Following a scheduling mix-up, Rose and I managed to have our first full pre-natal meeting with our doula today. There was some confusion about the time, but she made it this afternoon and stayed with us for not quite three hours. Three hours is a long time for me to keep absorbing information about managing labour, excitedly related by a woman passionate about the topic. Luckily, there was some laundry that I could go down and deal with for a few minutes for a break. Rose seems to be very much in tune with this doula, and the doula does have a lot of energy and passion, which is great.
This meeting got me thinking about presence and labour, or labour and presence. Rose and I have been exposing ourselves to a lot of information and expert knowledge on the process of labouring (we had a pre-natal class over two Saturdays recently, each session of about 6 hours). There are at least two reasons that we're amassing all this knowledge, and they both have to do with being prepared for labour. First, we want to know what is going on! The various technical descriptions of contraction timing, for example, will help us figure out in what stage of labour we're at. Second, we want to know how to manage labour, in particular, strategies for pain management, comfort measures, positions, drinking, eating, whatever.
This is going to be a significant process and it is being directed, rightly, at Rose's (and the baby's, don't forget the baby!) experience. It is everyone's job to help Rose have a positive experience. Not least of which, it is her own job. And it will be a huge job for her. But it is also my job (and the doula's job, and the midwife's job). And an important part of this job involves being present. For the whole time. Being there, with awareness, with presence of mind.
At one point during our meeting today, when Rose excused herself for a few minutes and the doula and I were chatting, she asked me how I'm feeling about this process. I said I'm learning (I mentioned to her earlier in the meeting that I'm reading this book; a great resource, but a slow read), but that I have this general feeling of incompetence about the whole process, like someone's who learned motorcycle repair from book. "Without having ever looked at a bike," she completed the thought. Yes. Exactly. Not unhelpfully, she said that what I do have to offer is unconditional love. Less helpful I thought is her conviction that my intuition will take over.
I am getting a sense of why my father made the choice of not being part of labour. I have not been given a similar choice, and I think it's a good thing that I haven't been. One of the key principles that we have been reading about and taught is the importance, for a labouring woman, of going through the pain, not working against it and not fighting your body. My own task is to work through this passive resistance, to get outside my own comfort zone, and, when the time comes, be an active, helping, and loving presence. To commit to the process, with my presence.
