HS - Birth Story

HS – Birth Story

I saw Debra’s card on the notice board, and I decided to give her a call, despite certain reservations. I’d had various kinds of alternative therapy – acupuncture, aromatherapy, cranial massage- and always been happy with them but was a bit uncomfortable with the assumptions about lifestyle and philosophies that went with them. I was wary of a kind of sanctimoniousness I associated with both practitioners and users. And because I was so grateful for the highly skilled medicalised care that Clara received, I was irritated by people who dismissed conventional medicine as though it were a poisonous system of patient exploitation. Because however wonderful complimentary therapies are, sometimes you just need the drugs and highly skilled surgery more than you need a back rub.

Debra returned my call within an hour, and I made an appointment to see her the following week. It wasn’t cheap, but no one would use complimentary therapies if they were, I expect. I’d had acupuncture for morning sickness and it had been amazingly effective, so I knew that money spent on something which was not- unlike medicine – immediately tangible - could nevertheless be well spent. I visited her in her pleasant upper room in Muswell Hill and felt immediately welcomed and at home. She has a truly beautiful voice. Surely someone must at some time have offered her millions to promote health insurance; I’d part with my money immediately. The fact that she is doing this, because she believes in it, must mean she has an incorruptible soul! And she had children of her own. I would no more seek advice on childbirth from a person who has never given birth than I would sex therapy from a eunuch.

At first we talked about my first experience of giving birth. Then I talked about Clara, her health, my fears, my feeling that I needed to recover a sense that childbirth could be a simple process, that it did not have to be- and more often than not wasn’t – a problematic, dispiriting compromise where you just thanked your lucky stars when it was over and you’d both survived. I wanted to feel that I could face it with equanimity and some self belief. I didn’t expect at every moment to feel on top of it, but I did want to feel equal to it.

Once we had talked about my personal experience and possible expectations, Debra went on to talk about the process of labour, and to discuss the whole business of contractions and what is often called ‘discomfort’. Discomfort is certainly the right word to use in so far as it distinguishes the experience from one of comfort. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to shy away form the use of the word pain. I had no real physical memory from the first time, only a memory, as I said, of the fear of pain. It was that fear I was afraid of. It was my weakness. Debra reminded me of something I think I had forgotten. When a contraction ends, all pain goes, unless you are very unlucky and have terrible back pain throughout. The feeling comes like a whale trying to do a back flip inside you, but then suddenly it is still and the relief from it is wonderful. Debra suggested the possibility of repossessing oneself in those moments. For me, the second time around, this recollection of myself was crucial to my sense that I could manage this, it was actually OK.

I did half hope that the hypnosis would turn out to be some trick, like valium, which would just take it all away, that I’d be able to kid my brain I was swimming in a warm sea while I was actually staggering around a clammy hospital room with a smell of metal and disinfectant in my nostrils. It’s not like that. I had learned to meditate some years previously, and it seemed that the state Debra induced was not unlike the meditative one, a disengaging of the mind from some things, the better to allow it alight on others. I closed my eyes and she talked, leading me gently through the process of envisioning my baby, her warm, lovely world inside me, placing myself in the eye of the storm, where she was. She talked about breathing – which, along with the knowledge that contractions were finite, was the other key thing I gained from the session with her. Her aim appeared to be to induce a sensation of deep calm and relaxation, a position not, as you might think, of weakness, but of great strength. She recorded the session. She seemed to be mixing phrases and expressions which were part of a kind of script with improvisation based on her understanding of my own feelings, some of the phrases I’d used while I was talking to her played back to me. After about twenty minutes she led me gently back to a more actively conscious state. That is, I wasn’t at anytime unconscious, but I was transported to some location deep inside myself where I found that I was not afraid. She gave the tape and suggested I listen to it regularly. That was all. She said I might like to come back for another session but that as I had seemed quite receptive, I might not feel it was necessary.

On the way home I listened, on the car radio to a piece of music I had never heard before, and even now I can remember it note by note, as I can remember the exact kind of weather we had that day, and where I parked the car when I got home, and many details that my every day mind can find no room for. Over the weeks that followed I made a habit of listening to the tape in the morning, at a quiet hour, and found that it quickly enabled me to enter a calm and deeply peaceful frame of mind, where I gathered strength and some optimism about the forthcoming birth.

Verity arrived a day late, and in a hurry. I had made arrangements- my cousin had three children of her own but had offered to come and help for the first week. She arrived on the Monday night, the day Verity had been due, and we all went quickly to bed. I was aware the birth was imminent. I’d felt happy and excited all day. In the afternoon Clara had had a friend round, and I’d sat chatting with her mother, watching them play. At four in the morning I woke and said to my husband, we maybe ought to start timing this. I suddenly realised that I had been having contractions quite close together for ages, maybe since the previous evening, but that somehow I had ridden through them. Once they got fast and furious, though, I stood by the bed feeling like a wave was turning me upside down. It was so violent I felt as though I couldn’t have told anyone my middle name, or my postcode, while they lasted. I just knew that somehow, this time, I was DOING this thing, it wasn’t being done to me. I wasn’t dictating how it was happening, but I was managing it, like driving a car which is just under control, taking the corners boldly and with finely intuned instinctive judgements. I concentrated on my respiratory system, so that I was able somehow to override the feelings in my womb. At one point I thought ‘imagine I’m breathing for Clara’. I breathed. I breathed and breathed and breathed, and it felt weird at first, and then it became essential, as though there was no other air in the world than air I was breathing just there. And then came the calm and I’d look up and say it’s OK, and relax. Then the contractions came so fast that although half an hour previously I’d been told on the phone to stay put, my husband picked up his keys and said let’s go. In the car I could feel the baby thrusting it’s way down. In the lift at the hospital I felt my knees going, and I stumbled into the birth unit with no space left between the contractions, but still breathing. I was locked inside myself, so deeply concentrated that when they started to ask me my address and hospital number I just turned my back on them. (The importance of wise and sympathetic midwives cannot be over-estimated. I had a wonderful midwife in preparation, but she was not on duty the night I gave birth. A midwife who believes in you and makes you believe in yourself is worth her entire weight in medical care, though both are sometimes necessary). Then while they were away filling in the forms I knelt down and gave a great cry, thought my waters must have broken, and looked down to see the baby caught in her father’s arms. So she was born just to the two of us, without the nurses present. I remember the feeling of that great cry, a mixture of surrender and triumph and the astonishment, seeing her there, breathing, panting, as though we’d done it between us, and were struggling for new breath together.

I don’t know how much of it was due to the hypnosis techniques, and the way they helped me both to prepare for the birth and to go through it when the time came. I’m sure it was easier also because the circumstances were better, there was a nest ready and waiting for the baby, I knew what to expect, and she was simply a second baby, travelling a road which had been made ready by her older sibling. But I am sure that the peace of mind and of body which I gained from my session with Debra, and form the subsequent sessions, just listening to the tape at home, helped to make the experience one on which I look back now with such joy – for me, and for Verity, that she should be born that way.