What I Learned from Natural Childbirth

So, it has been a few months since Barrett was born, and you can probably tell by the lack of blog posts in recent months. What can I say? I have had bigger fish to fry...err...an important little life to take care of. But I promised to write a little bit about what I learned during natural childbirth, and it's time to get back to writing, so here is the promised post.

I know that medicated versus unmedicated childbirth is a sensitive topic among mothers, and I want to say upfront that I respect every mother for what she goes through in labor. I am just writing from my own experience, and from a choice I am glad I made.

Because my water broke before contractions started (at the end of my last class as a student for the spring semester--providential timing, anyone?), and we could not get the contractions going quickly enough on our own, I ended up being induced. But thanks to a wonderful natural-friendly nurse named Kay, I was given the lowest dose of pitocin that I could possibly be given. I started at a level 2 out of 30, and ended at a level 8 just under 5 hours later, after which I pushed for about 10-15 minutes before Barrett first showed his beautiful little expressive face to the world.

I was able to go without pain medication, but the experience was different than what Chris and I had prepared for. During our Bradley Method natural childbirth classes, the focus had been on relaxing through the pain. Night after night, I would hold an ice cube while Chris massaged my back and I consciously relaxed my muscles through the pain. But during the real thing, all of my pain was concentrated in my lower back, the dreaded "back labor" that is spoken of in hushed tones like a pain-that-must-not-be-named within maternal circles.

So, labor became all about directing (okay, at times commanding) my dear husband, and later, my dear doula, to smash a fist as hard as they could into my lower back and hold it. I always wondered growing up what the pain of childbirth really feels like, and I think a lot of women cop out with the "you can't explain it" answer. But I am a communicator! I refuse to give up without a simile!

So, I would say that back labor for me felt like a series of charlie horses in my lower back. There you go, curious non-mothers of the world.

I remember taking a freshman seminar at Texas A&M about rites of passage in different cultures, and curiously, many of them involved pain. And that is the best way that I can find to describe my natural childbirth: as a rite of passage. It was like walking over a threshold of pain that I can never uncross and finding on the other side that I had become this new version of myself, Mother Elizabeth. The change was so real that when we brought Barrett home for the first time, I experienced it as being in a different apartment. I mean, I recognized the arrangement of the furniture, but I was no longer the Elizabeth who had turned the lock in the door and driven to school several days earlier. I had morphed in a very real way.

I wanted a natural childbirth in large part because I wanted to see what nuggets of gold God might have for me in the midst of that experience. I wanted to look the pain in the eye and ask it for truth.

Here are two spiritual viewpoints I took away from the experience:

1. How did Jesus do it alone? I don't think that the pain of the cross was purely or even primarily physical. I had a fantastically supportive husband, and a doula, and a nurse who was like our natural birth advocate. She even stopped her task at hand--cleaning up after another woman's birth--to be present at my left side as I pushed Barrett into the world. I was in a ton of pain, but I knew that I was surrounded by a powerful support team, and that made a huge difference. Jesus didn't have that. The Father actually LEFT him while he was on the cross because that was what was necessary to save us. Jesus was truly alone. And loneliness is, I think, a deeper, more visceral pain than any physical hurt.

2. And at the same time, the Bible also says that it was "for the joy set before him" that Jesus endured the cross. There is something to that. Normally, pain signals something wrong with the body, and so we often feel fear along with pain. But in the Bradley Method classes, I was trained to think of labor pains as productive, and thereby to release fear and to open up to the pain, give into it, allow it to come. Every pain would bring me closer to this little boy of mine, "to holding him in your arms" my doula would say.

I guess that's the kind of pain that Jesus endured. It wasn't profitless. It wasn't fruitless. Jesus "humbled himself by becoming obedient to death--even death on a cross!" (Philippians 2:8)

It's easy for me to think that God wants me to feel guilty about the pain he went through for me. I remember as a kid in church, getting to the Confession of Sins part of the service, and trying to think up things I'd done wrong and to make myself feel bad for them so that I could go up to communion and it would mean something to me. But do I want my sweet little son to think about what I went through in labor and feel guilty about the pain I endured to bring him into this new world? No! I did it so I could be with him, and it was worth it.

Jesus went to that cross for you because every pain brought him closer to this little child of his, to holding you in his arms. It was "for the joy set before him" that he suffered, because God isn't a God of guilt, he is Love, and he is Daddy. And it was worth it to him.


You were worth it to him.