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Birth as transformation. What does that even mean? Transformation sounds hyperbolic, but it really does apply. It means: “a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance.” Birth is definitely dramatic. Not sure how thorough works exactly for birth, but if it means “complete, not superficial or partial,” I’d say we can claim that too. Change in form or appearance? Totally. Where one thing previously resided inside the other, after birth, the two things are completely separate from the moment the cord is cut.

The baby goes from swimming like a fish inside the uterus, breathing amniotic fluid, sensing the outside world from a distance to sudden noise, brightness, coldness, hands – so many hands --, and BREATHING AIR. It happens every day, all over the world, but it’s a complete miracle every time if you ask me. How does that baby’s body know to switch from sucking in fluid to breathing air? It’s huge! And it just happens. Somewhere, a tiny little switch gets thrown, the baby draws in her first breath, her lungs inflate, and presto, she has arrived in the outside world as a separate, fully self-contained, independent (with respect to breathing anyway) creature. Up to that very moment, she was connected to her mother, a little parasite or voyager or whatever you want to call her, whose life was attached to and predicated on her mother’s life and breathing.

Does this blow anyone else’s mind like it does mine? It’s a subtle instant in a birth, when so much else is happening right then. Everyone is ecstatic, overjoyed to see the new little face. Everyone is talking, laughing, crying, hugging. In all the melee, it’s really easy to miss, but what a transformation that first breath is.

And finally, how about what happens to the mother emotionally. Mothering is instinctively a very protective behavior. Mothers will go to just about any lengths to keep their children from harm or danger. It’s not that hard when the baby is curled up under her heart, thrashing around, but totally contained with everything he needs right there, built into the system. No one knows that baby except his mother. No one knows all about when he gets the hiccups, when he is wakeful or asleep, whether he is a polite resident or a kick-boxer. And then suddenly that intense, perfect bond is broken. Is it any wonder that a mother can’t bear to be separated from her newborn? Of course, she can’t! She’s on day one of learning to let go, of accepting that he is now his own person on his way into a life that will extend (we hope and pray) far beyond hers. Other people can hold him, feed him, bathe him, change him. And they might drop him or accidentally hurt him or press on his soft spots or get bad germs all over him or or or… In the instant of birth, the mother goes from being the all-encompassing maker and protector of new life to being a separate, isolated individual. The amazing connection between two lives that is the placenta and umbilical cord is gone.

Birth -- total separation; complete change in form and shape; one of the most wonderful and dramatic moments in any life. Transformation.

(If you’re still reading, thanks for making it to the end! There is nothing about the process of birth that doesn’t dazzle and amaze me. I hope my readers, whoever you are, find something of worth in my rhapsodizing…)

Babies are geniuses. Truly. Imagine: you emerge from a dark, warm, contained place into harsh light, cool air, rough touch. Everything gets so much louder, instantly. And the smells. That’s totally new. You have no understanding of yourself in space because up to now you’ve been cradled. That constant, reassuring beat and the timbre of a beloved voice are now are gone. You are born!! From that moment, a baby starts learning and processing and absorbing at a pace that those of us old enough to think about it will never again achieve.

When I think about all the things that a baby learns in the first year, I am completely awed. They learn to control their bodies from the top down. It starts with lifting their head. Then they discover arms. Those things are mine? Trunk, rolling over, legs, pulling up. Walking! They know the faces of those they can count on. They understand many many words and start saying a few. (For those who struggle to learn another language, think how long it takes to begin understanding. And that’s with one language already under your belt.) These little geniuses are figuring out that language even exists while they learn to understand it and to use it. And there’s so much more: fine motor skills (picking up a Cheerio), smiling and laughing, grasping things, throwing things. They come to understand love and anger, security and fear, happiness and frustration, delight and fury. It is staggering to think about how much a baby takes in during that first year.

How is that even possible? It’s mind-boggling, but clearly necessary to our survival. If babies didn’t learn so fast, they wouldn’t have lasted long in earlier days of our history. But I wonder about more than that. When I look into a baby’s eyes, sometimes I am convinced that I see an old soul. I don’t know exactly what that means, but there is a depth there, from the beginning, that is mystical and powerful. My own son, my youngest, was born with the weight of the world on his tiny shoulders. I swear, that beautiful baby was ruminating about world hunger as he slept in his battery-powered swing chair. His brow was furrowed with worry. His eyes watched the new world around him with wary concern and some kind of bizarre insight peculiar to babies.

Then it goes away. Somewhere in the early years, as they become aware of themselves as selves and start working the world around them for all their worth, they lose the connection. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it happens or how, but as they become more purposeful in the little life they are embarking on, it consumes all of their attention, and the infinite recedes in favor of spitting out disgusting babyfood peas, getting the beloved stuffed lamb back from the older sibling, or ensuring that mommy does not leave the room by howling inconsolably.

Oh, but it was there, that connection and the genius of eternity.

I’m having “celebrate the pelvis” day. A person’s pelvis is actually 6 bones, 3 fused together on each side (2 iliums, 2 ischiums, and 2 p***c bones) to form the pelvis in a person. I’m most interested in womens’ pelvises, because I think so much about child birth. In massage therapy school anatomy lessons, we finally, today, arrived at the study of the pelvis. This fantastic set of bones is a baby’s first cradle. It has three movable joints in it – two at the back where it hooks onto the sacrum on each side, and one up front where the p***c bones come together in the middle. The iliums form the upper part of your hips, where you look for love handles. Courtesy of the ischium (lower part of the pelvis), one has what we generally call “sit bones” that get very sore if you have a bony butt and sit for too long on a hard chair. That p***c bone up front is a crazy place, hooked together with a ligament. During child birth, the baby’s head gradually descends through the pelvis and behind the p***c bone, giving us the magic “stations” which go from -3 (still quite a ways above the p***c bone) to +3 (below the bone and on the way out).

Did everyone else know that a pelvis can get twisted in all kinds of crazy ways? It can be tilted to the front or to the back; or better yet, one side can tilt forward and the other backward. This is all thanks to the three joints. Isn’t that great? My chiropractor tells me that mine generally does the right side forward left side backward thing. No wonder it causes muscle aches, right?

Anyway, back to the birth miracle and the pelvis, getting a baby to pass through a pelvis is no cake walk. Thankfully, mature women have widened hips which means a widened pelvis. But even so, it’s a pretty tight fit. Down goes that baby’s head as labor gets to the final stage. If you’re a lucky mamma, that baby is face down with its chin tucked so that the pointy back of its head comes first, sliding neatly under the p***c bone and then arching upwards as the baby emerges. If that baby has other plans, like diving out with one hand up or coming butt or foot first, well, things get a lot more complicated. But even with face down, chin tucked, a woman’s pelvis does amazing work to let the baby pass down and through, changing shape and moving to create space. Relaxin, a lovely hormone that contributes to the late pregnancy waddle, has made all a mom’s tendons and ligaments loosen up so the pelvic bones can expand and move around even more than usual. Then gravity and the downward pressure of that little head and the sheer, unmitigated force of a uterus in action send the baby down through the pelvis and toward the light.

I will always and forever be grateful to Amy Bookwalter, doula trainer extraordinaire, for teaching me the basic mechanics of hip rotation and pelvic opening. While that baby is still up high, mom should act like a ballerina, with feet turned out. This has the effect of widening the upper part of the pelvis while bringing the sit bones at the bottom together. Baby can descend from on high. Then, later on, when we get to those glorious +1 through +3 stations, toes point in to open up those sit bones at the bottom and let the small one out. Don’t believe me? Sit on your hands and feel your sit bones. Turn your toes out. Feel those sit bones move in?? Now turn your toes in like a pigeon-toed person. Did you feel that? Out those bones went! This is because when you turn your toes in or out, you actually rotate your whole hip and cause change in the shape of your pelvis. It makes extra room for the baby’s passage.

OK. Now someone explain to me why OBs in hospitals seem to always tell moms that the best way to push a baby out is flat on their backs, with their legs wide open and their toes turned out. No gravity and the sit bones closed. My first birth as a doula was a shoulder dystocia, which means the baby’s shoulder got stuck behind the p***c bone. Mom was pinned flat on her back, toes turned out, over her own objections. It was truly a moment, watching that OB yank that baby out. The baby ended up with a fractured clavicle. Mom felt terrible. I felt sad. Like Amy taught us, it’s just physiology. Have the doctors read about the Gaskin maneuver? We doulas have…

Got a message from one of the mom’s that I helped adopt a child from Ethiopia today. She told me that there is a whole group of families out there who are grateful to me for my past work in international adoption and wish me well in my new venture. Warmed my heart. Reminded me of another stage of life and a very different kind of family making to what I’m doing now.
These days, as a doula, I’m helping women through the physiological miracle of birth. The assumption is that all birthing women are mothers, although I know enough from my past to know it isn’t always that simple. Because if it were, that would mean that women who don’t birth children can’t be mothers. And that just plain isn’t true. I just flat out disagree with such a narrow and biological definition of motherhood. Which is not to say that giving birth isn’t momentous. It is. It is a miracle, every single time. That baby emerges through a feat of divine engineering that defies comprehension and then, all of a sudden, takes her first breath. And the gift of life is complete. The women who give the gift of life are amazing. And most of them go on to be mothers in every sense of the word. It brings tears to my eyes when I have the privilege of watching a birthing mother greet her child on the outside. But what about the babies who don’t have that kind of love after they arrive? For whatever reason, and there are so many reasons: illness, poverty, extreme youth, mental instability, addiction, death. Shocking as it is, in some countries, up to 15% of women still die in child birth, like it was 100 years ago, and we didn’t know how to do better. We just don’t know how to get the care to them in time. So then we have the babies without mothers.
I have had the honor to see a woman become a mother in another way – through adoption. I have a dear friend who adopted four baby girls from China, each of whom was thrown in the trash because she wasn’t a boy. I know so many women who fought for their adopted child with a ferocity that surely demonstrates the heart of a mother. I know a mother who flew to Haiti in the terrible days after the earthquake, 3 months pregnant, to find the daughter she was adopting and literally protect that child with her body while they slept in the street.
Mother is an incredibly rich, complex word. It is a word of the heart. It speaks about love and sacrifice and dedication and forgiveness. It is the breath of the holy spirit. I am a mother myself and know of the joy and sorrow, laughter and pain. I honor every single mother, knowing we are all imperfect and doing our best in a terribly broken world, to love our children – however they come to us.
(Please know that I’m not ignoring fathers. They are not today’s subject. 😊)

Getting our heads straight about birth...

As a birth doula, I ponder the fault line that has appeared between women who are giving birth today in the U.S. and the medicalized approach to labor and delivery. I see a fundamental difference in how the birthing parents and the hospital personnel view the goal and interpret the landmarks along the way. What do I mean by that?

I mean that hospital staff, trained to treat illness, respond to emergency, cure disease, prevent further disease, and relieve pain and suffering, see a women in labor as two people (mother and baby) who are in danger of complications, infections, and experiencing unnecessary pain while going through a medical process that needs to be closely monitored and survived, and all risks along the way minimized with quick intervention. The goal for them is a physically healthy mother and baby who can be released from the hospital within a day or two.

But more and more, the parents are looking for something different. They are more educated than ever and understand that 85% of births (according to the World Health Organization) will unfold without complications or significant risk to either mother or baby. They are learning about the incredible systems that nature has put in place to make birth an optimal transition for both mother and baby, including things like the natural hormonal exchanges that go on between mother and baby to trigger labor and make it progress, the benefits of delayed cord clamping, the importance of leaving the vernix and amniotic fluid on the baby’s skin, the critical role of the Golden Hour (vice immediate weighing, measuring, erythromycin drops, Vitamin K shot, vigorous rubbing and cleaning), and the cascading path that interventions often follow once begun. They see further ahead than a medically trouble-free birth and discharge from the hospital. They are concerned with how they themselves will feel about the process after the birth and how the birth will affect the baby’s ability to bond and breast feed and thrive.

Neither point of view is wrong, and there is so much room for overlap and congruence. But to bring them together more, we need to get our heads straight about birth. Birth doesn’t have to be looked at as a pathology until (in the 15% of cases that go awry) something is going wrong. It is daunting and difficult but also wonderful. It is a physiologically normal process that constitutes a daily miracle. Doulas and medical teams can work together better to honor the birthing mother’s wishes, to protect her memories, and do our best to give her the experience she is trying to have. We can let the mother’s birth plan be our guide, while supporting and protecting her and the baby. As a birth doula, this is my dream – that we will all grow together and learn to hold the space for our mothers and babies during birth.

Step one could very well be agreeing that birth is a normal, amazing physiological process that generally does not endanger mother or child and that unfolds in its own mysterious way.

Hello and thanks for stopping by! I'm Whitney. I'm a practicing birth doula with training in prenatal massage serving Fairfax, Loudon, Arlington, Alexandria, Montgomery, Prince Georges Counties and the District of Columbia. I have some immediate availability and am already booking into the summer. If you are looking for a doula who will take the time to understand how you want your birth to go and will help you bring your baby into the world according to your wishes, then we may be a good fit. I see my job as helping the birthing mother to understand what is happening, to support her in making decisions, and to provide physical and emotional support and comfort throughout her active labor and delivery. I generally work in hospital settings or birth centers. Please get in touch with me if you would like to have a free consultation. Call me at 240-988-6302 or email at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!