Emptying Your Bowl
AKA Exploring Our Fears Around Birth by Tipping Them All Out and Making a Mess
We carry the weight of our history with birth into pregnancy with us, before we’ve even conceived. The stories told to us by our mothers, by our friends. Sometimes, these are joyous stories of empowerment and the magic of birth. All too often, they are traumatic re-tellings of the wrongs done to women in childbirth, of trauma, and of loss. These tales blurted out over cups of coffee, as warnings or littered with “I’m sorry”s.
Even if you’ve never been told a personal birth story by someone, it’s impossible to escape the way birth is represented in mainstream media: of drama, and bright lights, and screaming.
Even if all you’ve encountered are positive personal stories, our cultural narrative remains one of “well it’s alright for people who have nice births, but…”, or of flat-out not believing women who have had positive birth experiences. Even if all you’ve heard are positive experiences, it can feel like a sort of pressure in itself; “What if my birth doesn’t go that way? What if I can’t do it? What if, what if, what if!”
One of the most useful things we can do in our preparation for childbirth is empty our bowls. We carry the weight of all these experiences, whether they’re those of family, of friends, of strangers, of our own previous births - around with us, like millstones around our necks.
I’m officially giving you permission to put them down.
Lay them all out on the floor, and sort through them. Pick them up, one by one, and look at them. Feel them, examine them, and cry if you need to. The ones that positively inform your own birth choices and plans, we can polish up and put back. The ones that make us most afraid are the ones that need the most work: these we need to crack open, to see their constituent parts. In the end, they will positively inform our birth choices, too. We can let their power over us, the weight of them, go.
Part of our work in my antenatal class and antenatal doula sessions focuses on this task. Working out exactly what you’re feeling about birth, and knowing where those feelings come from, allow us to inform our choices. Our fear is a useful tool, to an extent: it can inform what we want and do not want, and form the beginning of our choosing what is right for us in pregnancy and birth. Is the fear a valid one? Can we take steps to prevent said fear coming true? And, most importantly, if the fear does come true, what tools do you have at your disposal to handle it, to cope, to thrive regardless?
Birthing is a messy business. It’s messy physically, yes, but also emotionally. No matter how you birth, birth will strip you down to your basest instincts. Birth requires us to go deep within our primal selves. The messy work starts long before your baby emerges earth-side; it begins when we tip out all our fears and start sorting through them.
The Fears will demand to be felt. We can ignore them, push them away, and face them for the first time when we have no choice at our most difficult moments. Or, we can take ownership, and face them now, so that when we meet them in the dark, we already know them; and we know how to soothe them.
If this all sounds very intense, well, birth is intense!
Whether you’re extremely confident about birthing or feel that you’re drowning in your own fear, you can have a positive birth experience. The primary deciding factor in whether or not women feel positive about their birth experiences is not whether or not they got their ideal birth scenario. It’s not whether they had twinkly lights, or if their affirmations worked for them, or even if things went completely awry from their ideal birth. Rather, what makes people feel positive about their birth is whether they felt prepared, informed, and made the choices that were right for them in the actual moment.
When we sort through our fears about birth ahead of time - when we empty our emotional bowl - this gives us the space to be honest about our preferences, inform ourselves, and plan accordingly. It also takes a massive weight off our shoulders!
So I encourage you: Empty your bowl. Journal about it, word-vomit to a trusted loved one about it, write it into your notes app at 3am, whatever works! Spill it all out. Make a mess.
Then pick the bits that help, polish them up, and turn them into the power of knowledge - of yourself, of your choices - and own your body, your birth, your experience.
You’ve absolutely got this.
