Natural Childbirth

In the recent years, most of the (urban) childbirths I have heard of have been Caesarean. I see a disturbing trend where this will soon become the accepted norm, as in  Telangana where it is already 75% in private hospitals. How could something like childbirth, that is so primal to the existence of life on the planet, need so much medical intervention? Has life not propagated itself before the advent of this technology? Surgical intervention in true medical emergencies is a boon to mankind. I am afraid it is not medical emergencies that dictate the terms anymore. 

Having being frustrated about this for long, I decided to at least share my natural childbirth experiences. This may sound cheesy, as if it is a TV commercial -- natural, vaginal childbirth is a beautiful, empowering, transforming experience that offers enormous benefits to both the mom and the baby. It is absolutely true! You can find research papers online that link asthma, allergies and many other problems in young children to Caesarean births. 

So, here we go:

Albeit being 15 years old, the childbirth memories are still crystal clear in my mind.

In 2003 when I first got pregnant, we were living in California. My OB/GYN doctor’s spontaneous reaction after seeing me was that I need to be examined and assisted frequently all through the process. She obviously had never encountered anyone as petite as me, in her entire career. So I could understand why she panicked. At the same time, there was another line of thought firming up in me. It was to do with the natural process of childbirth that both my grandmothers in India had been through (with 12 and 6 babies each), in spite of being just as small as I was. They gave birth at their homes, all naturally, with older women helping them. Also, I had just then finished reading “Darwin’s dangerous idea” and had begun looking at the world through the news lens of evolution. Slowly, my trust in the human body’s intelligence grew and I shared my views with my doctor. I convinced her that I could attempt a vaginal birth, without any medication.

Around this time, we got introduced to the idea of La Maze and started attending childbirth classes with a midwife called Kris Avery. She was passionate about childbirth, and was just the one I needed to learn from. The seeds that she sowed in us took deep roots. “Pregnancy is not a disease, but it is being looked at as one and hence the slew of problems associated with that”, she said. She offered a new perspective to look at the labor pain. I remember her statement: “Pain with a purpose”, in the context of how the labor pain guides both the mom and the baby. Over a period of two months, she helped us understand the various stages of a childbirth. She gave us the tools – breathing techniques, age old wisdom from other countries, birthing positions, pain management, research findings – that we appreciated very much when the time came. Kris also recommended a doula who could be with us on the day of delivery.

On August 5^th, it was 4 a.m. when I first felt the jolt of labor pain. Thanks to Kris, I stayed calm and started making notes in my journal. Kris had asked us to jot down the time and duration of each contraction. After two hours I woke up Dev and my mom (who had come to help us out).  The morning drive to our hospital in Santa Rosa was quite nice with the Sun brightly shining. When we reached the hospital around 8 a.m., I was almost fully dilated. We had requested a private room and it was taking some time to get one. We needed the extra space to accommodate an inflatable swimming pool. After we got into the room, Dev and our doula got to work right away. They had to inflate the tub and fill it with warm water. This task seemed to take for ever. As the pain intensified, I couldn’t bear the wait any longer.

In the meanwhile, my mom arrived with a friend. I could hear her pleading the nurse or doctor to perform a C-section on me. She apparently couldn’t bear seeing me in pain! I got rudely awakened by this and forced my mom to go back home. I couldn’t care less then. Once the pool was ready, I got in and felt the pain level drop significantly.  It was wonderful to be in water. It was as if the warm water gracefully received the pain and the weight that I was carrying.

The doctor came in to check on me and said that I needed to be out of water since I was ready to push. She insisted that I start pushing. Being out of water didn’t seem right nor did the doctor’s orders. I said to the doctor, as politely as I could, that I didn’t feel any urge to push and that I couldn’t comprehend pushing at that moment. Also, I requested her to step out of the room. I didn’t know if she felt offended. Again, I couldn’t care less. I went back to the water, much against the wishes of the nurses who wanted to keep it simple. Sure enough, a while later I did feel the need to push and I called for the doctor. When she came back she said that I should be lying on my back, in the bed. She wouldn’t let me experiment with any other position that I had learned from Kris.

In bed, I felt like fish out of water. With Dev and the Doula assisting me with breathing and pain management, I pushed and pushed for about an hour, but in vain. I remember biting once in to the chubby shoulder of our doula while crying in intense pain. When there was a moment’s break from the pain, the bright Sun that we saw in the morning came to my mind. Some hazy thoughts and images about the Sun gave me the energy to persevere.  The doctor said that I needed an episiotomy since the baby had difficulty coming out. After the cut, around 1:30 p.m. the baby’s head was out with a gush of amniotic fluid. An Irish nurse said that that was considered lucky in their country! The baby had folded an arm and placed that hand cozily next to his ear, rendering pushing impossible. 

Overwhelmed and relieved, we were hugging each other and crying. It took us several minutes to regain our senses back. By then, the baby’s chord was cut, he was bathed and wrapped in a towel like a freshly baked loaf of bread, with a cute little hat on his head. We had actually requested the hospital (in a written form, called “birth wish”) to not bathe the baby and to not cut the chord without checking with us. But the nurses were on autopilot. I was too exhausted to worry about any of these then. Dev and the doula had to empty the pool and get the room ready for others (that was the arrangement; the hospital wasn’t going to let us use a pool otherwise).

Empowered by the experience of natural birth, I was in a state of bliss with baby Abhi next to me. Having seen the worst of pain and having emerged out of it without any medicine gave me tremendous confidence in my abilities and made me shed baseless fears that I used to harbor. I was transformed for life. 

*

Natural childbirth is a powerful, life changing experience that every pregnant woman is entitled to. I feel that it is a terrible loss to deprive oneself of it for reasons other than true medical emergencies. Looking back at this episode, I am wondering if this was my first step into trusting natural ways of living and learning, that we as a family so dearly enjoy now.  

I will share Aparna’s birth experience in my next post.

SAM 2018

The Swashikshan Annual Meet (SAM) is a get-together of non-schooling families from all over India. You can expect to find families from all streams of unconventional education -- unschooling, farm-schooling, home-schooling with and without a syllabus, world/travel schooling etc. It is quite eclectic and fun with fifteen different languages being spoken at the venue. This year's SAM happened in the scenic Goa.  It was a five day residential event at the beautiful St. Joseph Vaz Cathedral. “Team Goa”, as the organizers were called, did a fabulous job organizing this event that hosted 100+ adults and 150+ kids (2 – 20). This year was our third one. The previous two Meets were in Bangalore and Indore. We cherish the memories and the meaningful connections we made there and look forward to the next one eagerly. This Meet is one of the few social occasions where we could just be ourselves. So, with a lot of excitement, we arrived at Goa the night before the event. It was a warm feeling to see familiar faces at the venue. We went to bed early just so we were well rested for the next day. 

The only planned sessions were called “core sessions” and the topics were decided in advance by Team Goa. These topics were to do with our home-schooling journeys, our fears and anxieties etc. Every morning there was one core session for 1 ½ hrs.  The rest of all the days were left open for sessions that the participants could host. Basically, you didn’t have to be an expert to host a session, you could host one by being a facilitator enabling a discussion or by being a story-teller or by doing arts/crafts/games with others. The time table on the black board slowly got populated on the first day as people warmed up. There were five possible locations so that we could have parallel sessions.

The first day was mostly about getting to know each other. Ice-breaker sessions, with music and dance, by Manish Freeman worked wonders. I saw that even the grandmothers (there were three of them) were feeling more at home towards the end of the first day. I sat with a few parents who seemed new to home-schooling, to have one on one conversations. They had come with the same questions, anxieties and fears that I once had, eight years ago. Also, I enjoyed reconnecting with folks that we had met before at the previous Meets. It was reassuring to me to know that there were parents who had been primarily focusing on their relationship with their children (and not on academics), especially since the children were well in to their teens. It was in this context that three of us decided to host a session on parenting challenges with older children. It was useful to hear from other parents about their set of challenges and what they are doing about them. 

One common challenge was to do with media and devices – gaming, messaging. There was an 18 year old boy who said that he and his brother played video games for four straight years, and one fine day when they got interested in football they decided to stop playing video games and have never gone back to it. It was powerful to hear him say, “yes, I wasted four years of my life”. Jim, a dad of two boys, drew an analogy and got us thinking by asking if we would let drug dealers into our houses. Rajesh said that his 14 year old son is into Programming and his son’s journey in to the world of technology has been a fascinating one. He said that although his son spent a majority of his time on the computer, he spent a very little fraction of it on entertainment. His son had also devised ways of keeping himself fit while working for longer hours – taking sufficient breaks, eye exercises, push ups etc. When this boy hosted a session later it was inspiring for the kids to listen to him. His session was about the Android apps that he had been working on – figuring out the timings of the next bus, planning your trip on public transport system in Bangalore.

Dev has been battling a foot injury for about three years now. This injury prompted him to learn about a therapy called “Trigger point therapy” for pain relief. Dev wanted to share his learning that could help people treat themselves. So he hosted a session on this and demonstrated to the audience how the origin of pain and manifestation of it could be purely muscular and counter-intuitive (a sharp pain in the arch of the foot could be originating from the piriformis muscle in the buttocks). 

Rashmie and Avie hosted a session on the changes in dietary habits that their family has adopted. They said that their vegan lifestyle has helped them combat various illnesses and stay fit. Ashok did a session on NLP (Neuro Linguistc Programming). He asked the participants to talk about some of their problems. He later helped them understand their problems better by offering new perspectives. Abhi told me that he found this session very useful to find new ways of interacting with our neighborhood kids and resolving conflicts. Shuchita, Dev and Mahakash put together an extempore session on appreciating Hindustani classical music. Shuchita sang some bandishes, Mahakash sang Rabindro sangeet and Dev provided the platform on which this music could be made sense of. Ravi hosted a similar session on western classical music. 

In her session, Vijayalakshmi talked about ways of reducing waste from our homes -- home composting and green periods. She introduced the idea of using a cup (Diva or She) instead of sanitary napkins. Dr. Atul's and Dr. Arti's sessions were about alternative medical systems -- homeopathy and ayurveda respectively. A family traveling from South Africa presented their experiences in a session called "World Schooling". Muriel talked about education in the context of tribal societies. We learned about the history of St. Joseph Vaz Cathedral from the presentation done by the pastor.

I was thankful to Amritha for hosting a session on sex education. I don’t know if she intended it for the kids, but there was no kid at the session. There were about fifteen parents sharing their views about sex education for their children. It was very encouraging to see parents that have been open about this with their children. My children have known about menstruation since they were two or three. They know about mating in the animal world and have seen it many times. I thought that was suffice and also I was squeamish about talking about it in the context of humans. But then, I had not touched upon the aspects of tenderness, equality, pleasure and safety, as some parents rightly pointed out. They were urging me to have this discussion with my children.

One evening was devoted to FAQ’s, especially from the local people of Goa. Many interested young parents had shown up with questions. I was on the panel with two other moms, one dad and four young adults who have been home-schooled. Claude Alvarez, an environmentalist and the editor of the Other India Press publication, and his son Rahul (a snake catcher) were invited to be on the panel too. It was an intense, interactive session that lasted about three hours. Cluade's bold take on the system, sprinkled with a good sense of humor, was refreshing to hear. I hope it helped the Goans that took the time to come there.

“Listening Circle” was planned for the morning on the fourth day. The entire crowd was divided into eight small groups, with one facilitator per group. This circle is supposed to provide a silent, non-judgemental, hearing space that allowed people to open up, share or vent, trusting that their sharing will be kept confidential. The sanctity of this circle ought to be preserved by the facilitator by making sure no one intrudes or provides any reply to what they just heard. The participants, sitting in a circle, can share anything that they would like to (stories, experiences, memories, confusions, worries). It is beautiful to see how people slowly shed their inhibitions and step out of their comfort zones to share their life stories. 

On the last day, there was a gratitude and appreciation circle based on a South-American tribal ritual. A few chairs were arranged in a circle and participants sitting on the chairs with their palms up were blind-folded, with music playing at the back. The receiver had his palms up expressing his openness and readiness to receive and was blind-folded to eliminate any bias that this may create. There were people standing behind each chair, with their arms stretched out to touch the shoulders of the person ahead. The idea was to establish a warm physical contact while thanking the person in front and expressing gratitude and appreciation by whispering in to their ears. The music and stillness evoked powerful emotions in people that were both giving and receiving. I saw many people get deeply emotional with tears flowing down. I was skeptical to begin with and entered the circle reluctantly. I am happy that I participated in it because it was beauty beyond words. As the music continued playing, it brought more inquisitive people, including kids.  

Other than these, there was bonfire, drumming circle, art exhibition, guided forest walks, an evening at the beach, morning martial arts and yoga. My kids seem to have enjoyed the games and the dances with Manish. Thanks to Team Goa, we got to taste Goan delicacies and absolutely wonderful food on all the days.

-- Hema