Can Birth be Joyful?
Yep. It can. Do you believe it? With so many horror stories out there, I wouldn’t blame you for believing that although making the baby feels good, and snuggling with a baby feels wonderful, that the part in the middle – getting the baby out – is something to be afraid of.
What do most people say about birth? That it’s painful, long, traumatic, something to be suffered through to receive the reward of your baby at the end. These stories persist and it’s hard to think otherwise. Maybe you’ve already had a baby or two and it didn’t feel anything like joyful.
Are you willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of minutes to hear another perspective?
Your body produces the incredible hormone of love, oxytocin, whenever you do anything to do with connecting with other people – like sharing a fun evening with friends – or making a baby – kissing, hugging, having sex. It makes you feel close and connected, trusting and loving. It actually reduces pain. That very same hormone tells your uterine muscles to contract during labour. The muscles tighten and shorten which pushes your baby down onto your cervix to open the door.
At the same time, oxytocin creates those feelings you already know so that you feel close and connected to your baby and your partner. In fact, the stronger the contractions, the more oxytocin you produce, and the more love floods through you and your baby so that when you finally meet, you fall in love with each other. If you didn’t fall in love with your baby at birth, you might take one look at the wrinkled darling then opt for a cup of tea, toast and a long sleep, and get to the baby later. If that happened our babies wouldn’t survive for long, from an evolutionary perspective anyway.
Combine oxytocin with the other cocktail of birthing hormones – endorphins, melatonin, prolactin – and you have a powerful love drug that gets you through the intensity of labour and makes you feel like the empowered superwoman that you are, just like the mama in this photo here. What a great start to the hard work of mothering, knowing that you can get through the hardest of work and come out triumphant.
Yes, labour and giving birth is hard work. If it wasn’t we’d call it “holiday” instead of “labour”. With good preparation during pregnancy, by attending a birth course with your partner so they’re prepared for their role, by choosing care providers who you trust and creating a comfortable, private environment to give birth in, you too can have not only an OK birth, not only a good birth, but a fantastic, empowering, joyful birth that you look back on forever with pride. Regardless of how you give birth, you can feel positive about the experience. I’ve done it, thousands of my clients have done it, and you can too.
By Karen Shlegeris