Lemony Webbles

Serenity Lady gives birth

Suzanne grilled me about labor the other day, and I got to thinking about it. Here's what happened. (this is my longest webble yet!)

After going through labor, and coming back for more, I finally think I've come to some understanding of what it means to me to deal with the pain of giving birth. Not that I have tested this new understanding, mind you. But here are my musings.

I saw this TV commercial when I was pregnant with Maya, I think, for Thermasilk (this shampoo that activates when you blow dry your hair, or something of that nature) where this lady is in dry-hair land and she's in a desert and her hair is all sticks and hay and is breaking off- it's so dry. Then she turns and sees this doorway of fire and through the doorway is this lush green pastoral scene with a stream- the image of moist paradise. And she walks right up to the burning doorway (and I'm thinking, 'NO, DON'T GO IN THERE! YOU'LL BURN UP! RUN AWAY! STOP DROP AND ROLL!) and serenely walks right through and the fire doesn't burn her up, it makes her hair all (insert good hair adjective) and life is good and she's in moist pastoral paradise. I know, it's just a commercial, but you know, video is such a powerful medium that sometimes it can transcend even its most superficial uses and really mean something. And to me this meant a lot. Pregnant people that are nervous about labor, like I was, will find encouragement anywhere they can.

So here's what it means to me. The desert place is the first parts of labor, the parts you can sort of deal with by using techniques that you learned in classes and strategies that you figured out ahead of time, and tools that you brought with you. All intellectually based, reasonable things. But then you see the door of fire, and you realise that it's going to hurt more than you can reasonably handle and you don't want to go through any doorways of fire thank you very much I'd like to go home now and you did this to me, etc. The doorway of fire is the transition phase of labor and the green scene is, of course, having given birth and holding your amazing miracle of a baby. So the big question is, how do we get through that doorway? How is it possible to endure the fire? Maybe it's by tapping into that serenity.

Serenity Lady beleived, and staked her life on it, that she would not burn up in that fire. I didn't burn up either, of course. But that kind of pain usually means that there is something seriously wrong with you and you just might not make it, like multiple stab wounds or a heart attack or serious poisoning, and if you do, you will be seriously scarred or impaired in some way after the fact. I've got thirty years of conditioning in my mind and body that says that if I feel pain, that I am hurt in some way, that something is WRONG. And my body jumps into action and responds to that stimuli with the adrenalin I need to either fight or run away from that pain that's coming at me. And my whole self is whipped into action to deal with the emergency.

But then there's labor. Nothing is wrong when those contraction come on strong; I am not hurt, I'm not burned. And there's noone to fight, and I can't run away. My natural response is totally wrong for labor pain. (I fought it every second of the way. I was not the serene lady, confident in the end result, willing to go through the fire.) The first time, I tensed up at every contraction (fight), and in the second labor, I tried to avoid getting to the end by not doing things that would make labor progress (flight). When I would tense up, my doula would instruct me: Relax! Put your shoulders back down. But I didn't know how to relax when I was in pain. It just didn't seem possible. I didn't know any other way to respond. I've been told that tensing up during a contraction actually makes it hurt more, but maybe I didn't understand why at a deep level. It's so hard to beleive that something that seems so passive (relaxing) could deal with something so intense. I think I beleive it more now, though, because during transition with Maya I really did relax in the sense that I didn't fight against it. After the midwife finally decided with me to break my water completely, the serious get-the-baby-out contractions kicked in. And it really felt like fire, white hot, but I knew that I was going to be ok at the end, and I knew deeply that a baby would come out of all this. It took a great deal of concentration to stay calm and not flail when I felt another contraction coming but it was entirely possible to do. I can't really say it took all I could give, because I don't really know what that is, but it took a whole lot.

When I think of how Serenity Lady comes by her transendence, I am reminded of the real life martyr, the famed Mona, who was killed by hanging in Iran not too long ago for being a Baha'i and teaching children's classes. She didn't fret about physical pain, she kissed that dern noose and put it around her own neck. The physical pain and even the assurance of death were completely irrelevant to her goal of living according to her beleifs. No flames were too high or hot for her. She was focused somewhere else entirely. On Baha'u'llah- her heart's desire and her goal. She was HAPPY to walk through fire for Baha'u'llah.

And I wonder if I were to go through labor again, if I could focus on the fact that everything worth doing requires me to walk the path of sacrifice. Would I get that serenity and transcendence? Could I become like a spiritual warrior whose weapon is their submission to the will of God? It seems to me that practising that in the other areas of life would be a good preparation for trying to be detached from labor pain. From what I've read about the sympathetic nervous system, there is a mechanism in the body that will respond to that serenity and make contractions hurt less, be more effective at pushing the baby down, and go faster, as well as giving the baby more oxygen. So it could actually happen that spiritual understanding could be an effective way to deal with labor pain. But I haven't actually tried it.

Labor always felt like a testing ground for myself, where I could see my character as it really was, without masks or walls to hide behind, so I tend to think a lot of how my character can be improved in relation to labor. It's like a analogy for all the tests of life for me, and so I tend to get intense about it. But another less critical part of me says: it doesn't really matter what I did in labor or how much it hurt or what the state of my character was, as long as the baby came out alright, it was a completely successful labor. And I beleive that too. And why is it so important for me to judge everything anyways? But that's a whole other webble.

Posted by Bahiyyih at March 31, 2004 12:24 AM