Pain in Birth: Placebos & Potential

In my history as a mother, about 10 years, I have deliberately chosen to endure pain countless numbers of times. Just as you point out, most of us, including me, also take deliberate steps to avoid pain, like popping the Excedrin or having that THIRD glass of wine after a particularly exhausting day...:)

Birth, however, is not like having a toothache, backache or headache. Birth is a cataclysmic moment, a spirtual touchstone, and just as transformative for families and for the woman as it is for the baby. Nothing compares to my birth experiences in terms of changing my perception of the UNIVERSE and of myself and others, much UNLIKE my latest headache. :) (but maybe you have REALLY tremendous headaches. LOL ) Birth is ALSO extrememly commonplace, basic to human nature, rustic and earthly, much like a headache. Thus, your choice to simplify the issue of pain in birth as just another biological perdicament is acceptable. You make a good case.

I guess I'd like to make the case for pain. I would like to, one more time on this list, remind people of the complicated soul and spirit of our topic. We all talk about angels and spirituality each day in reference to the souls of our children. In the same breath, however, we believe we have the right to strictly biologically control an incredibly complex process of reproduction, we wonder aloud why it is WE who must endure repeated loss, as if it isn't really normal to even have ONE miscarriage, or it is unjust (justice being a PURELY human invention) that, even if we do "everything right" we continue to suffer loss. We feel jinxed, tortured and obsessed. I know this, because I spent years of my life feeling this way. I spent three solid years dealing with the death of my babies, the near loss of my life, the burial of another baby lost late in pregnancy, the shattering threat to my marriage and my whole personality. Now THAT'S pain. And I would not trade it for the world. I have become a more humble creature, more rich in my understanding of humanness, more at peace with what seems like the unlikely marriage of pain and faith. Would you trade it?

Would you?

It is THAT reasoning that simplified my decisions to undergo 20.5 hours of unmedicated labor with the birth of my healthy daughter. It is that reasoning that gave me the courage to insist on carrying my babies until they naturally left my body, in one and two weeks time respectively. It is that reasoning that relieved me from the burden of the often unnecessary D&C or the induced labor in my losses. It is my honor of pain that has given me the courage to do difficult things in my life.

E. Roosevelt said "You must do that which you think you cannot do.." So many momments in the last three years I have asked "WHY?" Why must do things I think I cannot do? Why endure pain when there is a way out? NO ONE should have to endure the pain of losing their children. In fact, though, it is nearly commonplace for humans to endure that level of pain in one form or another. It puts me squarely in the ranks of most other poeple, and out of the isolation of my upper middle class angst.

Beyond our struggle on this list, our culture is somewhat crippled by this mentality. In my career as an educator, I see parents eager if not insistent to diagnose and medicate thier children as a way of controlling their learning and behavior at huge cost to the welfare of the child and the TRUE understanding of the child. We medicate hoards of clinically depressed people without the benefit of therapy or theology to help them resolve their struggles. People treat minor delays and bad hair days as world altering issues, as if hang ups weren't a property of the information age. I wonder, deeply, what I would have lost had I chosen to be asleep, mediacted, incised, and mood altered during the last three years of hardship. What has the pain brought me? What does pain bring us during childbirth?

In recent postings, the physical benefits of natural childbirth, pain and all, have been given proper airtime, and are indeed fact, so let's not review them here. Instead, let us wonder of the mothers and babies who are born of pain.

Women, born with the burden of the responsibility of pregnancy, birth and inescapable parenthood, are tender beings. They are so seldom criminals, war mongers or void of compassion AND the true grit it takes to survive. They have a position, perhaps close to the hand of heaven, which makes it easier to understand and accept the combination of the divine and the earthly. We understand that opposites don't just attract, they define each other, like PAIN AND JOY. We know, firsthand, that we are not exempt, and have no "right" to be, from the strife and mystery of life.

I have reverance for the pain of childbirth. For me, to numb it is like caging a mysterious but beautiful, powerful animal because we are afraid of it. It doesn't impede my joy, it helps to define it much more completely. It shapes who I am, as a mother, a woman and a human. It perhaps brings me closer to the powerful, mystical place my baby has come from, with me as the vessel.

You can say now, reader, that I am WAAAY too heady, take things too seriously, think too much, and complicate things where Leanne had so deftly simplified them. Believe me, at times, I agree with you. :) If you are tempted by this response, then stick with the headache analogy, but also remember that you refer to your babies as angels, that Leanne even refers to her bith experiences as "surreal". Feel the depth of grief you do over your lost babies, but say not in the same breath that you do not respect the mystery of the pain of birth, and revere it for the same reason.

I offer no reasons here. I am illustrating the absence of reason. Creating human life, in case you haven't noticed, doesn't follow rules or reasons or justice invented by humans. No drug can make it so. When you remove your perception of pain, remember, you do not remove the pain itself. It is there, it is purposeful, and you have made a deliberate choice to be numb to it. You don't have the power to remove nature's pain, now, or in the future. You have your reasons for numbness, and I fully understand them, have lived through my own, and accept your choice.

But let us not be so narrow in vision to wonder aloud WHY anyone would CHOOSE to feel the pain. A headache interferes with our daily life. Childbirth shapes it.

"When pain is searching out the breaking point of the intellect, another factor, call it the soul or spirit or the true self, emerges."
Tolstoy

WHEW! I think I need to wash down an aspirin with a third glass of wine! :)

Best Regards-
Erica Tingler
Mother to Aubrey, 6
Mother to Peyton Ana, loss at 17 weeks
Mother to Isiah Clarke, s/b 1997
Mother to "the hooch" :) P/M due 9/10/99