s teacher tells him she wants to talk to me about breastfeeding but HIS translation is “Miss McGillicuddy needs help with her nipples.”

…You could hand express anything that has milk in it.
…You find yourself obsessing over the creation of the perfect, crocheted demo breast.

…You perform reverse pressure softening on yourself while describing it to a desperate mom over the phone.

…Your doctor’s nurse, while there for your annual check-up, asks you to palpate a lump in her nipple and give your opinion on what it might be.

- to read the rest, see BAY AREA BREAST FEEDING

Prayer During Labor

It shouldn’t surprise me, but several inquiries that have come my way have mentioned that Mom is interested in hiring me because of my openness to prayer during labor and delivery. I realize this can be a hot topic for some women, because God, Christianity, and prayer can (and does) mean different things to different people! I’ve been asked to pray with roughly half of my clients, either with them or over them during difficult times, and each time it’s been a unique experience. Prayer is intimate and different for every person, and I respect that.

For me, birth mirrors the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross. He died so we could have eternal life, and in birth we truly have to die to our comforts and desires for the greater good of our child. In both cases, the pain is not futile, it comes with a wonderful gift! Life!

My philosophy about birth and parenting is that it should be as natural as possible, that we should work in harmony with the way God made our bodies. I follow this philosophy as I bring up my children and am aware of the foods, creams, medications, cleaning supplies, and clothing that comes in contact with my children’s bodies.

- to read the rest, see BLISSFUL BEGINNINGS DOULA CARE