Postpartum cramping is very normal and, in most cases, a positive sign; however, it doesn’t mean it’s comfortable. Here's what to know—and when to give your doctor or midwife a call.
How Long Does Postpartum Bleeding Last? Midwife Hayley Oakes Shares What You Need to Know.
Postpartum bleeding, also known as lochia, is a normal part of healing after giving birth.
Shortly after your baby is born, the placenta that was firmly attached to your uterus via many blood vessels begins to separate and detach itself. After the birth of the placenta (usually 10-20 minutes after the baby), what’s left inside your uterus is essentially a large wound the size of a dinner plate.
How To Plan for Childbirth
Giving birth is both an incredibly physical and emotional event. Proper preparation is key. It’s possible to feel empowered by such an unpredictable process but it comes with knowing how and when you have choice and control in the matter. As the saying goes, knowledge is power.
A Midwives Guide: How To Cope With Discomforts of Pregnancy
Pregnancy is a wild paradox. It’s both the most common, every-day occurrence and the most incredibly profound process of transformation. At the moment of conception, you are physically and mentally altered and will remain so for at least 1-2 years (or whenever lactation has come to an end). You leave behind the body an identity you once knew and become someone different and grow someone new. With that, there can be expected and appropriate growing pains.
This Midwife Shares Why You Need a Postpartum Plan
There is so much emphasis on preparing for childbirth – rightfully so, given it’s a massive physical, emotional, spiritual, and sometimes highly medicalized event for both Mom and baby. However, even though the postpartum period lasts days and months longer than the time spent giving birth, very little preparation, mental bandwidth or financial resources are devoted to what happens after the birth…
Cord blood banking vs delayed cord clamping. Can I do both?
Once a client is halfway through the third trimester (week 34), we discuss postpartum options and their preferences. Two hot topics surrounding the immediate postpartum period (aka the fourth stage of labor) are cord blood banking and delayed cord clamping…
Consuming the Placenta: Making An Informed Decision
As a midwife, I often am asked the question, “What do you think about placenta encapsulation?” Although, it’s reported that placentas have been used in traditional Chinese medicine since the 1500s, consuming the placenta (aka placentophagy) in the postpartum period has become a recent trend in the last 15-20 years. (1,2)
Read moreHow To Find The Right Pediatrician
Finding a pediatrician who’s right for you and your family’s needs is important – your child’s health and wellness will be in their hands.
Here are some things to consider when choosing a pediatrician.
Read moreBreech Baby & A Mother's Options
One of the most common questions we are asked by prospective clients is, “What happens if my baby is breech?”
Read moreLeft-Side Lying
So, what’s the deal with hearing that sleeping or laying on your left side is best while you’re pregnant?
Read moreWhy Hire A Doula When You Have A Midwife…
A mother choosing an out-of-hospital birth with a midwife might not consider hiring a doula for labor support. The usual rationale is that she has her midwife and partner for support, so a doula is one extra person who may not be necessary. Plus, it’s an added cost to an already out-of-pocket experience. Most people think of doulas as important roles for women planning a natural birth in the hospital to help navigate the potential ‘cascade of interventions’ that can take a woman far from her birth wishes. So why would one hire a doula for a planned birth center birth? When stacking the odds in your favor of having the birth you want, a doula is one of the top tools to make it happen.
Read moreTransferring to the Hospital
The majority of the clients who choose to give birth at the birth center do so because they either don’t feel comfortable in a hospital setting or are afraid of medical interventions that could lead to an ‘unnecessarian’ (unnecessary cesarean birth). I find most families are nervous of this possibility of transferring as they think this option is only reserved for emergency situations or a need for a c-section, when that is rarely the case (cesarean rates for planned out-of-hospital births are 5% compared to the national average of 31%). (1) However, in preparation for a healthy, natural birth outside of the hospital, this includes understanding when transfer is indicated, so if it happens the process is that much smoother.
Read moreProtect Your Perineum
Second to the fear of the ‘pain’ (although I like to call it intensity) of childbirth, I find that most women are nervous about the idea of vaginal tearing during birth. Or some women have little to no fears about the birth but a heightened anxiety about tearing and the potential of needing stitches ‘down there’. While tearing is somewhat common, there are some ways of preventing it from happening during childbirth.
Read morePosterior and Right Sided Babies
One of the things I loved most about co-teaching Two Doulas Birth (an LA-based childbirth preparation series) was their curriculum and emphasis on optimal fetal positioning. As once a doula and now a licensed midwife, I have seen many births in these past seven years and believe that a baby in utero intuitively knows the path of how to be born through his or her mother’s body without a lot of intervention. However, there are external factors that can make the path a bit trickier, and a natural labor more difficult.
Read moreOptimal Preparation For the Planned Out-Of-Hospital Birth
Photo by Leilani Rogers
While birth can be an unpredictable process and approximately 23% of first-time mothers planning an out-of-hospital birth will transfer to the hospital (with the majority being due to non-emergent issues, i.e.‘failure to progress’ or a desire for pain relief), (2) there are a few things you can do during the pregnancy to stack the odds in your favor of having the birth you want.
Read moreThe One With the Severed Head
Chinnamasta is a Hindu tantric goddess who symbolizes both life give and taker as she is depicted without a head. “She helps the devotee to transcend the mind (all the ideas, attachments, habits and preconceived ideas), into the Pure Divine Consciousness.” (‘Birth Mandala: The Power of Visioning For Childbirth”)
Chinnamasta is also the name of the yantra (Sanskrit for “mystical diagram”) of the second chakra (energy point centered in the lower abdomen, pelvis, and sex organs). This is the chakra of progeny and Chinnamasta is the representation of that.
Thus, Chinnamasta is an archetype of the collective unconscious – severing ones own head to mother and tap into the yantra of the second chakra – the womb – and allow her baby to be born. This is fascinating to me as it corresponds with a philosophy of birth, one that I happen to agree with, that so much of the labor process (especially for a first time mother giving birth) is the struggle to move out of the thinking brain and ego and drop into a more primal and ‘id’ state of existing.
When a woman remains in her ‘head’, analyzing her labor and trying to will her labor to go faster or control it because its getting too intense, she is moving away from that deeper place of the collective unconscious where she ‘descends into her labyrinth’ (as discussed in previous post). Instead, she may be prolonging the labor process, making the pain more intense and perhaps the experience more traumatic.
If a woman can find the tools to ‘cut off her head’ so to speak, it will allow her to be unattached to what’s happening and just experience the motions and sensations of labor for what they are versus the story, drama and thoughts her mind wants to tell that are associated with the actions of birth. She can be a vessel through which new life comes through her rather than a closed, tight and complex network of connective tissue and fear getting in the way of her body and baby.
Some of these tools and comfort techniques can include hypnosis, music, nature sounds, massage, visualizations, mantras, affirmations, aromatherapy, movement and most importantly an environment that makes one feel safe, loved and supported. This will help relax the mind and give it something else to focus on – like entering a deep state of meditation – to step out of the way of her body and allow her baby to come through her.
As the Queen of Hearts once famously said, “Off with their heads!”…
The Death Before Birth
“Mexican Labyrinth of Birth”. Painting by Pam England, author and founder of “Birthing From Within” (childbirth preparation book and class series).
This painting was inspired by a story my friend Alberto told me. Two of his tias (aunties) are parteras (midwives) in Oaxaca, Mexico. There, women who give birth are called warriors. ‘The midwives tell a pregnant woman that when she is in labor she will have to go to the underworld where spirits hold all the unborn babies… She will have to find her baby, do battle in labor with the spirit to free her baby and bring him or her home - bring her baby back and into the world, to the family who is waiting. Only she can do this’. - Pam England
As a midwife, I have the distinct pleasure and honor of safely supporting women as they traverse their ‘labyrinths’ - reminding them they are safe, their babies are safe and to keep going while watching them go deeper inside themselves, battle, struggle, surrender, transform and come back as mothers with their new babies.
Giving birth is probably the hardest thing a woman will do in her life. I have even heard women say that at some point in labor they thought they were going to die. But the difficulty and the battle to cope with the intensity that is natural childbirth rests not in the body trying to figure out how to birth a child or the pain experienced (as a lot of clients after the fact report the pain was manageable), but in the mind’s struggle to let go of the self, the ego, and drop into a deeper place inside themselves that intuitively knows how to birth.
At some point in labor, I have heard almost every woman say, “I don’t know if I can do this. It hurts so much. I’m so tired” and this is essentially the moment the ego surrenders. A laboring woman’s consciousness moves out of the analytical part of her brain and more into the ‘primal’, instinctual, ‘id’ part where the ‘the self’ ceases to exist and she is just a vessel for this new life to come through. The part of her brain that is ‘in the labyrinth’.
As one of my clients so eloquently put it in her recent birth story posted here on the blog, “I kept visualizing the physical structure of my body getting stripped away and, with it, all the civilized things, the niceties, the learned personality traits that seem so ingrained just falling away. What remained was a warm, glowing, amorphous thing that was just the essence of who I was. It was who I actually was, and it was the most powerful and true version of myself - it’s the part that labored and gave birth to my son; it’s the part that took over in the hardest and most intense moments. Although, after the labor I seemingly went back to who I was, I feel as though that experience has forever stripped away the unnecessary aspects of self that existed before. On a daily basis I find myself honoring the loss of an aspect of myself pre-baby, and welcoming a new, stronger and also more vulnerable self.”
When this mental and consciousness shift happens in labor, progress is made and a woman is that much closer to birthing her baby.
At times, this is why I think labor for first time mothers can take so long (besides the normal physical feat of allowing organs and tissues to be stretched to accommodate a human being for the first time), because of the mental resistance to the journey that must be taken to the ‘other side’. It is the rite of passage of letting the conscious self whom she once knew ‘die’ before being re-born as a mother that is the secret and art of giving birth. Every laboring woman has her own labyrinth that is meant for her to travel through. It is not to be feared. It will only show her in the deepest depths of her soul a newfound sense of strength, courage and love she has to safely birth her baby and be born as a new woman, mother and family.
Mother Birth
When you are giving birth to your baby, there will also be a death – a sudden and immediate end to the autonomous part of you that can get up and walk out of your house whenever you want. The minute your baby emerges from your body, however, a new part of you is also born: you are a mother.
Sometimes the sense of the ‘mother’ self is immediate and strong, and sometimes it is subtle and slow to emerge. This is true for partners as well, even to a more extreme degree. In the beginning, partners are not the ones directly responsible for feeding their babies with their bodies, and yet they are still going through the motions of sleepless nights and constant care. Without the hit of oxytocin that rushes through a woman’s body as she is breastfeeding, which helps her bond, love, and know her baby, partners may have difficulty coping and understanding what it means to be a parent.
But just like in labor when you reach a new hard place that is steep and difficult, and you eventually push through and carry on, similarly, in the challenging weeks following birth, you have to remind yourself, as a mother and a couple that the struggle is only temporary. Soon, you will know your baby and how to co-exist. For a woman, this is still a very vulnerable phase of childbearing – hormones are surging and dropping all at the same time and sleep is greatly diminished – so you will want to create a safe cocoon for you and your family, where you can be exposed and engaged with your baby without a lot of intruders or distractions. This way you will focus your attention on your baby, your milk supply will increase, you will feel more rested, and you will have a decreased chance of experiencing postpartum depression.
Honoring the postpartum time is important. You may need reminders to turn off the habitual activities and thought processes that have made you who you are today for the weeks following the birth. During that time, the typical routine of daily phone calls, emails, work, meetings, laundry, dishes, and/or Facebook should be modified to allow you to physically recover, as well as to psychologically and emotionally weave a new pattern of thinking and being as a person, a parent and a new family. That initial shock from the temporary loss of your multi-tasking, active, driven, self-sufficient self will be replaced with an understanding and appreciation of a new self that is slower-paced, patient, observant, present. Perhaps this new self has a much more manageable daily routine with simpler goals, like getting in one shower a day.
This is not to say that you cannot do it all yourself, and sometimes life is such that financial or other related constraints limit your ability to take time off. When asking for help, whether in the form of your mother, mother-in-law, friend or doula, it should be someone whom you trust and feel comfortable with, someone who can take care of you, someone who frees up your responsibilities and allows you to hone in and take care of your baby and honor the mother in you.
Happy Mother’s Day