Help, help, need help! I said as I slapped my hand, in uneven rhythm, on the armrest. The gravelly sound issuing from my throat reminds me of a downshifting Mack truck. My husband is driving fast, but cautiously. He tells me that he may seem calm, but he is pretty freaked out because that was the sound I was making right before our first child was born. We are on our way to the birth center, and my son will be born 45 minutes later.
This morning as I prayed those words ran through my head - "help, help, need help!". I wasn't asking for the pain to go away, because pain is fundamental to the birth process, it is not an unfortunate side effect. And pain in life is the same. I do not ask for help that the pain might be erased, but there are a few keys to birthing without medication, and without walking away believing it to be a horrific experience - we need help to cope with the pain. My childbirth class taught that the keys are rhythm, ritual, and relaxation. Perhaps the most troubling times in life are when events disrupt our daily rhythm, throw off our rituals, and when stress prevents relaxation. I could not settle into rhythm and ritual, I could not relax in that stressful ride to the birth center when the contractions were coming hard and fast, and labor had seemed to arrive out of nowhere. I needed someone to settle me down, to guide me to my center where I could devise my own comfort. Today I feel trapped in my life, hemmed in by circumstances, some in my hands, but many that seem to be out of my control. And I want help, need help, need a guiding principle like listening to my breath, or focusing on an object, or slapping my hand in time with my vocalizing to get me through this disrupted, painful day. Labor progression is stopped when mom gets too cerebral, too tapped into thinking and worry, too distracted to allow the primitive part of her brain to let the natural processes of birth take over. Life progression gets stopped when too many factors crowd my mind and I cannot see a clear path ahead of me. When I cannot take the action that makes the most sense, that fixes the problem, because there are other worries, other factors to address, other agencies to respect. Today I cry, help, help, need help. Not to take away the pain, but to settle me down, to guide me to my center where I can devise my own solution.
