I’ve passed my official due date. Friends have been messaging asking if there is any news and saying things like ‘I bet you can’t wait to meet your baby’ and ‘you must just really want it out now’.
But I confess that most days I’ve quietly thought ‘not yet, please don’t come yet, I’m not ready’. Of course I’m excited to meet this little person who is constantly wriggling around inside me and kicking me, but I’m also terrified. Terrified of giving birth and scared of how life is about to change.
BFG is also oscillating between excitement and fear. Most of the time he is calm and reassuring, constantly telling me that I can do it and that all will be well. But sometimes he wobbles too. The other week he saw me lying down stroking my bump and suddenly said, ‘I can’t cope. Keep it in’.
Just when I think I’m calm and ready, I become seized by panic and anxiety. I worry that I can’t do it, that the baby will get stuck as my body becomes paralysed by fear, that my heart will give up through strain and exhaustion, that I’ll pass out, that I’ll lose too much blood.
Where does all this fear come from? It might go right back to my very beginning, if we are the stories we tell ourselves. My Dad has always described my birth as like a scene from the horror film Alien. My Mum had a caesarean and when she was sliced open, he says that I sat up inside her stomach covered in blood and seized the doctor’s finger with my eyes wide open. He’s told this story at dinner parties and it is even written in my Baby Book. First impressions? Mum wrote ‘Beautiful’. Dad wrote ‘Alien’.
So there is the first seed, an indelible image of my own dramatic birth. In adulthood, I collected birth stories with macabre glee, pushing friends and family to share intimate and horrifying details, relishing the drama. When I fell pregnant, I googled risk factors for every conceivable problem. What are the chances of: dying in childbirth, having a stillborn baby, needing a caesarean, tearing from a vaginal birth, being incontinent after a vaginal birth, permanently losing feeling in your spine after an epidural? And on and on. I have imbibed too many terrifying tales and sordid statistics.
What to do with all this fear? Early on, I turned to hypnobirthing, reading three books on the subject and taking a course. The premise of hypnobirthing is simple, based on the premise:
Fear = Tension = Pain
The more you panic about contractions and try to resist them, the more you will be working against your muscles and the more painful and prolonged the whole process is likely to be. Hypnobirthing is about trusting your body to work naturally and instinctively to birth your baby. It aims to keep your conscious mind out of the way in order to let the body do its job as efficiently as possible. Breathing exercises help you to stay calm and supply your muscles with plenty of oxygen. Our tutor told us that women in comas can give birth - it can all happen without you consciously doing anything.
As I’m not in a coma, the challenge is to keep my mind out of the way. I have a very active mind. Hypnobirthing involves self-hypnosis to reprogramme your brain to eliminate fear and think positively about birth. Whilst I believe the theory and plan to embrace the breathing exercises, I have struggled with re-programming and switching off my conscious mind.
In our classes we’ve watched videos showing hypnobirthing mothers giving birth. These women ‘breathed’ their babies out, without screaming, without being told to push. They maintained a state of controlled calm, even though you could see the discomfort on their faces. It is a world apart from the dramatic births typically depicted on television. We sat silently watching these incredible women whilst the camera zoomed in on the baby coming out. However calm the women were, there was the inescapable reality that these babies were being squeezed out from a small space. After the video our tutor asked us what we thought of what we’d seen. We all sat in awkward silence for a while. The expectation was for comments along the lines of ‘she was so calm, she didn’t scream, it’s amazing’. But instead my friend broke the silence confessing, ‘I don’t want to do it’. My thought exactly.
In class, we’ve done relaxation exercises. One exercise involved trying to lose feeling in your hand, and then transferring that numbness from your hand to your face. BFG achieved this. I didn’t and immediately thought, ‘I’m going to feel everything, there is no escape’.
I turn to my hypnobirthing affirmations, which I listen to lying in bed:
I put all fear aside as I prepare for the birth of my baby
I’m relaxed and happy that my baby is finally coming to me
I’m focussed on a smooth, easy birth
I trust my body to know what to do and I follow its lead
Each surge of my body brings my baby closer to me
I look forward to birthing with joy and ecstasy
Intrusive thought: No, I can’t go this far. I can’t look forward to birthing. I still fear it. I find the other affirmations helpful. I repeat them to myself. I shut my eyes, breathe deeply in and out, feel my lungs and diaphragm inflate, try to think positively. But I haven’t let go of all the fear.
Some friends took a class where everyone wrote down their birth fears and then a shaman ritually burnt them all. I don’t have a shaman. But perhaps writing these fears here will prove an exorcism of sorts. I hope so, I can’t carry them anymore. And I do want this baby to come soon, before the medical professionals intervene and induce my labour. So, once more, with feeling:
I put all fear aside as I prepare for the birth of my baby