I was crying in the chair, not being able to look at the nurse as I was very well aware of my 28 years of age and the fact that I should not be crying out of my fear for needles. It was one shot, 2 seconds, I knew it. I knew it wouldn’t hurt as much as I imagined it would, but I just couldn’t help it. The tears just came rolling down my cheeks and I pulled my arm out of the nurse’s grip. When she told me “you are going to be a mama, you cannot act like a baby”, I (of course) got upset by how she talked to me, but I also realized how urgent my need to deal with this fear was. This was during the first weeks of my pregnancy. If I had not been able to solve my fear during my 28 years of life, how would I be able to get over it in the 8 months I had left before labor?
One of the many many ways I used to manage my fear of the upcoming labor was by reading the book “Ina May’s guide to childbirth”. It wasn’t so much that it taught me what to do, or how to do it. But the book in general created a mind shift in the way I viewed childbirth. I used to only hear of birth in terms of comparing it with pushing an orange out of your nose, the worst pain ever experienced and not being able to sit down for days after. Labor seemed like something impossible for my body to achieve. This book completely transformed my belief of birth into something that my body was actually created to do!
One part of the book that I carried with me, was a section where Ina May is saying that comparing birth with pushing an orange out of your nostril couldn’t be more inaccurate as the nostril is not made to fit anything bigger than the size of mucus, while we are absolutely physically built to birth a baby. The book keeps showing you over and over that this is true. Birth is not achieving something that was never meant to happen, but something that we were born to do. Much of what we believe about birth comes from what the society has taught us, and while it might be entertaining to hear stories about scary births or comparing your pain to pushing an orange out your nostril, this is not helping us to believe in the ability of our body.
This book doesn’t come with any magical tricks or secret pain medication. It really is as simple as shining a light on the not so commonly told experience of birth. One that is believing in your own body and the power that we all inherit. It’s about listening to your own body and trusting the voice within you. Once done reading it, I started to believe in myself and my body in a way that made labor seem way less scary and more exciting. I was about to experience something so powerful that my mind had not been able to grasp it up until now. And in terms of fear, what else can you really wish for than a mind shift like this?
