The Death Before Birth

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“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.