Pregnancy & Birth
t was 6am in a remote, Colombian mountain-top town when I first found out I was pregnant. My husband was asleep in our back-packing hostel room and I was crouched over the Spanish pregnancy test instructions, waiting for that interminable two minutes to call time on itself. When those two life-changing lines appeared I felt sick. We knew we wanted children but I was shocked that I was pregnant this soon. I remember thinking how funny it was that my whole life had been changed and only I knew it; everything and everyone outside that grubby little bathroom carried on as normal while inside it, I sat staring at a urine-covered stick which would change my life forever. I needed some time to mentally accommodate my pregnancy, to let it seep into my identity before I could say the words out loud to anyone else.
So I crept outside and into the tiny town's market square. I watched the Latin American morning sun rise. I let its rays tickle my face. I sat on the side of a fountain and listened as birds awoke and called from the mountains all around. And we said good morning to the world, my baby and me. And that is how I thought of it, from that moment onwards; we were two, and 'I' no longer applied to what I did. We had needed those few moments to ourselves to accept each other, to come to an agreement that yes, this was happening. We were mother and child. After that, I felt able to speak the words out loud..
Fast forward nine months and I wished I could have retained a semblance of that calm of the Colombian mountain-top sunrise. I always thought labour would be excruciating, agony and an absolute trial of strength. I was not disappointed (not least because I had grown up with my own mother insisting that the only thing any expectant woman should ever write on any ante-natal form, no matter what information it was actually requesting, was the word 'EPIDURAL', in capitals, diagonally across the paper from the bottom left to top right). My 28 hours of labour were excruciating; it was agony squared, accompanied by the profound and overwhelming desire to climb out of the confines of my own body. If it had been possible to get up and walk away from my mortal form, I would have done so. I would have made a deal with the Devil if it meant a release from the pain in my body.
I know, I am not mincing my words. But I say this precisely because I mean it to offer hope. I survived it, (and I have even done it again since!) And there are certainly some crucial things which got me through the whole thing without my losing the plot and going out of control with the pain. And they are things which I can say I only learnt at my NCT classes. They meant that I can honestly say I felt in control for the vast majority of my labour.
While I had post-natal complications with a bad haemorrhage and a breast abscess, my actual labour was pretty standard. It started with low-down, period-like cramps in a coffee shop at 2pm with a friend. NCT magic tip number one; with a first labour, pretend as far as you can that nothing is happening. So I continued to drink my peppermint tea and listen to my friend talk about her recent promotion. Only when we said goodbye a couple of hours later did I say out loud 'I think I might be in labour'. The pain was regular, uncomfortable, but manageable.
I went home and waited for my husband to come back from work, noting down every time I had a contraction. They were about seven minutes apart. I insisted on the same approach of denial that whole evening. We watched Game of Thrones and went to bed at 11, me hooked up to (NCT tip number two!) the Tens machine. My husband managed to get three hours sleep while my Tens machine and I battled our way
My Birth Story
Lots of people remember their births with rose-tinted spectacles. Either the passing of time just whittles away the worst parts, or the part of your brain hard-wired for survival blocks it out. Some people will tell you that giving birth is beautiful, wonderful, and life-affirming. But sometimes, it’s more difficult than that. Mother of two, Lucy Bramwell, recalls the birth of her first daughter.