This Changed Everything

Finna’s birth story.

This Changed Everything. Finna's Birth Story.

I was so informed, so darned well read, so prepared. But not for this.

I had vacuumed up those pregnancy books, for I wanted it all, every last moment of the thing it that it had me taken 37 years to realize.

But this changed everything.

And in hindsight, it was nothing.

Something so arbitrary, so artificial, a line in their sand, changed my daughter’s birth, her very first breaths and my last ones as a pregnant woman, so profoundly.

A date.

An expectation of punctuality.

I never was very punctual.

My first child was so very wanted, so long in the waiting – for; I have always felt the tug of motherhood right there in the middle of me. When that second blue line appeared on the mast of the little low tech pregnancy test boat floating about in a cup of my pee, I froze for a second’s disbelieving rapture.

Then jumped up and down, the uncontainable bodily expression of the most intensely exciting moment of my life. ‘No way! No waaaay!’

Yep, I was pretty durn chuffed. I felt the sun in my belly.

The pregnancy was healthy and my babe grew happily in her big watery home despite my anxieties for her safety, born of the simple disbelief that I could be this lucky, this blessed. I wanted all of it, the whole pregnancy experience. I watched her on ultrasound at 11 weeks (‘Yes, one baby.” A baby?! There’s a baby in there?!), a fat bigheaded thing with stick limbs, and at 20 weeks (why did she keep moving away from the probe?). I had the blood test, the regular hospital checkups and the GD glucose test. I avoided soft cheeses and read pregnancy books and magazines, I coveted baby stuff and bought a sling online.

I knew I wanted to keep this bub close to me.

I joined the hospital birth centre’s Midwifery Group Practice program (each woman is assigned her own midwife throughout the pregnancy and birth), and wrote a birth plan full of all the things I didn’t want done to me, or to her. We’d chosen to birth here because of the nice atmosphere, the ‘family birthing rooms’, the big deep tub that could be filled with water. And because, other than home birth (for which I was too fearful at the time), it was the only option where we lived. I didn’t really want hospital, had envisaged a nice birth centre, but this, yes this looked ok.

A nice compromise, and all that.

I wanted water.

I wanted peace.

I needed support.

At 26 weeks there was some bleeding, enough to warrant a checking, and here, in this state, I met my midwife. On my back, a portent of things to come. The cause and origin of the bleed were hard to ascertain, and although it was brown, ‘old’ blood, I stayed in for two days, with steroids to mature her lungs, just in case. The Chinese Herbal Gynocologist I saw sent some herbs, and the bleeding immediately responded by slowing to spotting that continued harmlessly for the rest of the pregnancy. There were more ultrasounds, more turnings away from that sound blasting probe.

Now that I know.

It’s difficult to recount this story now, four years later, without editorializing.

Now I know.

So many things.

I must be honest here, Finna, it was not just ignorance but fear and distrust that sent me down that rolling jumbling path to your hasty birth. I found it impossible to trust in the thing that my body was doing, so getting this baby out safely was all I could see. I couldn’t trust in anything so frail as the way I felt about myself, my body, to do that.

And I couldn’t believe that you were safest inside me, in that first warmth, right where you were.

And really, nobody told me I could do it, that I was safe to trust in myself, and in you.

It was an obstacle, a danger, a test. Take the drugs, screamed the books, the magazines. Don’t be a martyr!

Nobody told me until long after your arrival that birth could be enjoyable, uplifting, sacred, empowering.

So it wasn’t.

So I was easily scared.

So birth was something to be got past, so I could have you.

The exception, in fairness, to the general aura of negativity and fearmongering was the Calmbirth class that I took over two warm yellow weekends at 32 weeks. That was soft and light, uplifting and positive. Sunk in soft big chairs that floated our bigness, I learned about breathing in the light of birth, and meditated on guided visualizations.

                                    27 weeks pregnant. Look at the big guts!

Somewhat buoyed by all this, I shared the creeping tummycrawling nightfears for my precious babe’s safety through birth, and the helpful peaceful birth space created by Calmbirth, with my hospital midwife.

She gave me short shrift.

“Birth is hard work,” she said. ‘It’s just really very hard work and you just have to do it.”

Granite face.

I could see what she thought of airy fairy hippie types confessing their weak fears and trying to shirk the hardness of it all.

So, no more fears allowed then. Right, best just get on with it, eh?

The word ‘midwife’ literally means ‘with woman’. You know, support, uplift, that sort of thing. She was a bit of a downer, actually.

41 weeks.

Me; ‘What will happen if I go past 42 weeks?”

Hospital midwife; ‘Well, then your baby will be post-mature…’ She trailed off and the acid fox look on her face told me all.

That would be bad. I wouldn’t want that. Your baby might die, or be sick, and all that.

At 9 days ‘over’ (over WHAT, I now think. Over what? When they are over it? When I am? When the hospital is overfilled? Stupid term…) I had yet another ultrasound.

‘Your baby looks very happy in there, lots of fluid, plenty of movement.’

Smile.

A few days later, the induction is explained. I’ll have a prostaglandin gel on the Sunday to artificially ‘ripen’ my cervix, and stay in hospital overnight to be monitored. It may start labour but unlikely.

Then the membrane rupture (ARM) and the ‘drip’ (Synotcinon) on the Monday.

The midwife says she will try to keep the birth as normal as possible and I’m still free to move around.

Free.

I’ll have to drag a drip and two belly monitors with me, is all.

And no water, no pool, no bath. But past the magical 42 weeks that isn’t allowed anyway. Hospital protocol.

So many things to be done.

Hospitally things, technological things. Monitoring, breaking, dripping.

All so dangerous.

I later learn that the hospital does inductions on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

‘Hopefully your bub will arrive on Saturday night!’ chirps the backup midwife, a lovely kind woman, on the phone. ‘They often do that, they seem to know…”

She remarks that she has had two inductions, and that it will be ‘hard and fast’. In my tired addled frightened hopeful mind (after learning that a baby is ‘full term’ at 37 weeks I’d been waiting for the birth since then. Five weeks) this translates to ‘you’ll have to work a bit harder but it will be over quicker.’ I’ve always been into that.

View birth as suffering, and you will want it over as quickly as possible, I guess.

I neglect to mention, as they have faded into the more intense events that followed, that an OB performed two ‘stretch and sweep’ procedures, which were unpleasant and had exactly no effect on bringing on labour. I used the breathing and visualization that Calm Birth taught me to get through them. They caused mild contractions, which then stopped.

Guess she just wasn’t ready.

Sunday morning, hospital.

Kind midwife hooks up another foetal monitor, and proclaims all well. She does a vaginal exam, and tells me that I am already beginning to dilate – one to two centimetres, so the gel won’t be required after all.

Great news!

I could cry when I think of this.

I was already in early labour.

My daughter was coming on her own.

My body worked just fine.

Just fine.

We went home, and spent our last pregnant day together as a couple in the sunshine, Not Thinking about tomorrow.

We went for a walk, held hands.

I’m glad we did that.

Monday morning, 8 am, we arrive, cross the cool silent concrete of the hospital maternity entrance, take the empty elevator box up to the maternity ward. We are shown the room of our child’s birth, sterile, a hospital room, and Baz takes one last picture of me pregnant, covered by the oversize floating green t shirt that I will birth our child in.

 42 weeks pregnant, Birth day.

Our midwife (not the sweet one, the ‘birth is hard work’ one) tells me she will keep the birth as normal as possible. She lays out a ‘nest’ on the floor where I might like to sit or crouch (it’s right there on the floor by my foot in the picture). She hooks up those ubiquitous bloody monitors and rolls me over when the heartbeat is too low. I am attacked by another cringe of fear. ‘If there’s a problem just do a caesarean,’ I say. Really really frightened for my child.

I just want my baby, I just want her.

She looks at me, a look that says, ‘don’t be such a pussy, you have to do the work like everyone else.’ A disappointed, dismissing thing crawling on her face.

I now know that the ‘work’ of a normal birth is a labour of love, it’s not the coalface at all, but something raised above, pushed beyond the normal boundaries of being. It’s oceanic, tidal, the push and pull of the biggest thing you’ll ever be part of. But I wasn’t to discover that until I had my second child at home, undisturbed, almost exactly three years later.

The first time, I just didn’t know what I had to lose.

But it’s the first time, and it’s all happening now.

The midwife shows me the amniotomy hook, ‘Just like a crochet needle.’ Crochet needles are nice.

I lie down on my back, she probes about, pinches a little, and the buckets of liquid that have sustained, protected, enveloped my child to this point gush out of me. Warm. Copious. Buckets. I exclaim, Baz exclaims, the midwife is businesslike.

Granite face.

I get up, start moving about, and I feel period – like tightenings in my lower abdomen.

‘I want to wait a few hours and see if this is enough to get it going,’ I say.

‘No, let’s just get it over and done with.’ What??

But she’s the boss, this is her zone, so I don’t argue (despite the slime of wrongfeelingness in my guts) as she tightens the monitor straps around my belly, those slipping lying arms that embrace my birth. I don’t argue as she pushes a needle into my hand, straps tape on. I don’t argue as she brings in that shitty shitty drip, that snake’s venom that will kick my baby out into the world.

I’m beyond arguing when I’m bent over the nest she has set up in full immediate view of the doorway with my naked arse in the air facing the door, beyond arguing when male doctors pop in and out, have a look around, leave. Yes, you can see a curtain in the picture, but what’s a flappy insubstantial moving curtain between my arse and the rest of the world? How do I even know, crouched there in my kicking pain, that it’s closed? The reality was that it was opened and closed constantly, and one of my birth memories is of a male doctor poking his head around the door to have a gander.

I’m staked to the drip, hogtied to the monitor belts, afraid to move lest the whole edifice slips beyond me, leaves me, even worse, alone.

The pain begins immediately, hard and fast and unrelenting.

I breathe, surviving each wave.

There is no gentle beginning, no tide coming in, no riding anything.

Just staying alive.

The pain does not stop between contractions.

I am clenched hard the whole time, just harder as each drowning wave hits my tiny island.

Baz offers music, icypoles, but I just throw up.

I can’t stand the music, am beyond standing anything.

He goes out for food, comes back, I barely notice.

All I can do is rock my pelvis and breathe through each kicking wave of hard pain.

I am in darkness.

I close my eyes and the hours pass like this, through to mid afternoon.

Hard angry gasping hours, banging away at me.

But I am coping.

Breathing.

Just.

Breathing.

Rocking.

There’s no time here anymore.

At last the midwife comes to me for something other than to pull up those fucking monitor straps that slip like a landslide. ‘Tine, you have to get up and go to the toilet. Your full bladder will be stopping progress. Get up now.’ She pulls me up, helps me to the toilet, wheeling my hideous nemesis Drip.

It is gone. She has broken it, the spell that was me coping. Me the most comfortable I could have got, on all fours on the floor, rocking. I sit on the toilet, urinate, and am consumed, utterly engulfed, by pain, panic, terror. I feel sick to the core of my being with it. I am shaking, every part of me dislodged, flying apart. There is no me anymore, just blinding burning pain, shaking terror.

I can’t do this any more. I’m crying, shaking.

I ask for pain relief. Midwife says no. Baz says yes. There is an argument, but I am in spiralling darkness, and I can’t hear them past my own gasping.

Midwife says she will check me, can I get on the bed? Somehow I do, lay on my back, and she tells me that I’m 7 – 8 cms dilated. Too late for pain relief (which I never wanted, wasn’t really what I was crying for) but she will turn off the drip and ‘let’ me labour on my own. I am simperingly, embarrassingly grateful.

The drip is stopped and the relief is instant. The pain still comes, not as hard and fast, but I am spent. I shake, watching my legs weaving out of my control and beyond my body. I am interested in their steady progress, something not connected to me. I am cold and spent. Baz says later that I was purple, blotched, he thought I might be dying.

I wasn’t, but neither was I any part of the experience.

She examines me again, inside, there’s still a bit of cervix left. I know not to push against this. I know not to push until The Urge hits.

I wait for it, screeching now, breath stretched beyond flesh, through each tearing pain. It’s a live thing, this pain, something crouching on me bullying the breath from me. It spreads from my stomach through my legs and the space between, through the floor, pins me there. It’s fire, it’s a volcano.

She gives me gas, I am a wretched cowed thing chewing on the mouthpiece. It’s my friend.

I need hands each time, Baz’s hand and hers, to crush, to hold onto so that I don’t get swept completely away.

I’m still waiting for that fucking urge, that undeniable force to tell me it’s safe to push, time to push. Each pain is taking more energy than I have.

I am up, crouching over the end of the bed, at least up. But screeching. Keening through the pains, striving to ride them. Waiting for The Urge.

It doesn’t come.

She makes me lie down.

‘You have to change positions. You have to start pushing properly. You’re making the wrong noises. The noises you’re making are fear. You have to work. Lower sounds, and push. Stop trying to escape the pain.’

But. I. Don’t. Feel. The. Urge.

I’m lying down now, flat on my back.

‘You have to lie right down, the baby can’t get past the bend otherwise.’

Oh no.

Not stirrups.

She pushes my feet into the horrible plastic things, and fear starts its tidal creep up my spine.

Let’s just get this over and done with. She says.

They’re rattling the salad spoons at the door she says.

You have to work, she says, it’s been too long.

You’re making. The wrong. Noises.

They’re rattling the salad spoons at the door.

I can feel the cold pinch of those forceps spoons, so I push, mightily, into the pain, with no urge, no guide from nature.

“Not like that. Slowly, sustain it.’

I feel a hard bulging force in my bottom.

The head.

In the wrong place, surely? Shouldn’t it be in the front?

I push into these pains, I try, I really do, with everything I’ve got left. I’m lying there, stranded, tied down, unsafe. I push.

“You have to hold the push.’ The head keeps sliding back again, I can feel it.

Push down, recede. Push down, recede. Tethered.

“We’ll put the drip back on.”

NO!!! I plead, nononononono!!!! Not that, I’ll push, I’ll push.’ I’m the baby now. Plese, please don’t do that to me again.

But snake is back, the evil thing kicks me again, but still I fail to push out my child.

“Out baby!” I say, ‘Out baby out!”

It’s been two hours of second stage.

She lets in the salad spoon rattlers, the Fearsome Ones, because I have failed.

The Fearsome One is actually a gentle, softly spoken female doctor with kind eyes and an empathic manner. She hurts me, it’s true, sucking that thing onto my baby’s head, cutting me, but she anaesthetizes me too. She pulls as I push and there it is, I feel the head slip out. I push again and she turns it, and the body twists and slides from me.

For a brief blank moment I am emptied. It is over.

I am utterly emptied.

Then Baz says it. “LOOK Tine!”

He has seen her, and I look, and our tiny whiteslimy pale daughter with huge dark looking eyes waves and starfishes tiny fingers and splays and she is here on my chest and everything is right again.

“She is perfect. She is beautiful.”

(Is it Finna? I look, yes, a girl!)

She is on me, and suddenly she is everything. I am laughcrying, and she is just. Everything.

Just. Everything.

All at once.

So perfect.

 A love comes whole, completely formed, all encompassing and irreversible. The biggest thing in the world.

For the tiniest.

Then the final insult.

“Oh she’s tiny isn’t she? And lots of vernix. She almost looks premmie, she could have had a few more weeks in there.” With Woman gives me an injection because after all that snake venom by body no longer knows how to deliver a placenta. It arrives, I barely feel it, it is whisked away and I don’t even look. I don’t know it but my body has secreted some away, a thumb sized bit that will live inside me and come away 18 months later after a homeopathic treatment. I will add this to my son’s whole placenta and keep them to be returned to the earth at the right time, in the right place.

The kind doctor starts putting me back together, repairing the cut. She tells me that ‘wasn’t even a bad birth!’ It is she who will visit me first the next morning,not my midwife. She who will smile and make me laugh and admire my beautiful daughter.

I guess my With Woman wants to go home, and I guess she needs to tick the box ‘feeding initiated’ before she does so. Hands descend, grab my perfect tiny child’s head in one and my right breast in the other, literally force the two together. She sucks, and despite the violation, the ruining of my intention to let her do this in her own time, I am delighted that she has attached.

She is weighed, this new centre of my world, and is less than 3kgs.

The terror, the pain, the humiliation recede to be picked over later. They are strong and there, but for now they are papered over with this love. His and mine, because Baz had his own kind of hell watching me in mine, being left alone in the room with me and a screaming monitor alarm, arguing with the midwife over her treatment of me. But right now this new father of my child and I are swamped, smitten by this tiny person who is so huge to us, so eclipsing. We are bonded through the trauma, through the love, through this earthshake that only we know.

Kind Midwife arrives., Hard Work leaves (I see her once more, late the following day, when she is mildly interested in my infant, and tells me not to let them put her under lights for her jaundice is mild, then leaves me to battle ‘them’ alone when ‘they’ want to). She supports me to get up, and the hideous bloody mess I have been lying in looks like nothing more than a scene from a slasher movie or a slaughterhouse. More of the gore goes onto the shower floor as I move, clotty blood flowing a watered pink river down the plughole.

I am cleaned, dry, I get my daughter back from Baz, I am wheeled into Postnatal, put into bed, tucked in with my perfection, this being who has formed from the very best parts of me. I spend the night smelling her, watching her head. I know the softness, the direction of the softbrown hair swirl, the ridiculous smallness of the fingers. It is all inside me. I imagine her at twenty, the love unchanged.

Watch her now, asleep on my chest.

And now she is four, way past a baby, beautiful, intense, emotional, kind, deeply loving, creative … all those things and more.

I do wish that I had made different choices about her birth. I wish I trusted her and me to know our right time, our right place.

Now that I know.

I regret the way of her birth, the time, the place, the caregivers.

But I cannot really ever regret anything that brought her to me. She has changed me forever, and although I wish it was different for her, I wish her exactly as she is.

A Perfectly Good School

You would home school if you were terribly isolated, right? Miles from Timbuctoo? If a vast red earthed cattle station was what you called home?

Or maybe you’d homeschool if you were a weirdo beardo hippie, living in a commune somewhere. Rejecting the mainstream, man, living on the fringe. Cool, yeah?

Or maybe you might do it if your kid has been so traumatized by bullying that you couldn’t stomach putting them back in school for another go.

This article, though a few years old, reflects on the extent of the latter problem; http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/victorian-school-bullying-is-out-of-control-national-report-says/story-e6frf7jo-1225719028056 .

Certainly homeschooling when there’s a perfectly good school just down the road is irresponsible, isn’t it. Denying them all those opportunities for socializing, for being socialized. Denying them educational opportunities. Holding them back.

I was a teacher in the state system for 8 years before escaping to be a mum. I worked for 5 years at one rural high school where I was a Leading Teacher, Year Level Co-ordinator and ran many events and programmes. Before that I did a year at 3 different high schools, and after it several years CRT where I saw many different secondary and primary schools. I put in. I worked in a lot of different schools, in a lot of different places in Victoria. I cared. I wanted to make things better, to pave the way, to use my passion for learning and my genuine interest in kids to create an environment where… you get the picture.

What really happened was that I simply got worn down. Innovative teaching and learning? Great! But we can’t change the timetable or the way the day is structured (to death). No, there’s no money for changing or building anything more kid friendly. Perhaps you could chase funding. No, you can’t change the rooms around because the next person might want the desks left in neat rows. Etc. The System was too big. The bullies were too numerous, too sneaky and too well connected. The kids were too disconnected, too resistant, and mostly they had given up too.

There were too few of me.

I stopped protesting the Coke vending machine and Crappola Junke Foode in the caf, both of which apparently brought in much needed funding that couldn’t be replaced by selling actual food. I gave up on creative learning projects, student built veggie gardens and strategies to address bullying.

I started recycling lessons, putting videos on, and taking a lunch break now and then. I stopped writing each child’s report individually, until 4 am, and started using the comment banks that everyone else relied on.

I still protested the new testing regime, and refused to participate, though. That was just going too far. I still cared about the kids, I simply had seen what was at the top of the mountain and it no longer seemed worth trudging on.

 That is why I'm homeschooling my children. Not out of some idea to be cool or fringe or out of fear of the 'mainstream', but because the environments in the overwhelming majority of schools are harmful to children in pretty much every way I can think of; emotionally, physically and certainly in terms of learning and the joy that naturally comes with learning. Our schools drain the lifeblood from kids, then the kids turn around and drain it from each other with bullyings and conformings and pushings – around. I know that some people sail through school untouched by all this, doing ok, but I’m not taking the chance for my kids.

And I want better than ok for them.

I don't want certain values normalized for my children. I want them to be part of a healthy, supportive, accepting community and to know how to find a satisfying community for themselves. I want them to retain their basic natures, their ability to judge and discern for themselves, their sense of themselves as empowered and worthwhile and thoughtful, respectful people.

The current school system was designed to keep kids out of the way while the workers of the industrial revolution went back to keep the factory wheels turning, and you know what, it still basically serves that purpose. It also conditions children to be good workers and avid unthinking consumers.

Missed the ad for the latest bit of plastic crap or death - defying junk food? No probs, the other kids at school will be sure to fill your little one in and tighten the screws of peer pressure until your child feels that his self worth hangs on having just the right crap.

What, you’re denying your child the right to be socialized to is accepting that normal is high–sugar high–junk high–plastic consumer goods equals acceptance?

Yes, I am actually.

There is a difference between simple social conditioning, the process of moulding children to fit into the current social regime, and creating an environment in which children can learn to interact in socially meaningful ways. Schools both reflect and create society, as does the media, and the current system is recreating a society that is increasingly obsessed with what it can sell and who will buy it.

To be happy, kids need to feel safe, they need to feel connected, and they need to be able to learn to deal with other people in a place where they are backed up, supported and guided. What guiding do you think your child receives in social interactions at school? How much individual attention can one teacher on yard duty covering hundreds of kids give? How many of the 30% of kids being bullied will be noticed in that environment? Or even one teacher in a room with 25 kids, all of different abilities, personalities and interests, some who want to be there and some who desperately don’t. Not. Much.

Our schools are places of mass. Mass ‘teaching’, mass socializing, mass testing. You can do quantity or quality, not both. It really is that simple. It’s Lord of The Flies, survival of the most vicious, socializing by throwing in the deep end, sink or swim. Schools are certainly good at socializing children, and the generations of school – socialized socially disconnected adults who eat crap in front of the tv night after night and derive joy from buying things instead of interacting with other human beings outside their front door attest to its success.

I want community, I want a social world for my children. That's why I wish to be part of a strong homeschool community, and even utilize a very tiny school that will let my kids attend a few days a week should they choose that. There’s no perfect, I can’t protect them from everything. But at least I can try to be part of a like minded community with kids who are treated respectfully and age appropriately, who are more likely to generally treat others with respect and be guided by adults who care about them and know them as individuals. Where individuality and differences of thought and personality are accepted and valued. That’s the hope, anyway!

I can be also as much a part of their lives as keeps them generally connected and safe, and I can provide what guidance and support I can as they learn about themselves and others and the world, rather then tossing them in that great big swirling vortex and watching from increasingly afar as they sink or swim.

That’s why you might choose a homeschooling community when there’s a Perfectly Good School Just Down the Road.

You WILL share!

Finna, three and a half, loves storytime at the local library. She sits leaning against Miss P, tiny hand on her knee, concentrating with comical absorption and waiting her turn to open the flaps or turn the page with barely contained eagerness. After the story, there is drawing or craft time, which is tackled with equally serious enthusiasm. At 3, she is now able to restrict herself to just holding three or four crayons at once, rather than hogging the whole box, or in fact all the boxes on offer.

Last week, the five year old girl sitting next to Finna, Molly, was overcome by a passionate need for the red crayon. The one Finna had. One of three, admittedly, but nonetheless one she had chosen for her drawing and planned to use. Soon. Much fuss ensued, and after some failed tactical negotiations, Miss P attempted the Snatch and Grab solution. Finna is a tenacious little soul though, and simply closed her grip.

She kept the crayon.

Molly cried.

“Finny,” I said quietly. “Look at Molly. “She looks sad.” Finna could see this straight away, Molly’s tear streaked face and wobbling lip a surefire sign. I gave her a moment to think. “I think she would really like to use the red crayon.” A small moment passed, then Finna looked at her drawing, did a little scribble with the red crayon, and passed it on to Molly. “Thanks Finna, Molly looks really happy now.”

This approach is something I've read about and had to learn to do, and of course it doesn't always result in sharing. What I'm trying to achieve though is helping her with the beginnings of understanding that others have feelings and needs too, and that's what sharing is about, not simply the redistribution of belongings.

The library episode got me thinking about what children learn from our well meaning efforts to make them share (often for our own comfort and to appease other adults). The Snatch and Grab attempt might have convinced Finna that Miss P is not to be trusted not to steal her things. Had it worked, she may reasonably have concluded that it’s fine to snatch things off people, that problems with others can be solved with physical force, and that it’s ok to take things off other people if you’re bigger than them.

What’s more, she might have felt disrespected, disempowered and angry. I sure would have.

What the more hands - off approach is trying to communicate is that other people have feelings and needs, and that she will be trusted to understand that and respond in her own way with kindness and generosity. The beginnings, in other words, of compassion.

 I should add here that Miss P is genuinely kind and good with the children, and the approach she used is simply what most adults would have done. It is just common practice, and it's the approach and the assumptions behind it that I'm questioning here. The basic assumption is the Empty Vessel theory of childrearing, that children are a blank slate that adults are free to write on and chip away at to get just the shape they want. It's Behaviourism, the idea that you train children to be the way that you, and society, wants them. And if they don't respond as you'd like, you coerce, bribe, reward, punish, shame, threaten or force them to comply.

It isn't about co-operation, and it isn't about mutual respect, regardless of how nicely the details are presented.

Let’s go back to the Snatch and Grab, and the feelings of anger and being disrespected.

When I was in Year 10 in high school, I met a friend whom I continued to see, in patches, for the next 15 or so years (yes, that does date me…). She was a person who drifted through life, periodically requiring rescuing from one dramatic scenario or another. When she moved back from interstate, towing a boyfriend, she did so in a very ancient car which did the predictable thing and bailed on the journey several hours from its destination, which was my place. This friend, D, and her boyfriend consequently spent several weeks camped happily in my loungeroom burning whole forests worth of firewood before I organized with my landlord for them to rent the cottage behind my house.

My electricity bill that winter was triple what it normally was, as they were having trouble acclimatizing to the cooler weather and required the heater to be blaring tropical strength rays 24 / 7. I didn’t feel sharey enough to foot this. Then D requested to borrow my car (I might add here that I lived in the mountains in Victoria, a 25 minute drive from the nearest small town where I worked as a teacher) in order to check out some rentals. Sure, I said, just organize it with me so it’s do-able. When the day arrived, it turned out that I was ill and needed the car to travel to a health professional. D screamed violently at me, pursuing me down the driveway with a torrent of anger.

Time passed, both parties moved, and I did lend her and her hapless mate the car several times, as well as giving him a lift to work several times a week. The last time I saw this friend was on just one such occasion. As we pulled into the parking lot of the school, she reached for the keys, asking what time I’d like her to pick me up from work. “Er, but…” She had me, I was running late, and off she happily went for the day… in my car. My only car. The one I was working to pay off the loan for.

Did I mention it was mine?

When I finally said to her that afternoon upon dropping her and her boyfriend at home that in future she must ask to borrow my car, not just assume and take it, a physically violent outburst followed. It was almost comical in its friendship – ending intensity and involved theatrics like spitting in my face and giving the bonnet of my car a damn good thrashing with her handbag.

Why, apart from this being a storytelling kinda blog, tell that tale? Well, really, is it a lot different from Finna’s scenario in the library? To a three year old, is a crayon less precious than my car is to me? In that little mind, focused on the joy and flow of completing the drawing or bit of play or whatever, her things (even if they are the library’s things) are her things, and respecting that is every bit as important as it was to me that this particular (ex) friend respected my belongings. Do I let strangers ‘share’ my purse, use my car, or wander into our home as they wish?

Do you?

Finna had that red crayon first, so it was her turn to use it, and them’s the rules. The mere fact that someone else has suddenly decided that she wants it changes nothing.

Sharing is a nice idea, and it’s an important thing to learn to do, but how has it become the only thing that seems to be important? Our childcare philosophies seem hell bent on moulding our children into good communist citizens (and communism has in reality pretty much always been usurped by human nature, has almost always slid into some kind of dictatorship when natural the natural acquisitiveness of our species comes to the fore in strong individuals) while showing them strongly individualistic role models of adults keeping all our crap to ourselves.

Why doesn’t little Johnny want to share his truck with little Lisa? Perhaps Johnny sees his parents lock their car whenever they leave it so that no-one steals it. And that’s fair enough.

So am I advocating a purely selfish model of simply letting children have all their stuff to themselves and never think of others’ needs? Nup. What I am saying is that forcing children to give up their possessions may solve the adult’s immediate problem of stopping the tears and hassle, but it teaches children some concerning things, and I even feel that it delays and stunts the learning of healthy boundaries and true empathy and compassion.

Had you known me at the time I was having those problems with my one – sided sharing friend, what advice might you have given me? Had you known me in the past when I was involved in relationships in which I was emotionally abused and allowing the people involved to ‘walk all over me’ what might you have suggested? Probably, if you are sensible, that I needed to examine my own feelings of deservedness, and put some healthy boundaries in place in my relationships. Learn to say no sometimes.

By forcing children to ‘share’, particularly when they are not developmentally ready we are teaching them that there are no boundaries in relationships, or that they are not allowed or trusted to use some discernment in setting them. This is dangerous.

Studying children and their brain development shows us that ‘theory of mind’, the understanding that others have a different view of the world to yours and thus the beginnings of the development of the capacity for empathy, does not begin to develop until age five or six. So why do we expect three and four year olds to have vastly more compassion than we ourselves do and give everyone else things that they are using, or that are precious to them even if it is only in that moment?

When an adult redistributes the wealth by force, children feel disempowered and disrespected. Children resist sharing because they are at a developmental stage in which they are trying to define the boundaries of their existence, what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not me’. They need to be able to say ‘no’ in order to do that. Saying ‘no’ is part of saying ‘I am me’. It is intrinsic to the development of self esteem, and the ability to define what is safe and comfortable in our relationships with others and with the world.

At the extreme end is the concept of saying ‘no’ to things that we don’t want to happen to our bodies; children are taught to say no to inappropriate touching to protect them from sexual abuse. Adults in abusive relationships stay there, get there in the first place, because they either feel that they have no personal rights, no entitlement to say no to others’ unpleasant behaviours, or because they feel so disempowered that there is no point to saying no as it won’t be respected anyway.

So we’re teaching children that they say no and won’t be listened to. We’re teaching them that they have no say in what’s theirs, and that they can’t be trusted to resolve conflicts in caring ways. Is this a good idea?

By respecting children, by understanding where they are at developmentally, we can encourage the development of compassion in three ways.

Firstly, by doing as I did with Finna in the library scenario and simply directing her attention with no pressure to how the other child was feeling, we can help children begin to notice the feelings of others, and to empathise with those feelings. In that instance my daughter felt respected, saw another's need, and acted kindly of her own accord. Win / win as far as I was concerned.

A year ago she wouldn’t have been able to do that, and I would have avoided situations like that, or even said to the other child, “Finna has that right now, you can use it soon when she’s finished.” Then let her use it for a while and distract her with something else so the other child could have a turn. Or maybe the other child wouldn’t get a turn, sometimes that’s just how it is. And the same if Finna wanted something currently in an other child’s possession, with the addition of supporting her sad and angry feelings about not getting what she had her heart set on. Of course I don’t always get it right, of course it can be really uncomfortable and awkward with other parents or people like Miss P running activities. But I really feel that the passing adult discomfort is worth it.

Secondly, by showing children empathy and compassion ourselves, by guiding them respectfully and ensuring that they get their emotional needs met, we give them personal experience of compassion, and a role model for compassion. Personal experience and role modeling are the two very most powerful ways in which kids learn. From birth we can teach our kids about compassion and kindness by using those qualities in our dealings with them.

Third, it gives her autonomy, the knowledge that she is trusted and therefore obviously able, to make decisions for herself. To solve problems, social ones as well as logistical ones. It gives her absolutely vital practice in doing this in a safe setting, and enables her to observe and process the outcome and perhaps take that into account in similar situations in the future.

Children are all different, and have different levels and kinds of attachment to things. My daughter is a very sentimental person (yep, a chip off the old maternal block!) and she invests her playthings, pets and even food with a great deal of emotional energy. She is genuinely attached to those crayons, to her concept of how she will do that drawing, to that dropped sandwich that can’t simply be replaced by a new one but must be cleaned and returned to her. Other kids not so much. They will happily let another child play with their things.

The key is to know children individually and to genuinely respect those differences.

I am also not remotely suggesting that sharing, or teaching our kids to do that, is a bad thing. Forcing them to share, particularly before they are developmentally ready to understand why they might choose to do so, though, I think is. The next time you feel tempted to resolve a kid dispute with the Snatch and Grab approach, it may be worth considering how you would take it if a police officer wandered in and took your wallet to give to another parent who seemed, rather loudly, to want it.

The last thing that occurs to me here is to wonder why it is that we are so keen to insist that our children share nicely above all other considerations. Well, no one wants to look like a bad parent do they? No-one wants other parents to think that we are raising selfish kids who Can’t Share. And precious few people seem to have the patience or the will to work out what’s going on for kids, to help them solve social disputes for themselves, to allow the time it takes each individual child to come to sharing things, feelings and time with others out of genuine empathy.

Much easier to grab the disputed item, give it to the squeaky wheel and send the reluctant sharer to the corner for five minutes until he stops crying.

And yes, with our son suddenly mobile and doggedly determined to investigate everything, particularly Finna’s stuff, we are facing a whole new chapter in this book. Yes it’s tricky.

Yes it’s confronting.

Ultimately though, I really genuinely have faith in my daughter and respect her. She’ll move through it. Onto the next challenge, no doubt!

Attachment Parenting in a detached World

Attachment parenting is not about being a martyr, about sacrificing parents and their needs in the best interests of children. That is not in the best interests of children at all. It is about attachment, the strong loving resilient bond that sustains and nourishes both children and their families, and in fact humanity. That allows us to feel compassion for others because at our earliest, at our most vulnerable and impressionable, we have experienced it ourselves.

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Before my daughter was born, we envisioned the parade of relatives. Offers of help so frequent they’d be annoying. Many loving hands helping us guide our baby through the world.

Instead there was a half hearted flow of cards and meeting of my daughter, a general whiff of suspicion about our responsive parenting approach, jibes about spoilt brats and a general impression that we were pretty much in this alone. Thankfully I found a community of like minded mothers in a Birth and Babies group organized by the Maternity Coalition, and this open circle of hands and hearts made the first intense few years of parenting feel warmer and safer.

Then recently this little gem of research surfaced. I’ll give you a few moments to have a look.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/07/120705151417.htm

Intense mothering. Sounds bad. Sounds… overdone. Way too much of a strain, all that responding to needs and putting your children first. No wonder mothers like that aren’t happy.

What a terribly enlightening piece of research that isn’t.

It focuses on mothers who believe, ‘that women are better parents than men, that mothering should be child-centred, and that children should be considered sacred and are fulfilling to parents’, and reports that the mothers studied in the survey based research also felt that ‘good’ mothers sacrifice themselves for their children. There is a huge area of crossover here with attachment style responsive parenting even though advocates of responsive parenting make it clear that parent’s needs must also be met rather than sacrificed, and that involved parenting is intrinsically joyful and satisfying for parents as well as babies. And that bit about women being better parents. Well, not that either…

I know, though, that mothers who are responsive and focused on meeting their children’s needs are commonly seen as martyrs.

What this study does do not, to my mind, do, is convince me that mothers who care and respond are putting themselves at risk of mental health issues, although this is at the crux of how most people would read it. What it does do though is to highlight that mothers as a whole are being failed.

The research is biased in the sense that it is based in a set of cultural norms that are recent in origin (they are really largely a symptom of the industrial revolution) and blinding in scale. It makes the assumption that detachment parenting, with baby fed artificial milk, sleeping in a cot alone (left to cry if s/he protests), and wheeled about in a box rather than carried by parents, is normal. It’s not. It’s recent and it’s become what society expects.

It isn’t what babies expect.

Instinctively it isn’t even what mothers expect, but we have become so used to the idea that it’s hard for the vast majority particularly of new mothers to go against the social grain and instead flow with their parenting instincts and their baby’s needs. If mothers do choose to do that, then social approbation and support for their role as a mother will in large be withdrawn, will in fact be replaced by the strong message that they are harming their child in various ways. This leaves parents alone at best, and isolation of this sort leads to doubt, depression, anxiety and burnout.

Parenting in a vacuum isn’t what parents should have to expect either.

It isn’t what we, a highly social and communal species, has evolved to expect or to need.

Our babies are born extremely underdeveloped, with only a quarter of our brain development in place at birth as compared to the half that even higher primates have, simply because our heads would be too large to fit through the birth canal any later in our development. This is a trade off; we get extremely complex, clever brains when they’re finished, but we have to put a lot of energy into protecting and raising our completely vulnerable young until that happens.

Our babies know this too. They’re extremely good at surviving, hence we’re around at all, and the way they do that is to make sure that they’re with a protective, regulating parent all the time. The thing here is that this is probably at the crux of why we are so social. One pair of parents alone simply struggle to parent properly and survive at the same time. It isn’t what we were meant to do. We support each other, form communities, parent together.

Not so much any more.

Quoting professor James McKenna on co-sleeping with babies;

‘An evolutionary perspective forces us to consider the potential consequences of the recent shift away from social or co-sleeping arrangements to solitary ones in western industrial cultures, thereby altering the adaptive fit between the human infant’s extreme neurological immaturity and social support environment that presumably made such immaturity possible – or at least safer.’ (1)

In fairness, the research article I linked to above focuses on mums who have a major belief that is anathema to attachment parenting. Attachment parenting is not about sacrifice of the self being for the good of the child. Quite the reverse, it’s about getting everyone’s needs met, it simply recognizes that one person in the pair, the bub, cannot meet his / her own needs and is entirely reliant on loving attentive parents to do so in order to survive and thrive.

There’s another bit of research that’s rather suggestive to me. This little gem here;

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/06/120611134241.htm

I find interesting.

It suggests that women find attachment parenting … empowering! That women who self – identify (another online survey) as feminists tend to also be attached parents to their own children. This study takes pains to designate the idea that feminism is anti parenting as being merely a stereotype, but I think that the evidence of history shows us that it was, at least, a reality. Ina May Gaskin, the seminal birth educator and midwife (who’s ‘The Farm’ birth community boasts a 1.4% c section rate) relates in her book, ‘Birth Matters’ that when she spoke about empowered woman centred birth to university students in the 1970’s, she was met with stony silence or horrified responses. Feminists don’t have children, it’s enslavement to the domestic treadmill.

So something has changed. Women now who identify as feminists also put their hands up for attachment parenting. No doubt that’s because they tend to think and research more than their peers, but I also think that it’s because of a recognition that mothering, and the right to do so in a supported loving community, is as much an integral part of being a strong empowered woman as is the right to equal access to quality education and employment. The pendulum has swung, and perhaps a woman’s right to raise her children in a loving responsive and satisfying way is one of the newest feminist issues.

Why? Because responsive parenting that allows parents to follow their instincts, slow down, spend the time to really enjoy their children and their role as parents, is deeply rewarding for both. Because skin to skin contact, breastfeeding and keeping babies close gives mothers (and fathers) a beautiful oxytocin based hormonal high. Because birth in an undisturbed safe setting, birth completed by mother and baby together, is one of the most exhilarating and empowering experiences that a woman can have and the strongest start to motherhood.

Because the fact that the leading cause of maternal death in the year post partum in Australia is suicide, is appalling.

Parenting in a vacuum may be symptomatic of the things we have lost, but perhaps attached responsive parenting can begin to show us the way back. Initiatives like Mamabake, where mothers co-operate to produce food, and Birth and Babies that supports new mothers to parent instinctively, create genuine community and empower women to raise children whose needs are met, and whose lives are a joy to themselves and to their families.

Attachment parenting is not about being a martyr, about sacrificing parents and their needs in the best interests of children. That is not in the best interests of children at all. It is about attachment, the strong loving resilient bond that sustains and nourishes both children and their families, and in fact humanity. That allows us to feel compassion for others because at our earliest, at our most vulnerable and impressionable, we have experienced it ourselves.

Perhaps instead of yet more research to point out the blindingly obvious, we could direct our energies into creating the sort of social support for loving parenting that made our species so incredible and so successful in the first place.

Eat Your Words

‘Oh you’re a good girl, eating yer fruit!’

How I hate that sentence, directed at my three year old daughter.

We hear it when she eats fruit. We hear it when she eats an avocado handroll. We hear it when she eats rice and veggies at the Chinese noodle shop.

I don’t like the whole ‘good boy / girl’ thing with its implication that a child might be bad if they behave in a way that we don’t like, but in this instance it is the implication that one would only eat real actual food if coerced into it, or in order to please a parent. It’s as though I’d spent the previous ten minutes berating her into performing such a feat of healthy eating, and her eventual capitulation must be praised to encourage future compliance.

I hate it because I don’t want her to absorb the idea that real food is something one must suffer through to gain the reward of adults’ approval.

Actually, Finna just likes fruit. If we take her shopping, and say, ‘get yourself a treat!’ she will trot straight off to the fruit and veggie section and load up on apples, grapes, cherries, mandarins, berries, carrots (current top of the pops is a bunch of baby carrots) and bananas. Yum-o! Her beaming little face and busy happy hands choose and organize, peel and arrange, sample and snack. “Mum!” she’ll call from the back of the car, “I want an apple.” She loves the green ones best.

There was a study released this week that was reported on across Australia. Published in the Medical Journal of Australia by Zhou et al, it reported that (extrapolated from a sample of 13,000 Adelaide children from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds) Australian children eat way too much saturated fat, mainly from dairy products, milk, biscuits, cakes, and breakfast cereals, and far too little fibre. It also found that about one third of pre-schoolers are overweight or actually obese, but that this is probably from lack of physical activity rather than too many calories.

I have to say that I’m not exactly prone on the floor with shock at these revelations. I would go further and say that my experiences as a teacher have left me convinced that this study was pulling punches. I think the problem is worse.

The report said that the children tested did have adequate levels of iron, calcium and zinc, but I have to wonder whether these are from genuine food sources or from ‘fortified’ products. If so there are two concerns; one that artificial supplements don’t act the same way in the body that food derived ones do, and two that there are hundreds of other nutrients that are vital to a resilient thriving growing body and the best way to get these is by eating a diverse range of (mainly plant derived) real foods.

In my pre children life I was a teacher, and worked at one rural secondary school for five years. During that time, the Issue Of The Coke Machine popped up regularly at staff meetings, persistent as an unwanted suitor. The thing hulked in the 500 student strong school’s canteen, hogging a whole corner and dispensing an array of teeth – rotting beverages that appalled many of the teaching staff (no doubt partly because it made our job that much harder; taming coke – addled adolescents after their lunchtime caffeine and sugar bender was no joy). That wasn’t the only Issue, the canteen sold solid crap too, cakes and lollies, fatty fried foods and white bread rolls and bags of chips.

Why was it so? Clearly the voices of the teachers were ignored, and parents can’t have been complaining too loudly. The principal’s reason for the Coke vending machine’s continued presence among us was simple; the school needed the money. And that was why the food at the canteen remained enticingly crap also; apparently the sugar drugged little tykes in our care would rather starve than buy healthy food at school. The School Needed The Money.

The school’s attitude to its role in promoting healthy eating habits in kids wasn’t the only reason I make the claim that the situation may be even worse than reported. The contents of children’s lunchboxes, revealed to me over eight years of teaching in a variety of Victorian schools, were not uniformly but certainly generally appalling. The average kid was dragging along a white bread plastic cheese sandwich and a bag of chips, along with canteen money for lollies. Seriously. In fairness, some also had sweet biscuits with icing, a bottle of cordial, a little baggie of some junk food. Some certainly did have a piece of fruit, and the ‘brain food’ initiative in some schools (with a scheduled midmorning break for the consumption of fruit or nuts) helped. A minority of kids definitely had healthy, actual food in their lunchboxes.

Getting back to my beautiful daughter. How on earth did we get her to eat these things? Regular threats and beatings? No, actually, it was down to two basic things.

Firstly, we offered her a range of real actual food (things that grew somewhere, not long ago, some of them in our garden) from when she became interested in eating (at about eight and a half months old).

Secondly, we never forced, cajoled, tricked, bargained, berated or bribed her to eat anything, and we never stopped her from eating any time she felt like it. No sitting down to ‘finish your tea’ if she’s not hungry. No smothering veggies in tomato sauce, no eating races, no bargaining about eating dinner so you can have desert. Just, here’s some food, eat what and when you want. Nowadays, (she’s 3) we sit down to eat meals together at the table, but she still eats as much or as little as she wants. We occasionally have treats (too many hot chips when we’re out due to gluten and dairy allergies, dammit, but Finna will just as often choose an avocado sandwich given her druthers), but the vast majority of the food we have in the house grew somewhere recently, and even through several moves of house we always chuck a few veggies in the garden. This morning she lit up with excitement, ‘Yes! Let’s pick some broccoli!’ We grew it, and that makes it that much more magical.

Finna is completely self regulating, she stops eating when she’s full, and many times we’ve observed that she consumes exactly what her body needs. I’m guessing that our exact way of going about things may not be for everyone, but certainly children learn most powerfully by example and immersion; they learn what to do and how to be by observing what’s normal in the folk around them. Reason number five hundred to be really careful how you go about schooling your children; if they are in a school environment where the norm is eating rubbish, then you can bet your lunch that will become your child’s preferred norm too.

So what do I reply the next time someone says, ‘Ooh, you’re a good girl eating that!’? Suggestions welcome ;-)

My son's simple birth

My son’s birth was so simple.

He was conceived in late summer, some months after another little soul decided not to stay, six weeks into its pregnancy.

This loss, of a pregnancy that felt tentative and out of time from the beginning, nevertheless floored me, mired me in unexpectedly powerful grief, left me wading through thick purple sadness. I fumed at the four decades old body that had, in fairness produced and nurtured my perfect little daughter (one out of two ain’t bad, surely). Several months dragged on while my poor old body healed and re-calibrated itself, and I became dark with the hopeless tangled certainty that it wouldn’t give me another baby.

Then came January. Midsummer month, bright and yellow, and I just opened clenched hands and let it all go.

I enjoyed January.

Early February, hothot time. Sandcastle season.

A day spent digging in the warmwet sand with Finna. Her little paws piled the stuff high as rhythmical water licked at it, building lumpy sodden sandcastles that the ceaselessly hungry tide ate. And I knew. There was another there with us, watching us build, feeling that tide, those slipping waves that ate sand. That other made me nauseated, turned the usually enticing odour of an Indian restaurant into a repellent fume, and flipped breastfeeding my girl into a strangely prickly thing.

I knew he was there. Just not that he was he (although a dear friend, nearest I have to family, somehow knew this all along).

Two thick lines.

The next few months were hard going and beautiful, miraculous, jubilant, scary exhausting and hopeful. By gods I was sick. We moved to a house on a remote 400 acre farm, a move that was belly scrapingly slow, and my daughter and I ate tree apples, most of which I threw up again. My partner did the hard yakka of moving mostly on his own because I couldn’t stand the feel of anything and those long car journeys might as well have been on heaving oceans. Recently my daughter watched a video about a fluffy golden retriever puppy, one I used to keep her happy on those awful moving trips, and the sound of the title music knocked a wave of powerful nauseous revulsion though me, even now, so many months after my son’s birth.

My belly grew, (and grew and GREW like something out of a children’s story book, the kind that has the child wondering how big this can get and what could possibly be in there!) and the nausea slowly receded to a tolerable background nag at about 19 weeks. It never left completely. I lived again.

I slept with my Finna in a corner bedroom of our new house, all yellowlight in summer and dankly cold in winter, and listened to my inside baby. He was envisioning coming into the world under a tree in the yard, apparently. Some work to do, then, on making that happen!

I dreamed of a big strong baby boy, spread out asleep in the bed with his sister and I.

I’d had no medical anythings this time. After what happened to my first birth it seemed fairer to this baby. I didn’t want Inside baby hearing the scream of ultrasound, or being kicked out of me by Syntocinon, pulled at the last from my utterly empty unfueled, cut pulled and tethered self by a doctor who Meant Well.

My partner and I drove by the local hospital. ”Oh you can’t have it there.” Excellent, my thoughts exactly. No independent birth centres in our entire state either.

I was 22 weeks pregnant when we met the woman who would support me to have a powerful, simple, life changing birth. At home. We chatted on the wide long slatted porch of our home, with its tangled vast garden and cows in the background pacing and eating and birthing their own children. When she left my partner and I agreed. She was perfect. We just trusted her, and Finna, all two and a half years of her, thought she was the bees darn knees, although the blood pressure cuff sent my sensitive child running to daddy in fear of what was being done to me.

Our lovely midwife confirmed it. ‘Yep, there’s a baby in there!. Good, the other option was really large tapeworm. Not as nice.

Weeks wore on, I ground them slowly out, walking and stretching until stabbing pelvic pain and swollen legs, the skin stretched and creased with pressure, stopped me well into my eighth month. I looked forward to birth, feared it, worried about how my sensitive and very connected little daughter would cope with seeing her mum in pain, hear her ‘vocalising’ (which in my first birth translated to keening high screams, something I felt might disturb her!).

So we prepared.

We watched videos of gentle water births, and Finna said. ‘Want to watch babies –come-out!”

We talked about the baby in mum’s tummy, and she watched the little limb bits wave across my belly more than anyone else.

She made friends with our midwife Mary but never could stand that blood pressure cuff or the belly checking. ‘Baby’s fine…’ a tiny worried voice.

We found, at 36 weeks, a perfect doula, the wonderful Kate who came armed with paints and bubbles and a willingness to look for frogs and pick green plums. Our dear friend and her daughters were on standby too. Finna’s Distraction Team.

We did turns of the sodden warming garden with me on hands and knees, swiggling my pelvis for Inside Baby’s benefit, although the little guy’s head had been firmly engaged since 33 weeks, making elephant noises for Fin as she rode around in childjoy on my swaying back.

And at 38 weeks we had a blessingway, a warm beautiful thing that painted my belly with stunning swirls of inspiration and love, and my soul with hope and joy and footprints beside mine. I read Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, the most stunningly positive and sensible thing I could possibly have imbibed at the time.

The birth pool arrived, its room, the yellow corner one, draped with Blessingway candles and beads and wordflags.

A darknight peaceful birth filled the eye in my mind.

We waited. And I got on with things, so the waiting wouldn’t swallow me whole.

At 40 weeks Finna mouse nibbled a mushroom from the garden, then threw up fiercely in the kitchen, a torrent of reddish lumpen stuff that left her cowering and sobbing. Terror for my girl jolted at me, and Inside Baby jumped up to lie under my ribs. The illness passed and finally Finna slept beside me, cleaned and tired. Inside Baby descended again the next day, head jammed firmly back in place, his sister safe, and this time the pressing feet scrimbled my right side rather than the traditionally favoured left.

At 41 weeks I took my Finna to a playgroup, batting off the ‘Oh, you’re overdue’s (with much dramatic widening of eyes) and the ‘you poor thing’s and the ‘where are you having it’s and the ‘do you know what you’re having’s.

Why offer sympathy? Bizarre, I felt, in my waiting space.

The fears that dogged me were these; that I would not be able to go into labour myself, that my body would fail me and I would feel the strangeness of another blankly painful birth that belonged to others, that somewhere in all this I might lose my precious baby.

So I read Ina May again, walked some more in that tangly sunny stormy green past our back door, held the blessingway beads, heavy with love and the colours of birth.

The next day, the day before the third anniversary of Finna’s birth, my partner went off on a trip to a town several hours drive away. The day was warm, and a young local girl came to babysit in our home for a few hours. Finna played, showed her trees and seeds and things, and I found a red flag of impending birth on one of my frequent toilet visits.

A text to midwife, a text to doula; it could still be days or weeks. I got on with my quiet lumbering day, feeling regular tummy grumblings of anxiety, or excitement. Baz called, we chatted, I suggested perhaps labour might be not far off but also perhaps not for weeks yet.

We smiled, Finna and I, we played, we went out to that long porch and she sifted horsefood and the anxious digestive pangs continued and it stormed, mightily. Long rolling strokes of grey thunder drove us inside, squealing. We hid together in the corner under the window.

I was overcome with hunger, ate, packed in food, a huge grainy sandwich, fruit, honey. I was starting to have my suspicions about these tummy grumblings, timed them. Every two or three minutes. Couldn’t be labour. Too mild, too kind with only minutes between them.

Gentle whisperings.

We were weary, my girl and I, so we lay down for a rest. She had some boobs, and the pains changed; grew, took on more of the tugging quality of a period. I got up, we got up, Finna played, a growing need for movement pushed at me.

I paced.

These tugs at my belly were about a minute apart.

A text to Kate, wondering if she might pop by as she lived locally, and just ‘tell me what she thought’. A limp feeling of not wanting to be alone crept in, I followed Finna to the porch, the waves of pulling grew and I walked through them.

Phone, Kate. Please come, thanks, ten minutes, have you called Mary?

Mary, sorry to bother you, probably a false alarm, pacing the long green feathered porch, do you think it’s a false alarm?

NO.

Pacing. Driven, pushed, up and down, there and back, tromping the porch. Waves now of tightening, pain, pulling.

Kate arrives just as I can no longer focus on taking care of my tomorrowthree birthday girl. She shows Kate the horse food, she’s safe, I pace, I breathe. I’m swimming now, floating smiling in the clear water between the tugs, swaying and humming across the tops of the increasingly powerful waves.

Mary is here, smiling strong gentle. I’ll talk to you once that one’s past. Oh, is that another one already? They’re pretty close together aren’t they?

Smile, ride another one, humming hip circling now, I have a favourite place on this porch, a safe corner of doorframe that hangs me from it by my strong hands, feels the centre of me as these waves crash in growing and heaving.

Now all of me must be there to ride each one.

So they don’t swamp me.

I am singing, hhooooaaahhhhhe-e-e-eyyyy…… and the breath keeps me surfing, not drowning.

This bub might be born on Finna’s birthday! Oh, Idon’t think she’s going to make it to midnight.

A fistclench of excitement. This is happening?

More waves, another and another, more and more powerful, but each one is only one. Each one I can do.

Then the timbre changes. There are still those crashing tightening pains, but I’m transported. Smiling, lolling, shaking. I’m in a loose place, a steaming jubilant ecstatic place. Are you ok? Oh yes. Where do you think you’re at? Oh, I’m in transition, but not that hellish burn of terror and agony of last time. This is intense, it holds me tight, but it’s blissful too, a rush of soft bliss, and I’m somewhere else.

I cruise there for a while, then the thing I’m riding changes again, hot drawing up pain. It’s a pain I don’t like now, it’s not so friendly now I’m feeling it now it’s here.

I want the pool now, cool wet holding. Too late.

Huffing grunting pushpain and a swollen gush of lifeliquid, the sea my baby has grown in, leaves me in a shocking tidal wave.

NOW I know what the urge to push, so empty and absent from my first birth, feels like!

I’m down, a huffing dog still in my friendly doorpost corner.

Stretching burning pains, reaching down the insides of my legs, red hard pain. B comes home, somewhere behind me.

His face, felt, you’re doing so well, hun!

Mary spreads towels under me, do you want to go inside?

Go?

Inside?

Foolish talk!

The unkind pains shear me, push me apart, splay me, and as each crescendos (slow it down a bit Tine) there are harsher sounds pulled from me, fearful sweeps. Mary checks that strong pulsing heartbeat again, and it’s all I can do to let her.

 Kind hand on my back, relax your bottom. I do.

Hot! Towels! My. Back!

Mary brings them, they are joy on me, and Finna, my littlebig nearlythree girl, finds a little facewasher and places it gently over my back too.

I am swamped with love, nuzzle her, lean my head on her little body for a few suspended warm moments.

The lulls in between the pains, those shrieks as the solid head pushes its way down me, are even now calm, painless.

The peaks push me to the very very top, the lowest highest furthest bits of me, stretch every part of my being, pull sounds from me; shitfuckshitfuck!! Those are good shit fucks! Laughter brings me back in, gratitude for this warm sensible woman just letting me be what I am, do what I can do.

That head is shoving at me, pushing my body apart, coyly advancing, slidingback.

Only a few more pushes now.

It’s a little blondie!

A few more? Of those?!

I’m on knees, body snaked up along that doorframe, my stronghands holding it holding me.

Another tidal wave and I grab that pain, push that head, hold it and gruntshove again HUNH! I hold the painforce, use it’s ripping power, push and it slips from me, the whole long body warmfalls from me and Mary catches my child lays him on the towels and I laughcry out in a surge of the hugest mountain of triumph and relief.

‘I’ve had a baby!!’ I’ve had it!

Me. It’s done and I did it!

Stunned for a suspended moment.

Pick up your baby Tine, we need to go inside it’s getting cold out here, and my hands are on the warm slippery body, the little thing held firmly to me, towels wrapping us, I’m shaking and high and in love already and I hold the person to my chest, the tiny wetwhite new person, mewing quietly, bluish under the white, and sitdown on something, a chair that someone puts under me, and Mary passes me some oxygen to wave in the tiny face.

I love you, we all love you and want you here with us SO much.

My first words to him.

And the life comes in, the limbs move firmly, definitely, he has made his decision to stay. He breathes, and Mary says ‘him’ and I look.

And Baz and I, Finna beside him, look.

We have a son.

The rest is all warm and jumbly, and really there is no ‘the rest’ because birth is not the beginning or end of a living person’s story, it’s a profound transition. He lived before that, inside me and right now he snuggles warm on my lap, breathing in sleep and warming my breast with his strong joyful little warmhands.

Even deep in sleep he’s always checking that I’m there.

My dear friend and her three precious daughters arrived as we sat in that chair, just inside the door where our son was born. I shakystood to birth a huge placenta with the longest cord that Mary had ever seen (the cord that was wrapped several times around his neck when he slid out of me), and our son’s father cut the strong rubbery lifeline a while after that. We made our way, my son and I supported on each side by one dad arm and one Mary arm into the living room where I sank onto the couch to smile and smile, warm in the support of Baz and a curious Finna, our friends and Mary and Kate, and where our newborn son found that source of safety and warmth and nutrition that newborns are so completely primed to find. Breasts that filled with milk the second day after his birth, and fed him so well that he gained half a kilo in his first ten days.

He was born at 7.05pm (24 hours almost to the minute before his sister’s third birthday), and that first red flag show had happened at 10.30 am, with real labour that I could recognize as such from about 3 – 4 pm.

He was born amid rolling latespring thunderstorms, on the porch of our home, and Baz, newly the father of a son as well as of our perfect daughter, described the scene he came home to, with me in the 20 minute or so long second stage, as ‘Wagnerian’. Our son is named for the Norse god of thunder, and that was to be his name if he was a boy, from before he was conceived.

The photos from that night show tumbles of people on the couch; me and our son at the centre with Baz and Finna, our amazing doula Kate and fabulous midwife Mary, and our dear friends, who had driven three hours to arrive to see our son for the first time, ten minutes old.

The team, and our ordinary miracle.

Baz describes our little boy as ‘a joyful presence’, and so he is.

The next day we all celebrated Finna’s third birthday with messy chocolate cake, little presents and the presence of my brilliant friend and her family, the first people to see my boy after his magnificent birth.

Tor’s birth was simple, inexorable, awe inspiring, and left me stronger, bigger, more. It gave me back some of what that stolen first hospital birth drained away. I can’t begin to express my gratitude to the fabulous warm people who made it possible for me to do it, to be and do what my body, and nature, always knew I could do.

That four decades old body did, does, pretty well after all.