Volunteer Birth Companions

I am very happy my book is selling - by the way, people, it would be a very nice Christmas or Hanukah gift for any of your close friends or relatives who are expecting a baby in 2012.

Please visit Amazon to review or "like" my book.

I want to tell you about the Montreal Birth Companions. This is a group of very special women who accompany underprivileged women  during their labor and birth experiences. Most of our doulas are just starting out, but some of them have been working with us for years. They are all volunteers, working out of their own pockets and from the goodness of their hearts to help other women have a joyous birth experience.

One of "my"doulas has been volunteering for months, doing her own research, studying,doing courses with different organizations and waiting for her time to accompany a woman in labor. Finally, yesterday, I got a call from a nurse to tell me that one of their patients who is alone here in Montreal was in labor and wanted a companion.

Our doula rushed to the hospital, where she witnessed a beautiful natural birth and was able to provide comfort and companionship to a birthing woman. She is hoping to be accepted to midwifery school this year, and I hope she gets in. She is a natural!

Killer Mama

The other day, yesterday in fact, we lit the woodstove for the first time and stayed inside like the two children in the Cat in the Hat and watched the rain. Of course there was laundry and cooking and homework and computer tasks and all that, but when it's pouring outside you do feel like you are just sitting looking. And it did pour, great grey poodles of it.

So when the ten year-old suggested a movie, we adults jumped to it and we all set off to see Spy Kids, even though on one site it had a dismal rating of three. Movies are great! Especially when it's wet and cold, and it's a matinee so you know you aren't spending thirty dollars, if you include a drink (what am I saying - a drink for two people for four dollars?). The warm smell of popcorn, everyone running in without their raingear on yet because it's still October, kids yelling, a young man with his older parents laughing and joking with the cashier. To the movies!

Spykids is about a step-mom who is actually a spy. The step-kids are having trouble with the blended family and ... don't want to spoil it for you. But the most hilarious scenes are at the very beginning, when spy-mom is beating the bad guys, seriously beating them - don't mess with the spy-mom. The thing is, though, that she's about to give birth to the blended baby - product of the new marriage.

This is a bizarre scene presents a beautiful sexy yummy-mummy, dressed in tight leather with belts and things, pregnant and actually in labor, beating off the bad guys with high-powered karate kicks. She says things like "I still have time"   kick, whirl ... "my contractions are still only three minutes apart"... jump, punch, kick, ..."was that my water breaking"?

She leaves the bad guys lying on the ground (kids' movie - they just fall down, no muss, no fuss) and hops into a conveniently waiting ambulance. Next scene, she is rushed into the hospital where she disappears into a room and all you can hear are terrible screams of absolute deathly pain, then whaaaa! A baby!

Oh, dear. I can't begin to unravel the cultural tangle that I observed yesterday in that movie house.I don't know why we are so interested in the image of beautiful women acting aggressively and why we try so hard to silence them in labor. Why don't most women say "My contractions are still only three minutes apart?" 

I do know, though, that I was laughing the loudest when I saw that lovely woman being physical, upright and downright active in labor.

A Peek into the Doula's Year

… you are assisting at someone else’s birth. Do good without show or fuss. Facilitate what is happening rather than what you think ought to be happening. If you must take the lead, lead so that the mother is helped, yet still free and in charge. When the baby is born, the mother will rightly say: “We did it ourselves.” Tao Te Ching

January 23 … I make myself comfortable on the couch in the living room … they have the lights on low and there is a sweaty, earthy smell in the air. The cat hovers around my ankles. I hear another contraction coming and going. Its 3 a.m. and I have been here for two hours. In the morning, we will go to the hospital, driving on the highway at dawn. The baby will be born by breakfast time. Everything is good.

March 16 … I am sitting in the Jacuzzi room, kneeling quietly next to the bath as I splash water on her back.

July 3 … She wants to dance during contractions, back and forth across the small room, keeping me moving as she holds my hands.

October 1 … I speak gently to the father-to-be, explaining that her pain is normal and his anxiety is perfectly natural.

December 23 … She calls me at home at 2 a.m. I awaken and answer the phone quietly. She says she is in labor and wants me to come to her. I hear from her voice that she is not ready so I speak to her for a while through a few contractions and suggest that she tries to sleep. She calls me at 7 a.m., after sleeping for four hours. She was woken by stronger contractions and she calls me to find out if it is time to go to the hospital. I reassure her that she is coping very well and I talk her through a couple of contractions over the phone. As she is still able to talk through them, I know that I will be able to start my day as planned. She calls me after lunch to say that she has lost a pinkish mucus plug and that she can no longer speak through contractions. I reassure her that everything is going well. At 9 p.m. her husband calls and I can hear her moaning in the background: they want me to meet them at the hospital. We arrive together and the doctor finds her cervix is seven centimeters dilated. She is given a room and she continues to labor well. Her back is hurting and I use St John’s Wort oil to relieve the pain. Her husband is by her side, letting her know that she is doing a great job. She turns to me and says that she needs pain relief. I tell her that this intensity of pain probably means that the baby is almost here. With her next contraction she starts to push. The nurse comes into the room and notices that she is pushing and calls the doctor. As the doctor arrives, it is clear that the lady is pushing and her baby will be born soon. The doctor greets her patient and as the nurse prepares everything on the delivery cart, there is silence and peace as the woman relaxes in between her contractions. As she gets ready to push again, her husband gently wipes her face as he murmurs words of encouragement. I know that with this contraction, the baby will be born. And he is. The doctor tells her patient to reach down to take her child; as she does, her husband bursts into tears. The nurse helps her to place the baby on her chest and covers them both with a warm blanket. I look at the doctor and we smile at each other, happy with the team effort.

Viagra?

I was listening to our national radio the other day in the car. There was a rather lame comedy show that took the place of a mock debate, with canned laughter and all. The debate was supposed to be about the perils of Big Pharma.
With a half an ear on the radio, one eighth of my attention on the road, and the rest of my thoughts on the woman I had just visited, I waited for a laugh - there must be some gags you can get out of the idea of drugs and the common man.
Into my consciousness blurted the voice of a youngish man, explaining the increase in Viagra's popularity over the past few years. In a ham-handed way, he was attempting to turn the problem around, and according to him, the reason why a 65 year old man couldn't get it up was because - oh, when he looks at his wrinkled, saggy, old 65 year old wife, what's there to turn him on?
I quote almost verbatim.
I was shocked. This is national radio! How can he be allowed to present older women, and older men, in such a light? Whoever talks about a long marriage with such disrespect? And how's it anyone's business anyway?
Then I remembered, of course, this is the 21st century. My 9 year old watches hockey games, where men are getting their necks broken by other men (I thought the game was about shooting a puck at a net?), and during the commercial breaks, he learns about Viagra, and imagines it is a pill you take when you are tired of going on walks.
In our drug-happy, Pharma-controlled society, little wonder that women do not expect to give birth without pharmacological pain relief. Men and women cannot maintain a long marriage without Viagra. Children cannot be controlled without Ritalin. For every mild ailment there is a pill. You can take a pill if you are shy, if you are sad, if you are scared.
But why not go through the real emotion? If you look at your old lover's body and see all the scars and lumps that were not there when you met, wouldn't that fill you with love? And if the love isn't Viagra love, so be it.

Birth Conspiracy?

I remember seeing a medical student who was attending his first birth. It was a normal, natural hospital birth. The woman was on the bed, her husband was by her side, I was next to him, there was an intern helping with the delivery, a nurse, the physician in charge, and a young medical student. The baby came out, everyone was happy, the new parents were exhilarated and crying, and then the medical student exclaimed loudly: “Look! Look! Look at its little toes! Look! They’re like real toes. They’re just like real toes!”
The attending physician looked at him and whispered: “Philip, get a grip!”, but I was hoping that that simple amazement and wonder would stay with him throughout his career.
For some people, this story may be full of problems and issues. What do I mean by a “normal, natural hospital birth”? Can a woman have a natural birth in a hospital? I remember hearing from an obstetrician that among some women in our city a “natural” birth was when you didn’t wear much makeup when you gave birth. What is a normal birth? If a hospital has a 90% epidural rate, does that mean getting an epidural is normal?
And certainly, we can’t have trained professionals going gaga over newborn’s toes, can we?

We are living in an age when we are terribly concerned with our health, yet it is an age when human life expectancy is at its highest. We worry and fret endlessly about our children, but have difficulty finding time to spend with them. We are living a life that is far from nature, yet we yearn for the “natural” and the “green”. We are so divorced from our own bodies that a surprising number of pregnant women do not know where their cervix is or how a baby is supposed to come out.
In our world, human life has become so complicated that every simple activity has a huge structure built up around it. This structure is built upon a foundation of information supplied by an army of experts. Simple processes such as eating, healing, making love, giving birth, breastfeeding, caring for children, have all become complicated and institutionalized. When a woman decides she wants to have a child, one of the first things she will encounter is the structure we have built up around birth. She will be met with a mountain of information and much of it will be conflicting.
In the birth world everyone wants to have a little piece of the birth experience. The birth practitioner wants a piece of even the most physical and elemental. Here is an example: It is often very tempting to do a vaginal exam. Why? We want to know what’s going on; if the baby is moving down, if the cervix is opening, where the baby’s head is positioned. What most practitioners will not admit is that this intimate physical connection with a woman is important to them: it is an amazing thing, to feel a baby’s head coming down the birth canal! But how often is it really necessary? Does the laboring woman actually want to have so many exams? How many vaginal exams are done for the sake of the birthing woman, and how many are done for the attendant?
The birth practitioner, or any birth “expert”, also wants a little piece of the bigger picture: we want the woman to have a natural birth, with no epidural and no interventions. Or perhaps we want her to have an epidural so that she can be more comfortable. Or we are convinced that surgery will be less risky. Either way, we want to convince her that we know best. In fact, we do know best: we are more educated, we have seen more births, we have seen more pregnant women and we know what to do.
Or do we?
The Birth Conspiracy is this: It is an understanding, created by all of us, that we cannot function without experts. We cannot give birth without birth experts. We cannot labor without assistance, without classes and checklists. We cannot make our own decisions, or accept consequences for our own actions. It is a way we can avoid responsibility for our lives. Those of us who are experts want and need to control the process. It is very hard to sit on your hands and wait while a woman labors. It is much easier to interfere, to preach, to suggest, and to control.

Interested? You can order your copy of The Birth Conspiracy soon - watch this space!