Pregnancy and Birth Outcomes...

...are influenced by a variety of factors, but cannot be controlled by planning.

Let me rephrase that.  Parents have an idea (fantasy?) of what it will be like.  Moms and dads get organized, read all the 'right' books, take classes, write their birth plan, hire a doula.  And the reality is nothing like they expect:

Just getting through a contraction blocks out everything mom has learned and read.

 
The parents expect to be at home with their doula in early labour and end up in the hospital for 18 hours instead. 

 
Mom says she will never get an epidural and after 30 hours of labour, gets it and wonders why she didn't get it sooner.

Most of us have a fundamental belief (whether we acknowledge it or not), that if we prepare in a certain way and do all the right things, we will have the 'good' birth.  If the birth we have does not match the fantasy, we make an assumption that we have done something wrong and judge ourselves as failing.

Part of what Birthing from Within is about is acknowledging this belief and shifting the idea of a 'good' birth. External factors (what happens) are not as important for parents feeling good about their birth as internal ones (what parents do in the moment).  Some people have unexpected cesarean births that they feel great about, because they know they did everything they could.  Others have a rapidly progressing vaginal birth with no interventions that they perceive as being completely traumatic.

Birthing from Within is not about laying down a plan to follow to the letter.  It is about preparing by putting out into the universe what we would like for ourselves, without being attached to what actually happens.  We are prepared to accept what is happening in the moment and do the next best thing, when necessary.

This is a huge departure from most of what is out there about birth preparation.  It can be scary to let go of the busy work that we do to get the 'right' plan.  And it is good to be a little bit scared, especially when we are stepping into the unknown.

Please check out www.birthingfromwithin.com and www.elliedoula.com for more about this unique birth preparation.

Fathers and Partners Help Best as Birth Guardians...

...and/or loving partners, not as coaches; they also need support.

In honour of Father's Day, I decided to write about this Birthing from Within principle.

In our birth culture, we have moved from dads not even being in the room, to an expectation that they are responsible for supporting the mother in every aspect of pregnancy and birth.  This is not fair to either parent.

Birthing from Within Classes and doula support recognizes that fathers are also going through a rite of passage and major life change that is parallel to, and different from, the mother's experience.  Birthing from Within Classes provide a special class for fathers,that address their different needs. Read more about how Birthing from Within helps fathers...

The main role of the father during birth is to simply be present for the mother, to focus all of his attention and love on her.  Many dads learn that their role at the birth is to 'do something', whether that means negotiating with hospital staff, getting ice chips or doing a certain kind of massage for the mom.  While there are times during the birth that specific tasks may be required, the thing that moms remember most is a sense of their partner being present emotionally.  The father's preparation is sometimes about unlearning -- letting go of the instinct to solve a problem or fix something and instead learn to let the mother experience the intensity of labour, simply being there for her and recognizing the birth as the transformative experience it is.

Birthing from Within pain-coping practices (learned in a class) can help the parents stay connected to each other and gives the father something 'useful' to do that maintains and intensifies their emotional connection.

Having a doula or other female support person present is an excellent way to allow the parents to focus inward on the birth, while the doula gets the ice chips!  Doulas can also help direct dad if he is uncertain about what might help the mother and give him a break if he needs to leave for a few minutes to centre himself. Read this article about how doulas help...

Mothers

Julie and Ellie - Early Days

Happy Mother's Day.  What a lovely opportunity to take a few minutes to reflect on ourselves as mothers or mothers-to-be.

How do we let go of the judgement that we feel from the world around us, and more importantly the self-judgement?

Learning to say: "I am doing the best I can with the resources and knowledge I have and moving forward."

Learning to let go of the organic quinoa falafel cakes we saw on Pinterest, but never baked. Let go of the parenting book we didn't have time to read.


Let go of feeling guilty about yelling at our 3 year old for digging up the section of the garden we just planted and putting pine needles in the watering can -- eventually even letting go of the yelling (maybe).

Instead, how do we learn to embrace the early morning request for a group hug with mommy, daddy and 6 stuffed animals and hold on tight for an extra minute, instead of rushing off to make breakfast?

How do we give in and relax at the idea that our 3 week old needs to nurse for six hours straight, put up our feet and read a juicy novel, while he lies on our chest?

Julie and Ellie - Today

During pregnancy, how do we prepare for birth and motherhood in ways that nourish us, whether it is preparing a special place in our home for our baby, or in our hearts.

I am off to enjoy my daughter's company.  I hope that everyone has a wonderful day.

Returning from Birth

This article originally appeared in The Nurturer - a publication of Mommy Connections Lethbridge

Giving birth is a journey.  During pregnancy we prepare.  This preparation might include taking classes, reading books, preparing the baby’s room, having a baby shower and other types of more personal, emotional preparation.

The birth itself is a transition - from the self you were before to the birth of yourself as a mother.  There is a lot of focus in our culture on the well being and experience of the baby. It is equally important that you, as the mother, are nurtured and supported in your new role.  Surround yourself with people who will protect and support you in the first few days and weeks postpartum, while you are learning your new role.

As you learn to recognize yourself as a mom, you may start to wonder what happened to the ‘old you’.  Where is the woman who went to the gym four times a week or who spent an hour a day painting or who cooked gourmet meals? When we have a new baby (or two or three children) sometimes we stop doing other things that give us pleasure and our lives are all consumed by parenthood. This is okay.  For a while.

As time passes many women find that they are starting to return to their old interests, or pick up new ones.  Your world expands again beyond motherhood to include other things.

There was a woman who lived on a farm and had two horses. Before she had kids she rode them every day.  Even well into her pregnancy, she went for rides, spent time with the horses, grooming them and just enjoying their company.  Even though she was happy when her daughter was born, she missed her horses.  So she made a promise to herself that when her daughter was a little older, she would go back to her horses, even if it was only a couple of times a week.  When her daughter was about ten months old, she arranged for a teenage neighbour to come and babysit three times a week so she could go riding.  She saw having that time for herself allowed her to be a better mom.

What I have just described is called the Ceremony of the Return.  Coming out of your birth and early parenting experience and wanting time for yourself is healthy and positive and it helps you come back to your family refreshed. 

You need:           Symbolic object; tags; pot or ground for burial 

·         Think of something you love to do that will be impossible or difficult to do the first year after birth

·         Pick an object that symbolizes/represents that part of your self

·         String and tag the object with a date one year from your baby’s birthday

·         Bury the object in the ground or in a pot.

·         In one year, around baby’s birthday, dig up the object and make a commitment to resume the activity you love.

Good Nutrition is the Number One Thing You Can Do to Ensure a Healthy Baby

Throughout pregnancy, many women receive numerous tests to ensure that their baby is healthy.  While these tests can sometime be helpful in detecting problems, in most cases knowing something is potentially wrong does not actually provide a solution.

The best thing you can do to take care of your baby and yourself is to eat well and stay physically active.  There is no guarantee that if you do all the 'right' things, your baby will be healthy, just as some people do things that research has shown to be harmful and end up with perfectly healthy babies.  Nevertheless, eating well and exercise have been proven by research to improve outcomes for babies overall.  Also, the habits that you form around your diet before and during pregnancy will be passed on to your children.  Babies actually develop a taste for the food that mothers are eating through their amniotic fluid (and later through breast milk) and like those foods themselves.

Here are some specific suggestions (businesses are all Lethbridge-based):

Yoga is great for helping you feel good during pregnancy and preparing your body for birth. Theresa Spencer at Terra Sol Yoga offers classes and workshops for pregnant women and their partners. www.terrasolbodytalk.com

Eat whole, unprocessed food. Avoid processed soy, sugar, corn syrup and artificial sweeteners whenever possible. Many grocery stores have a 15% discount on the first Tuesday of the month, so stock up on healthy, organic food. Look for local produce and meat, as it is often free of pesticides and hormones and it supports local businesses.

Eat as much as you need to of healthy, nutrient rich food and you can expect to gain 28-40 pounds (or more) during your pregnancy. Perfect Fit – Pre & Postnatal Fitness offers classes specifically tailored to pregnant and new moms to help you stay physically active. www.perfectfitness.ca

Taking a DHA (or fish oil) supplement improves your baby’s brain development. Naturistas (424 7 St S) sells prenatal DHA, other prenatal vitamins and many other high quality pregnancy and baby products.

Receiving chiropractic adjustments can be a great way to relieve many of the common discomforts of pregnancy. Many women under chiropractic care report feeling better during the entire pregnancy, better quality of sleep, less morning sickness and a more comfortable labour and delivery. Contact Dr. Amy and Dr Elliott at West Lethbridge Family Chiropractic for more information. 403-327-0070.

Birthing from Within® Childbirth Classes help you prepare for the healthiest, most stress free pregnancy, birth and new parenthood possible. Contact Ellie at elliedoula@gmail.com to learn more about these unique classes.

Take time every day to relax and connect with your baby, even if it is just a few minutes. When you are eating, pay attention to the food, how it tastes and remember that you are nourishing yourself and your new baby.

Join ‘BIRTHING FROM WITHIN LETHBRIDGE’ on facebook for great articles and information to help you in pregnancy, birth and new parenthood and chances to win prizes.

Getting Postpartum Support - A few ideas

Below are some ideas for support with a new baby.  Most of the resources are local to Lethbridge, but the ideas apply to everyone.


When you have the baby, change your voicemail to say:“{NAME} was born {DATE&TIME}, weighing {POUNDS}. We are busy getting to know our baby and we will get in touch when we have all rested a bit.” You can also put a sign on the door if you expect people to stop by.

 Make a list of things that people can help with: Groceries, Meals, Chores, Errands.  This way when they ask what they can do, you can put them to work. Check out www.mealtrain.com to set up an online meal request calendar.

Hire a postpartum doula (if you haven’t already).  A postpartum doula can help you with practical baby care, emotional support, babywearing and anything else you might need.  See www.elliedoula.com for more on postpartum support.

Connect with La Leche League Lethbridge for breastfeeding support.  Meetings are the first Tuesday or Wednesday of each month at the downtown library.  Join the facebook group to get reminders about the meeting or call 403-331-1003 for phone support.  www.lllc.ca.

Find a group of new moms you can connect with.  www.mommyconnections.ca offers postnatal programs for moms in Lethbridge.

If you think you might have postpartum depression, get help.  www.thesmilingmask.com has lots of resources including the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale.  Alberta Health Services offers in-home counselling for women with postpartum depression, free of charge.  Contact Bree Elliott, Mental Health Therapist at 403-388-6666 for more info.

Get a baby carrier and wear your baby as much as possible.  www.ecobabycanada.com is a local business selling great slings, wraps and soft structured carriers, along with help learning how to wear them.  Also join the facebook group for Bridge City Slingers – Lethbridge Baby Wearers, to get support on babywearing and info about meetings.

DADS: If mom is breastfeeding the baby for hours every day what does dad do:

o   Everything else! – find ways to give mom a break (even a short one)

o   Wear your baby in a carrier around the house or go for a walk

o   Change diapers

o   Give the baby a bath or take a bath together

o   Take a nap with the baby (make sure to follow safe co-sleeping practices)

o   Make a meal, or go out and pick up healthy takeout or nutritious snacks

o   Sweep the floor, do a load of laundry, change the sheets on the bed...

o   Support breastfeeding by caring for your partner, so she can care for the child.

The Teacher is "Midwife" to the Parents' Discovery Process...

...not the expert from whom wisdom flows.

This is the fourth Birthing from Within guiding principle, and one more thing that sets Birthing from Within apart from some of the other prenatal class options that are out there.

I realized how true this is when I mentored my first group class last weekend.  My regular class series (whether weekend or six week series) is 15 hours of class time.  Last weekend's class was 6 hours total.  At first, I was concerned that I wouldn't be able to cover 'everything' in 6 hours.  Then as I explored further, I recognized that there is no 'everything'.  There is simply the process of introducing parents to new ideas and ways of thinking about birth and themselves as parents and trusting they will take what they need from the class and learn more on their own.

There is so much 'information' about birth:  telling people where to go, what to do and presenting potential scenarios for parents depending on the decisions they make.  The reality is that parents will not really be able to understand in advance exactly what will happen and instead need to understand that each birth is a different and intensely personal experience for everyone (even a mother and father at the same birth or a mother from one birth to the next).  This is one of the reasons that we use the Labyrinth to look at birth.  The labyrinth has one pathway in and out, but the path is full of twists and turns.  When I taught this at my class last weekend parents really responded to it.  One mother said that she only really understood how useful it might be for labour and birth once she explained it to her own mother.  This is a really good example of how the Birthing from Within Mentor (teacher) introduces a concept and parents take it, explore it further and make it their own.  She bought the Labyrinth of Birth book, which includes history of labyrinths, how to make them and ways to use them in preparation for labour and during labour.

What I do as a Birthing from Within Mentor can be hard to explain.  In our society, we are accustomed to looking for the right answer.  Many people feel inclined to make judgments about pregnant women and give them advice, and sometimes that advice seems helpful, especially if it reinforces what we already believe about birth.  As a Mentor, it is not my job to tell parents what to or tricks on how to have the 'right' birth.  My role is to help them understand what might be right for them and to truly accept that the unexpected is inevitable.  From there, parents take responsibility for their own birth preparation.  Sometimes, it seems to make the classes more challenging to 'sell' to people, since I am not offering a magical solution.  Instead, I am offering the opportunity to discover things about yourself, your relationship with your partner and presenting new ideas that may help you in birth and as a new parent.

I have a six-week series starting on November 2, for those in the Lethbridge area.  please contact me for more information:  elliedoula@gmail.com

Childbirth Preparation is Also Parent Preparation

This is the 3rd guiding principle of Birthing from Within.  People spend a year preparing for a wedding day, how much time do we spend preparing for married life?  Similarly, most prenatal classes spend most of the time preparing for the day of birth itself, how much time do we spend preparing for actual parenting? The Birthing from Within perspective is that you are a parent while pregnant, and we use the terms parents, mothers and fathers to refer to our class participants.

One great thing about Birthing from Within Classes is that the way the classes are taught, prepares you for both birth and parenting.  We learn that birth is unpredictable, unexpected events occur, we cannot plan for or control every aspect of it.  We may feel frustrated, exhausted or uncomfortable.  Welcome to parenthood!

I think about the ideas I had about both birth and parenting before I had my daughter, and I have to smile at myself.  The expectation that I could control so many things, that if I just figured out the magical equation she would sleep, calm down, nurse the way I expected her too.  Even now, she is 2 and a half and I still sometimes want to make things happen in a certain way, that is easy or convenient for me.  I would have loved to take a Birthing from Within class, and maybe it would have helped me understand that holding a baby for hours on end to get them to sleep was not a problem to be solved, but what I signed up for as a parent. Now, in the rare event that she wants to snuggle or has trouble going to sleep, I do my best to use my Birthing from Within breath practices (used for pain-coping during labour), to be present in the moment and enjoy it or at least accept it.  It works (sort of) for temper tantrums in the grocery store too.

Connected to the topic of parent preparation, I participated in a workshop in my community this week, from the creators of The Smiling Mask:
The purpose of The Smiling Mask is to create awareness, understanding, and acceptance of postpartum difficulties; to bring peace and validation to mothers and fathers by engaging and empowering families, and communities in the life changing and natural experience of parenthood.


The three women who started it all experience postpartum depression after the births of their children, and they were not prepared for it.  Our society and media barrage us with images of happy mothers and peaceful babies, and if we fall outside of that there is some kind of deficit in us.  Really the deficit is in an understanding of parenthood as a major rite of passage and the reality that we feel all kinds of things as new parents.  Consistently, new parents feel exhausted, but other than that it really depends on the individual. If we do meaningful preparation before birth, the more resources and coping skills we will have.  The more that we create a community of support, whether it is family, friends or professionals such as postpartum doulas and counsellors, the more we can call on them when we need help.  Everyone who had a new baby needs help, the difference is whether we allow ourselves to accept the help.

I would highly recommend The Smiling Mask website, dvd and books.

The Essence of Childbirth Preparation is Self-Discovery...

...not assimilating obstetrical information.


This the second Birthing from Within® principle.  For some of us, when we are first pregnant, we start to read all the 'books'.  The ones about what happens every week during pregnancy, describing: the birth, the dilation, effacement, induction, ruptured membranes, prolapsed cords, and on and on. Sometimes, the desire to get 'all the information' comes from a belief that the more we know about these kinds of things, the 'better' our birth will be. A good question to ask ourselves is: what kind of information are we getting from these books and how will it help us to prepare for and give birth to our baby?

Many books and childbirth classes present primarily obstetric information, which is simply technical, medical information about birth.  This is information that is especially useful if you are a doctor, nurse or midwife and you need to determine what is happening medically during a birth.  As a parent, this information can be interesting to read, but it is not necessarily relevant when you are actually going through the experience of labour.

Are we looking for a magical formula for the perfect birth?  Or do we just want to gather as much information as possible and leave ourselves open to all the possibilities? Maybe what we are looking for is something else, something to help us in our journey and these books are what is available to us.

We are very much a society that emphasizes solving problems, getting the 'right' answer and planning for everything.  Birth is about surrendering to the unknown, and accepting that we will get there regardless of what we do or don't do to prepare.  One of the things we do as part of Birthing from Within childbirth preparation is to use the labyrinth as a metaphor for the childbirth experience.  (Click here for an article about this).  The labyrinth allows us to look at birth as a journey, where we are challenged, we face the unexpected, we doubt ourselves and we move forward and reach the centre (i.e. the birth of our baby).  Birth gives us the opportunity to really learn about ourselves and to emerge as parents.  This is as true for fathers as well as mothers.

It is important that we do the amount of preparation that feels right to us.  For some people it is reading and taking two or three different prenatal classes and hiring a doula and joining groups online and talking to everyone they know who has ever had a baby.  For others, it is blocking out all medical information about birth and just preparing emotionally.  Or somewhere in between. There is no right or wrong way to prepare.  What is useful to understand is that we are all going on the same journey, in the sense that it is unpredictable and there is no magic formula or right way to do it.

Birthing from Within childbirth classes are unique in that people with very different kinds of approaches to birth preparation are able to benefit, as long as you are willing to learn about yourself and move forward on your journey, one step at a time.

If you are interested in a Birthing from Within Class and you live in the Lethbridge area, please contact me for more information.  If you live somewhere else, please check out Birthing from Within's website to find a Mentor in your area