I wrote this blog with Sarala’s permission, and it is now featured on the Cambridge vbac friends blog
Sarala’s two VBACs in the Rosie Delivery Unit and the Rosie Birth Centre as told by her doula
Author: Sophie Messager
A tale of two VBACS
How closing the bones can help after baby loss
When I started writing this post during baby loss awareness week, I thought I was going to write a post specifically about miscarriage. But when I started writing it, I felt that it needed to be about baby loss in general. Because you cannot measure grief by what it looks on paper.
Your grief can be as real if your baby died when you just found out you were pregnant, or if your baby dies when he was several months old. Grief cannot be defined by numbers, and we cannot measure how sad, how hurt we are, or by comparing ourselves to others. By judging that some losses are more “worthy” of grief than others. It doesn’t work like that.
Yet, god knows I’ve been guilty of doing this myself when it comes to my own grief. So I want to share my stories, and those of others, and I hope it helps. I have two different histories of baby loss. The first was when I was eight and my little brother, Julien, was stillborn.
This was in the late 70s, and in those days people thought that brushing things under the carpet was the right thing to do, that to pretend it just hadn’t happened meant that, somehow, it would disappear from your brain. None of us where allowed to grieve or process our feelings properly. There was no funeral, and my brother’s little body was disposed of in clinical waste. There was no memory box, no pictures, no footprints. I never got to see my brother (neither did my mum). My mum hid in the toilets to cry. We didn’t share our sadness. I was left with all those unprocessed feelings, so unprocessed in fact that my mind’s choose to forget them to protect me. I have this big blank in my memory which I cannot retrieve. I can’t remember my mum being pregnant, or anything after the birth. Which is odd because, of course, I have plenty of memories of times before that. There is a part of my childhood I simply cannot reclaim because we weren’t allowed to grieve at the time.
When I studied how children grieve as part of my antenatal education diploma, this led me to revisiting this in depth and I had some lovely healing conversations with my mother about it. In fact in 2017 I closed the circle by giving my mum a closing the bones session-she was very scared about what it would bring, in case it brought all the bad feelings flooding back I think, but it was gentle and beautiful and, honouring, nurturing and healing for both of us. A couple of years later, I would give her the massage again to help with back pain, only for my mother to tell me the day was the anniversary of the birth of my baby brother,
My second loss, was when I miscarried my own baby (I went on to have 3 further miscarriages and 2 live children but I am only relating the story of my first loss in this blog).
I started to try and conceive when I was about 33. After over a year of trying and no pregnancy, we were fast tracked for fertility tests, due to my age and irregular cycles. Everything was normal but my cycles were very long and they wanted to give me drugs to induce ovulation. I wasn’t keen, so I investigated other options instead, and after 3 months of acupuncture, I fell pregnant for the first time. I can still feel the raw, amazing joy I felt when the test turned pregnant. I can still picture myself, alone in the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I burst into tears of joy. I kept my little secret all day and then surprised my husband with the wrapped positive test in the evening. For 3 months I walked around in a constant state of bliss. Yes I was tired and nauseous at times, but mostly, I was so high on pregnancy hormones, and I felt that nothing could touch me.At 12 weeks we went for our first scan. We were very excited. Then the sonographer told us there was no heartbeat. She tried scanning me again. I was in denial, still hopeful that somehow, there had been a mistake, and that my baby would still be alive. But my baby had died. What ensued was disbelief, numbness and shock, followed by the deepest grief I had ever experienced. I cried like I had never cried before in my life. Big heavy howling sobs. My arms literally ached for my baby.
It wasn’t helped by the lack of understanding of my own feelings, by the lack of acknowledgement our culture provides to women who miscarry, by the lack of support, or by the inappropriate, well meaning comments given by friends and relatives who didn’t know how to support a mother’s grief.
- “It wasn’t a real baby” (to me it was)
- “There was probably something wrong with it” (maybe, but this was implying I was wrong to grieve)
- “You can have another one” (I wanted this one)
- “At least you can get pregnant” (more grief dismissal)
All these comments contributed to feeling that my grief wasn’t valid.
Thankfully someone put me in touch with the miscarriage association. I rang lovely local volunteer lady Janet Sackman. She was the first person to put soothing, acknowledging words on my grief. I ended up attending miscarriage association meetings for a while. I helped me a lot with processing my feelings. But nothing was done to help heal my body, my spirit, my soul, in a holistic way.
I carried this grief and this fear with me-nobody helped me with that. I never experienced that feeling of bliss in any of my subsequent pregnancies, because I was so scared that I was going to lose my baby again, that I didn’t dare let myself be happy again.
In 2013 I was trained into doing a postnatal massage called Closing the bones. I have been offering and teaching it since 2014 (read about that here). Having offered the massage to hundred of women, we started noticing some common threads in what this ritual does, and one of these thread is how helpful it is for loss. Amongst the women who received this massage, many, including the ones who had live births as well as loss, told me that the ritual felt especially significant for loss. To this day, women keep telling me this.
This is what some of those women said:
” I came along to the Closing the Bones Training about a year after my baby had died. Towards the end of the ceremony, as I was being rocked deep shudders started going through my body and as the rebozo was pulled tight around my pelvis I felt a huge emotion that even now I am not sure what to call it. It felt as though the protective bubble I had formed around myself moved away and with that my baby – as if I was releasing him. Sobs racked my body all the grief, the anger, the exhaustion all the disbelief of what had happened came pouring out. I hadn’t realised how much I was holding on to. I felt the women form a circle around me and felt what it was like to have a safe space held for me, allowing me to just be there in my wild tumult of emotion. I heard someone singing the most beautiful song and someone stroking my hair, hands touching me sending love and support“. Rosie (you can read more about Rosie story and the beautiful poem she wrote here ).
“I have had 3 different losses. All the years up to having children when I felt sad I realised I had empty arm syndrome. It was a deep sadness that as I was so young was not felt I had the luxury of acknowledging. (Wwhen I felt pregnant) I never fully bonded – just in case. I always felt doomed. After two more children in quick succession I learnt closing the bones and was lucky enough to be the subject for the full closing ceremony at the end. I could see golden light all around and I felt deeply relaxed and to have so many women touch me was a unique honour. When I got home I felt a far deeper connection to my children than I had before. A lingering barrier I was unaware of had been lifted. Since then I have felt a far deeper acknowledgement of my loss. And far less pretending all was ok. It feels far more authentic. ” Allison
“Having the closing the bones massage helped me to accept my babies loss and start to move forward and also forgive my body and let go of all the negative feelings.” Claire
This is also what some of the women who had losses, have either experienced or heard about closing the bones, but didn’t experience closing the bones at the time/or since their loss told us:
“I think it could have helped me as it took a long time to fall pregnant again and I felt like I had to be pregnant again in order to process losing our second daughter. Maybe a closing the bones ceremony would have helped with saying goodbye to that pregnancy and feeling less stressed falling pregnant again. If that makes sense?” Hannah
“Instinctively I feel this is a worthwhile ritual/ ceremony to honour the mother and acknowledge her pregnancy and loss”. Molly
“I had a miscarriage at 9 weeks. I think closing the bones would have helped me in so many ways, but mostly emotionally, being able to share it with another woman who understands or at least who can empathise and perhaps sympathise. Who could normalise it (I knew it was common, but it would still have been nice to be told again, several times!). A healing time with another woman. That’s what I would have liked”. Saveria
” I didn’t know about closing the bones until recently and had not really considered it with regards to my loss, but your post made me reflect and actually had (has!) me in tears thinking about how, at the time, a “ceremony” would have helped me so very much. I would have found a closing the bones ceremony beautiful in that situation, a celebration of my child, me as her mother, and a way of celebrating her life, however short it was. I would have found it healing and it would have allowed me the focus I so desperately needed to just be alone with her, and my thoughts, and my pain! ” Jo
“I think it would have helped me after numerous miscarriages as a way of creating ‘closure’ but still keeping that love within me, honoured as a part of my body. I think of it whenever I wrap someone else, and today when I wrapped myself…” Katrina
If I could go back in time and have women close my bones after my miscarriages, I know what it would mean to me. It would mean that I would be held by a group of loving, supportive women, and that they would witness and acknowledge my grief as valid, without judgment. THat I could let all my emotions out, within a safe space, whilst being held. This would have felt very significant for me at the time, the physical aspect of it, and I expect would have helped me heal faster, and better, than I did at the time. It would have been complimentary to the more “mental” side of the miscarriage association meetings. This is also why I feel so strongly passionate about supporting women through loss.
In her recent book, Braving the Wilderness, Brene Brown states :
” The collective pain (and sometimes joy) we experience when gathering in any way to celebrate the end of a life is perhaps one of the most powerful experiences of inextricable connection. Death, loss, and grief are the great equalizers.”
This feels like what this ritual is all about when honouring the loss of a baby.
Energy hygiene for birth and perinatal professionals
What is energy hygiene and why do you need it as a birthworker?
Please don’t let the “woo” undertone of this title put you off and read on because I am going to try and explain it in a way that is hopefully both meaningful and helpful for those of you who aren’t used to dealing with energy work.
Let me start by making an analogy. As a doula (and I’m sure you do the same whether you are a doula, a midwife, an antenatal or postpartum educator or a therapist who work with expectant, birthing and postnatal families), I naturally use a certain level of physical hygiene. Before interacting with a family, I make sure I’m clean. For example, I wash my hands before touching a newborn or before entering a ward in the hospital. So this is the part of the hygiene where I make sure that I protect the families I look after against any germs I may be carrying.
During the actual process, during birth for example, most of the time I do not feel the need to apply extra hygiene measures, however I may choose to wear gloves whilst cleaning bodily fluids, or give my hands an extra thorough wash after dipping them in birthing pool water. By doing this, I protect myself again germs that may be carried by the people I look after.
Finally, when I get home from a birth, or from visiting the hospital or a new family, I also clean myself appropriately. After a long hospital birth, for example I always put all my clothes straight in the wash and usually have a shower or bath. This is about my own comfort and well being, as well as protecting myself and my family (i.e. trying to limit bringing hospital germs back into my home for example).
Of course, all of these practises are something I do without even thinking about it, and they are also adapted to the levels of risk and vulnerability of the clients I am supporting, both in the way I protect them (disclosing to clients that one of my children or another client’s child has come down with an illness for example), and the way I protect myself (choosing to wear gloves to clean up).
I bet you do it too, especially if you are a health professional or therapist. These basic hygiene measures will have been drilled into you. And you don’t even think about it anymore.
For a long time I thought of energy hygiene as a long and complex task that I just couldn’t do (a bit like I used that I couldn’t do meditation because I thought this required to think of nothing (if you still believe this watch this fantastic animation about it)
But various experiences made me dabble more and more into techniques of energy hygiene. It boils down to 3 aspects: Grounding, Cleansing and Protection. Good energy hygiene didn’t have to be complicated, because intention is key and the principles are the same as with physical hygiene.
But before I go into this, let me explain about bit about what I mean about energy, and energy work.
The human body (and all living things) emits an electromagnetic energy field. This can be measured scientifically with electrodes for example. But the field produces energy that also goes beyond the physical body. Traditional medicines like the Chinese and Indian medicine have a deep understanding of these energetic systems and how they affect health and wellbeing. The organ that produces the biggest, most measurable electromagnetic field is our heart, and its electromagnetic field can be used to communicate between people. The institute of HeartMath has some cool science on this.
The tricky bit for us Westerners is our current medical view of the human body doesn’t acknowledge the existence of such an energy field, so it can be difficult to understand, or to believe in. Yet, everything in our world is made of particles and energy. A friend once told me “if you believe in quantum physics, you believe in Reiki”.
Interestingly, even the most sceptical among us have felt energy. We have all felt stuff like the gaze of someone behind us, feeling really good or really uneasy somewhere for no apparent reason, or that when someone walked into a room, the room instantly felt uplifted, or the opposite, the room felt suddenly heavy and uncomfortable.
Energy work can simply be summarised by saying that every time we interact with someone, we exchange energy. Whether we are mindful of it or not. So coming back to the physical hygiene analogy, we bring our own energy to the table, and so do everybody we interact with. Therefore the same rules of cleansing and protection apply on both sides.
As birthworkers and healers, we need to make sure we’re as clean as possible, that we protect our clients and ourselves, and clean ourselves again when the work is done. When we get that close to people, especially in the birth space, where massive energetic shifts are taking place, then energy hygiene is essential, for the same reasons as physical hygiene is essential.
So whether you teach a class, do massage or healings, attend births or support families after birth, anything that involves getting close to other people who are in a state of flux energetically and/or in a vulnerable state, then you need to apply the same principles.
First, keep your own energy clean. Don’t bring your own shit to the table. As a doula, if I have some personal challenge going on, I do to mention it to my clients. Similarly, I try to leave my own energetic crap at the door. Grounding yourself will help with this (more about that later). So be mindful about protecting the people you work with, and make sure you’re as clean as possible.
Second, protect yourself. Everybody you interact with will bring their own energetic state to the space, and like for physical hygiene, some people are clean and full of positive energy and some people aren’t. You don’t want to catch the energy issues of others.
Third, when the work is done, be sure to cleanse yourself again.
So how can you do this?
It’s quite easy, because it is all about the power of visualisation and intention.
Grounding is the earthing of our own energy to the energy field of the Earth. Again some cool science behind earthing-we know that earthing helps people heal a lot faster, having measurable effects on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. One of my two favourite ways to ground myself are the tree meditation, and walking barefoot on the grass. Super simple an quick, and they work!
The tree meditation goes like this: stand up, close your eyes, give your body and mind a quick scan (how do you feel etc). Then imagine that you are a tree. Visualise the tree in as many details as you can. Then, with each out breath, imagine that you are growing your roots deep into the earth. That’s it! do this for a couple of minutes, then scan yourself again. Be prepared to be amazed at the difference!
Protecting yourself is a simple as visualising some kind of protection system around you. Find something that work for you, because in my experience if the visualisation isn’t your bag it’s harder to visualise. Some people picture a bubble (including one with a reflective surface), some see some kind of suit or cloak, or shield, etc . As you visualise your protection recite in your head what you want it to do (for example, to stop any negative energy from coming in but letting positive energy circulate both in and out). If the idea of the bubble appeals to you, you could try listening to this guided meditation.
Again it’s interesting to experiment how you might feel before and after a protection visualisation!
Cleansing can be done by grounding yourself again, whilst visualising all unwanted energies flowing into the earth works well. Walking barefoot on the grass/the earth is a quick and powerful way to ground and cleanse. You can also try and visualise whatever works for you as a way to sever the energetic links you will have made with all the people encountered that day and that you no longer need. It could be just visualising something like a shower or waterfall cleaning you, seeing the energies flow down into the earth, visualising scissors or other cutting implements actively cutting the ties you no longer need. Again intention is key, and so is finding a visual tool that speaks to you.
Another nice way to cleanse your energy is to smudge yourself with sacred herbs (sage is a classic, and there are many other. I personally love Palo Santo) or an essential oil spray made with cleansing intention (or you can buy a ready made one).
There are many many other ways to practise these energy hygiene techniques, and like the physical hygiene techniques, you may feel drawn to activate some of them depending on your circumstances and what you feel the need to do in a particular situation. For example, I often feel the need to add a layer of protection to myself on crowded public transport like the subway in London. Similarly I may feel the need to ground myself more than usual after teaching a bit group, after providing a healing session, or to cleanse my house after doing a healing in my space.
If you’re a Reiki practitioner, then there are all sorts of ways you can use the Reiki energy for grounding, protection and cleansing, depending on your intention (and specifically, if you’re trained at level 2 you can use the Chokurei Symbol for both empowerment, protection and clearing negative energies).
So in a nutshell, energy hygiene is healthy and necessary, and actually simple and easy to do! Give it a try and see what difference it makes to your life.
What new mothers really need
I’ve just finished looking after a new mum as a postnatal doula.
As I supported the new mother, once again I was reminded of the fact that our culture’s focus, when it comes to postnatal recovery, is completely wrong.
Our culture got it wrong because it focuses entirely on the new baby, when it should be focusing on the new mother.
I have touched on this before when talking about postnatal recovery, but I need to dedicate a whole post about this topic.
What it boils down to is in fact very simple.
A new baby’s needs, too, are very simple: food, warmth and shelter.
But those needs are also incredibly intense and time consuming, because babies need a lot of cuddles, and feeding little and often.
Traditional wisdom around the world understands this well, and new mothers are nurtured, and are not expected to cook, do chores and or look after other children etc for at least a month after the birth of a baby.
The support often comes in the form of extended family and local community, or an older woman or young girl is hired to help.
This happens because these cultures understand how important it is for a mother to recover physically and emotionally after growing and birthing a baby- and also how important it is for her to have time to get to know her new baby.
The nurturing takes place in the form of special nourishing dishes, as well as physical practises such as massage and/or binding of the abdomen or hips with a cloth (again many cultures are very specific about this, understanding how vulnerable the new mother is).
Since I started teaching the closing the bones postnatal massage 4 years ago, and started learning about the importance of this practise to help a new mother regain her strength and energy, I have taken it upon myself to ask every foreigner I meet what the traditional postpartum practises of his or her culture entails, and I have found that some form of nurturing practise of this kind (usually involving massage and/or binding of the abdomen hips )is ubiquitous around the world.
An Indian mum told me how her mother hired an old lady from the village who came and gave her a full body massage EVERY DAY for a month after the birth of her twins. A Kenyan mum told me how people would fight over whose turn it was to cook her food, and how she was so well looked after, she didn’t even wash herself.
What do we get, in the Western world today, on the other hand? As clinical psychologist Mia Scotland said at the doula UK conference, “Two weeks paternity leave and sleep when the baby sleeps”. We get presents that are entirely focused on the baby (bar the odd bouquet of flowers maybe-but you can’t eat those sadly), which again is very telling about what our culture considers important.
New mums aren’t nurtured, quite the opposite, in fact, their needs are ignored, nobody is admiring and respecting them for the amazing feat they just accomplished (growing and birthing a whole new person!), and they are even encouraged to “get back to normal” as soon as possible and admired if they do so.
This is SO wrong.
It also means that women feel guilty for seeking support for themselves, because of this bullshit, superwoman, “I can do it all by myself” crap that is peddled by our culture.
As I mentioned above, a new baby’s needs are simple, but they are also intense, and so what the baby really needs is for his mum to feel strong and nurtured enough to be able to meet those needs.
The needs of a new mother too, are incredible simple when it comes to it.
She needs good food, and she needs rest.
She needs not to worry about meeting anybody else’s needs for a while, but her own (and her baby’s).
But those simple needs, in our nuclear family culture, can be incredibly hard to meet.
So as I mentioned in my post “why you need to write a postnatal recovery plan” before, I would like to encourage expectant parents to plan a few weeks of support after the birth of their baby, thinking about how they are going to eat, rest and look after their house/family for the first 4-6 weeks after the birth.
You could call upon your family for support if this is a good option for you. When my children were born, my parents came from France for 2 weeks under the agreement that they would take care of all the shopping, all the cooking and cleaning etc and that my husband and I wouldn’t lift a finger. I get on very well with them so for me, this was heaven. I know, however, that many new parents do not have any family nearby, or that the family’s company may not necessarily be the kind that brings, calm peace and rest, and it will only work if that is the case.
You could plan ahead and batch cook and freeze food, or order some in.
If you can afford it, getting some support in the form of a postnatal doula, a cleaner (even if only for a short while), a mother’s help, or any other extra pair of adult hands which can take the weight of for a bit is completely priceless.
I just supported a new mum, and during the first 2 weeks postpartum, I gave her the closing the bones massage 4 times. It felt great to be able to nurture her this way, and it also felt very much needed. But I am also aware that, whilst I offered this to her as part of my postnatal doula package, not many mums who haven’t got a doula skilled in doing this would feel they can justify the expense, because of the misplaced cultural focus I mentioned above.
So if you are reading this and you’re an expectant mother, I urge you to write a postnatal recovery plan, and demand presents that support you and your growing family rather than your baby.
If you are reading this and you know a new mum who could do with some support, either give her that support directly if you can, in the form of some nourishing home cooked food delivered to her house with no expectation of entertainment in return, in the offer to play with her kids or hold her baby whilst she naps (tidy her house up, fold some laundry and empty her dishwasher whilst you’re at it), or if alternatively, buy her some help-a few hours of support from a postnatal doula, a delivery of frozen dishes that she can just pop in the oven (my client used this company ), or a closing the bones massage or 3!
Together, we can slowly help change our culture’s focus to one that honours and support new families.
If this resonates and you would like to work with me, head over here if you’re an expectant or new mother, and here if you are a birthworker
Rebozo video class-how to use a rebozo for pregnancy, birth and beyond
I did a live video class this week on how to use a rebozo shawl to support yourself and your clients through pregnancy, labour and birth, the postnatal period and beyond. Here is it 🙂
PlayClosing the bones, a journey in-between worlds-by Virginia Valli
Please visit our sister website to read Midwife Virginia Valli’s account of closing the bones
Closing the bones, a journey in-between worlds-by Virginia Valli
Why being a doula is a zen-like practice
As I have moved from learning to teaching, I have always been blown away by how much deeper one’s knowledge becomes when you start to teach something to others, rather than just using it for yourself.
I recently became a doula mentor.
As I support new doulas through their journeys, of course this too is deepening my understanding of what being a doula is all about.
As a new doula and I discussed the process of supporting a couple through the beginning of their labour, it suddenly dawned on me:
Being a doula is a zen-like practice.
Why?
There are many reasons.
The first one is that birth, by essence, is totally unpredictable.
You don’t know when labour will start.
You don’t know how long it will last.
You don’t know how it will unfold.
So just like giving birth requires you to surrender to the process, being a doula too requires the doula to surrender to the unpredictability of childbirth.
This means that, for an ex control freak like me, it is the ultimate lesson in letting go of control and acceptance of “what is”.
In the early days of my doula journey I was so excited, bright eyed and bushy tailed about attending births, that I never gave this much thought.
Five years and many births later, I have achieved a certain state of acceptance and relaxation that allows me to cope with the unpredictability in a much more relaxed manner.
First, there is the on-call period. The time around the “due date” (we should really call it a “guess date”), during which my phone never leaves my side, and sits on my beside table at night. As I have young children this requires a lot of organisation and backup plans for the “just in case” scenarios. For example, right now I am waiting for a client to go into labour and my husband is abroad for a week, so I have a couple of doula friends also on call for me, just in case I need to call them at 3 am to come to my house and mind my children (I look forward to the time when my kids are old enough so they no longer need childcare). Similarly, my social life is on hold, I can’t drink alcohol, and I am never far away from home (If you want to find out more about what being on call entails, I have written about this here and here, and I really like doula Lindsey Middlemiss’s view on the topic too).
Becoming a doula is a calling, something that women do out of passion, not motivated by money. Yet the unpredictability and the intensity of this time, the on call, requires a certain zen state of mind, in order to be able to cope with the intensity of that period. Many doulas give up after a few years. Fellow doulas who have been doulaing for more than 10 years, such as London doula Lauren Mishcon, tell me they can count on one hand which of their colleagues who started at the same time as them are still doulaing.
And when I say unpredictability I don’t just mean waiting for the labour to starting within the 4 to 5 weeks window between 37 and 42 weeks. This is long enough by any means but I have had many experiences outside this window.
Take for example the client who stayed pregnant until 43 weeks had passed. Or the one whose waters broke at 34 weeks, followed by a speedy labour. Or the one who unexpectedly went into labour (thankfully, easily and quickly) at 37 weeks, 48h before I was due to attend my mum’s 70’s birthday abroad. Or the client who texted me with signs of early labour a month early when I was hours drive away, committed to teaching a course and just couldn’t come home (she waited for me to return, thankfully). Or the week-end when 3 different clients, with 3 completely different due dates, where all threatening to go into labour at the same time (they ended up birthing a week apart-one was late, one was on time, one was very early). Or the time a fellow doula called me on Christmas day to ask if I could attend the beginning of the labour of her client who had unexpectedly gone into labour 6 weeks early-the doula is question was over 6 hour’s drive away.
As I reflect on how far I have come since I started doulaing, I remind myself that in the early days of my doula career, I didn’t even dare bake a cake in case my client called whilst it was baking. I had since learnt that, with a few rare exceptions of extremely speedy labours, with most labours you get plenty of warning and time to get all your ducks in a row. These days I seem to take a lot more in my stride, and things which would sent me into a frienzed state of stress barely raise my heartbeat.
I also bow to the doula community, which is incredible when it comes to supporting a sister in need in times like these!
Second there is the early labour. For a first time mother, this may last many hours, and when I am asked by parents or mentees when should their doula join them, my answer is always the same : when they need her.
During this stage of labour, everybody is at home, even couples planning a hospital birth, because hospitals tend to send you back home if labour hasn’t become established yet. Some couples just let you know that they are in labour and don’t require your support yet. So you just sit there knowing that you may be called anytime, and it might be a short time or it might be hours, or even more than a day for you to wait. In the early days I was very twitchy during this time, not knowing what to do with myself. I remember a particular time when a couple’s waters had gone earlier that day, and I didn’t dare go to bed in case they called. My husband found me trying to snooze fully dressed on the sofa and marched me to get into my pj’s and to bed. I’m so glad he did, because they didn’t get into labour until the next day at lunchtime!
Now I treat this period like a pre-marathon and just chill, meditate, watch soppy films and eat nice food, whilst I wait for the call that I am needed. Recently I even sang in a concert with my choir whilst clients were in early labour. It was lovely, because it really energised me for the long birth that followed (interestingly they called asking me to join them the minute I got home from the concert). Many first time couples welcome the reassuring presence of their doulas in the background during this stage, however, even though they may be coping fine by themselves and not actually need you in the same room, knowing that you are in the house help them feel safer. So I have spent many early labours sleeping in the spare room, dozing on the sofa, or simply sitting down reading a book whilst their laboured in another room.
Again there is a big element of acceptance. Supporting labouring couples is all about what the couple needs, not what the doula needs. This can be hard sometimes. You can be eager to be with them, and they don’t need you there yet, so you just sit there, chomping at the bit. They might say we’ll text you in a couple of hours, and they don’t, and you worry about them, and wonder when it is appropriate to contact them again. They might ask you to go home when you’d rather stay. I once had a couple asked me to wait outside their hospital room for several hours, they needed to be on their own for a while, this was a couple of years into my doulaing and I was totally fine with it, but earlier on I know I would be been really eager to be in the room with them and it would have been frustrating.
As you can see, there is a lot of patience involved, and there is a lot of acceptance of “what is”. And there is no space for ego. It’s not about you.
There is a saying in the doula world that doulas are about being, not doing. And it can indeed be challenging to wait “doing nothing” whilst you wait for a couple to ask you to join them. Except you aren’t doing nothing, you are holding space for them (read about that here), even if you aren’t actually physically present, and this space holding is the most important part of our support.
During the birth itself, time seems to assume an unusual loose pattern, and there is something about being there during that process that feels unique and amazing-like time stands still and you are really “in the moment”, you don’t think about anything else or feel you ought to be somewhere else or doing something else. It feels like some kind of amazingly deep meditative process.
Later on when labour becomes established, there are other aspects still, which require us to have a very flexible attitude.
Labour can take a long time. The shortest time I have been present was about 6h (the birth was only 3h long-but doulas always stay after the birth to make sure you’re well and settled and help you feed your baby for the first time etc). The longest time I have supported a birth was 4 days (I have written a blog about How to survive along birth as a doula ) .
Labour can also be surprisingly faster than expected. I have missed a few births, when things happened so fast the mother didn’t realise this was really labour until she started to push, so they only called me after the baby was born. Again now I am quite philosophical about it because deep down I know that things happened the way they were meant to. But missing a birth is always a sad thing for a doula. There is some grief involved in the process.
These days I do a lot of shared care work, because of my teaching commitments. This means I work in a team with another doula to support a client. This has many advantage, not least the ability to lean onto a doula sister during the whole process, and being able to tag team through a long birth. This is the ultimate lesson is letting go of one’s ego, because, sometimes, the mother develops a deeper relationship with one of the doula team, and choses to call only one of us even when the other is available. Sometimes I only support from afar whilst my co-doula attends the birth.
Many things can happen which makes the birth plan veer off course. And when this happens, we have to keep calm and help the couple navigate these as best as we can. I have written before about how difficult it can be for a doula when birth don’t end up the way the parents had hoped. We becoming very emotionally invested in our clients, and when they are sad, we hurt too.
I have also learnt the hard way not to have expectations. The universe has a knack of teaching us the lessons we need to learn, and for me it has been trying hard not to have expectations about what might happen one way or another. It’s kind of difficult not to, especially when this isn’t a first time labour. With first time labours, I have learnt to expect something long (anything between 24h and 48h), so if it’s shorter I am pleasantly surprised. But with mothers who have given birth before, it’s difficult not to have expectations based on what their first birth was like. Yet every birth is totally unique. So for example when a client of mine birthed early with baby number 2, I expected baby number 3 to be early too. But no, he was born 2 weeks past the due date. I also had a client whose first birth had been relatively quick, but her second birth was a lot longer. I didn’t cope very well with it at first, because of my expectations. I also had a client whose second labour had a lull, and she got sent home from the hospital, again this wasn’t what I expected. So now I give myself a mental kick up the arse when I catch myself having any expectations.
The final lesson doulaing has taught me is that everybody is different, unique, and full of unexpected quirks.
I didn’t grasp this in the same way prior to becoming a doula.
It fits in the “don’t have expectations” category too, because every time I think I have sussed someone out, they do or say something completely out of character.
Like the woman who plans a homebirth but then decides to have an elective cesarean instead. Or the one who was scared of birth and planned to go to hospital as soon as possible, but then decides to stay at home during her labour.
This is also one of the reasons doulas have to be so adaptable. If we are to support a birthing woman and her partner the best way possible, we need to change and adapt really fast as a moment’s notice, like a chameleon.
So these are all the reasons why doulaing is like a zen practise.
We don’t know when things are going to happen, how they are going to happen, what will happen and how long it will last. Yet we manage to stay calm, grounded and hold the space through it all.
If this resonates with you and you feel drawn to working with me, head over here if you’re a birthworker and here if you’re an expectant or new mother.
Why it’s important to sit with the pain
I have just supported another long birth, one that didn’t end up the way the parents were hoping for.
I always find myself raw and open after supporting such a birth.
As a doula I become so emotionally invested in supporting the parents, when thing don’t go the way they had hoped for, I feel sad and powerless.
So usually I sit with that feeling, and I leave my heart cracked open for a few days.
Because I need to sit with it, to honour it to absorb it to process it.
This poem from Michael Leunig sums up exactly how I feel:
“When the heart
Is cut or cracked or broken
Do not clutch it
Let the wound lie open
Let the wind
From the good old sea blow in
To bathe the wound with salt
And let it sting.
Let a stray dog lick it
Let a bird lean in the hole and sing
A simple song like a tiny bell
And let it ring
Let it go.
Let it out.
Let it all unravel.
Let it free and it can be
A path on which to travel.”It’s taken me several years to understand this process. At first when I experienced this feeling I felt bereft and I tried to “fix” it. I discussed it with friends who suggested various self-care tools. And yes, whilst self care is an important part of the process, so is sitting with the pain and the discomfort. I have learnt to make peace with it, welcome it even.
I have the skills to heal myself, and yet every time this happens, I choose not to for a few days, because I feel I have to sit with the raw feeling for a while so I can process it and learn from it.
Sitting with the feeling helps me I am going to reflect on what I was meant to learn from the experience.
I have an appointment booked to see a bodyworker friend who knows how to reset my nervous system after a birth. I often sob on the massage couch and I also often get the most amazing insight as I do so.
So I guess my message is, look after yourself (I have written about self-care before here , and also about how I use Reiki to manage my energy and those of others in the birth room-you can read about this here), but do not necessarily rush to do so, because you may miss out on insight if you do.
If you feel drawn to sit with the pain for a while then there is probably a reason why you’re meant to do so.
Are you full of should?
This week I had a very interesting coaching session with Charlie from Your Time to Grow.
I wanted to talk about how I’ve been feeling like I’ve got too much to do, and how to manage my time better.
It is a recurrent problem for me, I am a busy self employed person with many hats, and many people relying on my support. I am also the mother of 2 young kids, and a wife. There are A LOT of things to fit in my day, and I was wondering how to make it fit better, because I felt that I just didn’t have enough time.
In the past, before I became a mother, I was scarily organised. I was one of those people who planned everything, never forgot anything, and had no tolerance for people who didn’t plan or who forgot stuff.
I was a control freak.
Motherhood rewired my brain completely and I slowly morphed into a less organised but much more creative version of myself.
I wouldn’t trade my more laid back, less organised self for my old control freak self, because I feel much happier and relaxed as I am today.
But I guess some of that control freak mentality is still ruling me a little.
Through the coaching session, Charlie pointed out that when I talked about my day and my workload, there were a lot of “should”. I should be more organised, procrastinate less, do more of this, less of that. You get the picture.
I was full of “should”, and with the should, also full of guilt about the stuff I wasn’t doing.
The thing is, guilt doesn’t serve any useful purpose, in this situation does it? It doesn’t help me do my work any faster, it just makes me feel crappy.
I also realised that I am spending far too much time focusing on what I’m not doing, where I’m falling short of my own standards, rather than focusing on what I’m doing well.
At the end of each year, I tally up what I’ve achieved professionally, and trust me, the list is usually pretty impressive. But at the time, in the trenches, I often forget to celebrate my own achievements, and instead I tend to focus solely on my shortcomings.
Charlie pointed out that I’m actually achieving most of what I set out to achieve. It was very useful to have that pointed out, because I realised that not only I’m actually getting things done, but also that I don’t like to work with a rigid schedule, so that the mindset I had, that I ought to stick to rigid rules and planning, simply is never going to work for me . It got me thinking that it’s OK to work with more flow in my day, and this actually works better for me.
It was a bit of a lightbulb moment to say the least.
I realised that I am doing OK. That although not everything on my to do list gets done (does it ever?), and that it can take me a while to reply to emails, the important things get done and that I work better under a deadline than when I have plenty of time ahead.
And, most importantly, it’s ok to work like that.
Having this discussing freed me of guilt, and left me feeling quite liberated.
It was like someone had just given me permission to be myself ,rather than trying to work by other people’s standards.
I’m going to be experimenting with a new, more flowy way of planning, one that feels good and true to me, instead of forever seeking the magic tool that will fix my workload problems. Because let’s be honest, it doesn’t exist.
What about you, are you full of should?
How do we make decisions (especially difficult ones during pregnancy and birth)?
I’ve been reflecting on the complexity of decision making lately.
How do we make decisions , especially difficult ones, and how does this apply to pregnancy and birth?
Let’s debunk some myths first.
I think we naively like to believe that we make decisions in a step by step, rational, logical, maybe even scientific basis.
You know, gathering all the facts, all the “evidence”, making sure it’s process driven etc.
Nope.
Our decisions are first and foremost shaped by our experience and our emotions (fear being a big one and I’ll come back to that in a minute).
Think about it this way: your decision is like the tip of an iceberg. All you see if the decision. What you don’t see is the iceberg below, which is made of EVERY SINGLE EXPERIENCE you’ve had in your life so far.
That’s right, everything you have experienced until now plays a role in your decision making.
People do not make decisions ignoring their experiences, only often this isn’t a conscious process.
Let’s say for example, something really scary happened to a friend of yours during her birth, or you witnessed a very negative experience (this includes stuff you’ve seen/read in the media).
This is what you now associate this experience with.
Being presented with scientific evidence showing that is not necessarily going to shift this belief.
It takes a lot more work than this, because exploring your own belief system isn’t a quick and easy job.
That is why, by the way, so many women are scared about childbirth-because the media only ever portrays birth as a scary, mightily painful, life threatening like emergency. This message has been passed onto you and built into your subconscious without you even noticing it.
In an antenatal class I taught, there was a father who was a medical doctor. He got very heated up when we talked about co-sleeping, stating that it was dangerous.
The thing is, science tell us that when you remove risks factors such as consuming alcohol, taking alertness altering drugs, smoking (and as long as you make sure that the co-sleeping environment is safe and the baby is exclusively breastfed), then having a baby in your bed carries no more risks of SIDS than having your baby sleep on a separate surface-read more about it here (ISIS).
I chatted to this dad during the coffee break and asked him what he had witnessed. He said during his training he saw 4 babies who (allegedly) died of SIDS due to co-sleeping.
So he had integrated this belief through his experience and no amount of evidence was going to change this.
That’s what I mean when I say experiences shape our decision making.
What doesn’t help is that we live in a culture that has put science on some kind of impossible pedestal, and create dogmatic beliefs rather than fluid thinking.
We also completely dismiss emotions, and instinct especially, in favour of “rational” thinking.
Interestingly, evidence even shows that under pressure of time for example, even experts revert to gut instincts when making decisions.
And we are more guided by our experience and emotion than by logic.
I was chatting to male midwife Mark Harris earlier and he reminded me of a favourite topic of his: that everything we see, the world we live in, is an hallucination, because it is the product of the mental construct we have developed as children.
If decisions about where to give birth were based on facts and logic, the majority of women would be planning to have their babies at home or in a birth centre. Not in a hospital obstetrics led unit. Because, for healthy women with uncomplicated pregnancies, there can be more risks in giving birth in an obstetric unit than in the other two settings. The odds of having a straightforward vaginal birth, for the same low risk population, are roughly 90% at home, 80% in a birth centre, and only 58% in an obstetrics unit (this was demonstrated by the birth place study).
And yet most women are scared into believing that birth is inherently dangerous and that they must give birth next to doctors, just in case something goes wrong. Not realising that much of the “going wrong” is actually perpetuated by a risk averse, fear based, maternity system.
Now before you start clamouring that sometimes, thing DO go wrong, let me explain this : my most important value as a doula is to make sure you feel supported in your decisions.
My work as a doula has completely changed the way I perceive the world and people.
As a scientist, I mostly interacted with scientists, and although they were all different, they kind of shared a lot of ways of thinking.
Plus being a doula means I get to discuss people’s emotions and feelings a lot-something you don’t tend to do as much in a day to day science job.
What doulaing has taught me above all, is how amazingly, fascinatingly and wonderfully different we all are.
And that every time I think I have “sussed” someone, they throw me a curveball that goes against everything I thought I knew about them.
Nobody fits nicely in little boxes.
And we should celebrate out quirks.
I have supported women who were terrified of hospitals, and for whom being at home felt like the safest option. I have also supported women who were terrified of giving birth vaginally and for whom having an elective cesarean was the safest option.
See where I’m getting to, here?
We are all SO DIFFERENT. I’m still learning about this and still being amazed by it every day.
What worked for your friend might not (and most likely isn’t) necessarily the best choice for you.
How does all of this relate to the decision making process?
It means that each person has their own, individual way of making decisions.
It means that the process is incredibly complex.
And it means, when it comes to childbirth, that only YOU know what are the right decisions for you.
It doesn’t mean that you mustn’t look at facts and debunk myths.
But it means that supporting you, REALLY supporting you, without an agenda, through making such important, life changing decision such as how to birth your baby, requires an incredibly sensitive, skilled person, who can help you tease out what you really want, rather than what others have led you to believe what is right for you.
But at the end of the day, because of your personal circumstances, some options are going to feel safer than others, regardless of what the evidence says.
And I fiercely defend your right to make your own decisions, however odd and quirky they end up being.
I started to try and conceive when I was about 33. After over a year of trying and no pregnancy, we were fast tracked for fertility tests, due to my age and irregular cycles. Everything was normal but my cycles were very long and they wanted to give me drugs to induce ovulation. I wasn’t keen, so I investigated other options instead, and after 3 months of acupuncture, I fell pregnant for the first time. I can still feel the raw, amazing joy I felt when the test turned pregnant. I can still picture myself, alone in the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I burst into tears of joy. I kept my little secret all day and then surprised my husband with the wrapped positive test in the evening. For 3 months I walked around in a constant state of bliss. Yes I was tired and nauseous at times, but mostly, I was so high on pregnancy hormones, and I felt that nothing could touch me.
