how (not) to have a positive birth
tamagotchi babies and suspended judgement
The app on my phone keeps pinging with updates on the progress of the tamogotchi baby. Digital baby has fingernails now, and some patches of black hair. It looks like a very old man. Think Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button and you’re roughly on the money. Digital baby is suspended in mid-air, tethered to the internet and my imagination. This week the app informed me that the baby is absorbing and excreting amniotic fluid. In other words: the baby is floating in its own piss.
In the real world I’m in my third trimester; strangers have no qualms about making comments about my size, and a thin dark line has suddenly appeared on my stomach. When I look in the mirror I’m struck by the way this line is slightly off centre, veering to the right like a drunk driver. It bugs me.
Time moves fast and slow during my second pregnancy. Fast: I’m running out of time to get all my book edits finished. Slow: The hours I spend awake at night struggling to find a position that I can fall asleep in (nine times out of ten I end up lying on my side with a pillow between my legs). Fast: who has time for birthing classes second time round? Slow: There’s still enough time to pontificate on Twitter.
Anthropologists might describe my current state as a period of liminality, in which I am neither one nor the other. An in-between time. It’s tempting to view this as a period when I am without my usual freedoms, to move, to think, to drink Malbec, to eat sushi. I have never been an earth-mother type, and find pregnancy hard work. Something to get through rather than enjoy. I know this isn’t the case for everyone.
In the run up to my first birth, I tried my best with the hypnobirthing stuff. I really did. Hypnobirthing is the idea that if we mentally prepare to have a ‘positive’ birth then the trials of labour can be reframed as an affirming, empowering experience. Although ‘all births can be positive births’ there is undoubtedly a preference for unmedicated labour in a home setting. My husband was skeptical, recognising, quite rightly, that it encourages women to distrust their medical team when they are at their most vulnerable. Contractions are ‘negative’ language, we must call them ‘surges’ instead. Also: don’t feel that you must comply with the recommendations of your medical team; resist intervention if you don’t feel happy with it.
Giving birth to my first child at the tail-end of Covid, the main tenets of ‘positive birthing’ were logistically impossible. There were no home births, and the local birthing centre was closed due to a lack of staff. My only option was to travel to our nearest city, where, barring a c-section, I ended up having every intervention under the sun in a room no bigger than a broom cupboard. I had the pethidine injections in my bottom, an epidural and an induction. I complied with every suggestion put forward to me by my medical team. Under the positive-birth metric, I had failed.
And yet at the end of all this, our daughter arrived into the world. Unharmed, healthy, safe. How was this not a positive birth? I wondered. Sure, there was blood everywhere and I had to be stitched back up. I don’t think anyone even uttered the words ‘water birth’ as I was hooked up to too many monitors. Could I have given birth ‘naturally’ at home? Possibly, but I’ll never know for sure: I had just given birth during a global pandemic.
This time round I’m trying to maintain an agnostic approach, one which is open to all eventualities. I am the author of my own birthing experience, and it was messy, ecstatic, chaotic and real. I won’t let other women tell me otherwise.
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Recommendation Corner: trad-wife-brat-girl-edition
READ: Meet the Queen of the ‘trad wives’ and her eight children (The Times: paywalled)
Megan Agnew travelled to America to meet Hannah Neeleman on her homestead in Utah. Far from living the dream, Agnew paints a portrait of a mother who has sacrificed her successful ballet career in order to fulfil the farming and fatherhood fantasies of her husband.
READ: ‘Kamala IS Brat’ (The Guardian)
A brief explainer of Brat-girl summer for those of you who still feel clueless.
VISIT: Phyllida Barlow - Unscripted (Hauser & Wirth, Somerset)
A retrospective of Barlow’s work is currently in-situ at Hauser & Wirth. ‘The title ‘unscripted’ refers to the experimental and iterative nature of Barlow’s working process, allowing each project to evolve through a process of making, unmaking and remaking, involving chance and mishap as well as changes of mind. She saw this working practice as akin to processes of growth, decay and renewal in nature.’ You can visit for free!
Oofff, Grace, I relate to this! Feelings of birth-failure are really the shadow side of all this positive birth stuff. If I could have taken just one thing away from my (admittedly hypnobirthing informed) birth prep, it would be repeating to myself: 'birth is birth however it happens.' Helped me get through all the interventions I ended up needing to make sure baby arrived safely. Keep your courage!
Praying for you as you approach this second birth! Birth is such a divisive topic (what isn’t when it comes to women?!) and so I rarely talk about my four births. Thank you for this.