The Pickles family website

Last Saturday and Sunday I had the great fortune and pleasure of being part of the birth of our first child.

Western culture feeds us an idea of child birth being this painful and traumatic experience and urban life separates us from the whole of life cycle (birth, childhood, youth, young adult, etc, up to and especially death.) The fact that infant and birthing mother child rates have fallen significantly in the western world over the last few generations, seems to have escaped popular culture. Child birth is usually portrayed as some ghastly agonizing torment to be endured not revered as an amazing process that is (or should be) a normal part of life. Which is a very sad thing.

My experience as an active bystander was very different from what I had been lead to believe by popular culture.

Georgie and I had gone to a number of birthing classes (Transition to Parenthood and Calm Birth with Julie Clarke and an Active Birth class at the Royal Hospital for Women). None of which really catered to or prepared men for the emotional experience of birth. (They were great for providing information about birth and infant care, and I found them all very worthwhile.) I guess men don't like being confronted by that sort of stuff and maybe it's very hard to do in a class format. The birthing class did help teach me a lot about what to expect in terms of signs: which bit of labour Georgie was in; that I needed to ply her with fluids but not how to support her.

I was shocked at how little I could do to help her physically but also how much that physical support contributed to her well being during the process. and how much I could do emotionally to affirm her belief in herself.

Georgie's waters broke at 8:30pm on Saturday night (10th May). Contractions didn't start till about 12:30am and didn't get strong until about 5am or 6am. My contribution in that period was fairly minimal apart from saying my catch phrase "Your body was made from this. You'll be great" and we cuddled. "I think I'm ready", Georgie said.

When they started, she said words to the effect that the contractions were like mild period pain. I slept but Georgie was too excited or nervous to sleep properly.

By first light the contractions had gotten stronger so I talked her through a visualisation of a bush walk we do down the south coast.
In the Calm Birth classes (and on the CDs that you get as part of the class show bag) there are a series of creative visualisations. None of which had any resonance with me and didn't have a great deal of resonance for Georgie. So in the weeks leading up to labour, Georgie and I discussed places and situation that made us feel calm. Georgie even went as far as writing up a script for me to read out. I'm a fairly crap reader but luckily I was able to grasp enough of what she wanted to hear to build a visualisation based on some of our walks. So in the dawn light I talked her through a visualisation. The other really cool and coincidental thing was that as I was talking her through the visualisation some cockatoos flew past singing, so I was able to weave that real sound into the visualisation. I don't know whether it helped her but I was excited by it. It certainly didn't detract from the effect.

I didn't need to find the visualisation particularly calming (there are a number of other things I find more calming) all I needed to do was create a scene that she found relaxing and that I could convey in a relaxing manner. This separation between what I would have chosen and what Georgie needed was crucial for the whole process to work. If I had not been able make that separation, most of my part in the process would have been redundant, distracting or worse.

By 8am on Sunday morning we knew we were really in business. I started making the appropriate phone calls. Thankfully the day before, we'd both been making preparations for the coming events. These preparations were really the first real work we'd done to get anything ready at all. The lead up had been so busy and chaotic that we were running quite behind on all the stuff we needed to do.

When Georgie's waters broke we rang the midwife. (Like us, she wasn't very excited by the prospect of an overnight birth.) She said that there wasn't much to worry about and that labor could take as much as 24 hours to begin and that we should take it easy and get some good quality rest. She also said we should probably go in to the hospital in the morning to get checked out. When we rang at 8am to let her know we were progressing more seriously she said that she'd be in by 9am and that we could come in any time after that. By 9am Georgie's contractions were five minutes apart and one minute long so she decided we should head over to the hospital. Getting her into the car wasn't very easy she ended up kneeling on the floor of the front seat with her elbows on the seat so she was facing backwards. I drove very slowly. (I'm sure people on the roads at the same time thought I must have been completely pissed and driving slowly to cover the fact).

As we were walking in to the hospital we found Ally, Georgie's sister which completed our company. We all went up to the birth centre and were shown into one of the three rooms. Both the others were empty. Pix (the midwife) was, I think, a little surprised to see us so soon but she and Leona (a trainee midwife) looked after setting us up wonderfully. (I think the other major factor with how amazingly everything went was that the Malabar midwives were so awesome).

Ally was amazing. I'm surprised she didn't die of boredom in the first couple of hours. I spent my time talking Georgie through the bushwalk visualisation which seemed to work nicely. Creating the visualisation was simply a matter of describing everything I could remember from some of the times we'd done bushwalks in our favourite spot. With an emphasis on the beautiful and peaceful aspects and the minor details. Also I focused on my tone of voice.

One of the issues I had with the CDs and the visualisation sessions in the Calm Birth class was that I couldn't relate to them. It was partly to do with the fact that I didn't enjoy the tone of voice, which was not that different from the one I used. I think the difference for me was that if I was listening, I would have found a woman's voice more calming. But I wasn't and Georgie was and it worked for her.

The other thing was that the imagery used in the CDs struck me as being a bit American and affected. The imagery I used was solely descriptive and designed to absorb the listener in the moment rather than convey metaphors. It was lucky that this approach worked for Georgie.

For the first couple of hours at the hospital, I mostly sat next to Georgie stroking her between contractions and being still (without touching her) during the contractions. Sometimes I would suggest changing positions but mostly I did what I thought was needed (and was told when I wasn't doing the right thing.)

As I sat/stood with Georgie through the contractions, I felt at a loss with what to do because I felt like I was doing so little. But it seemed my simple, calm, quiet presence was all that was needed.

Things were progressing slowly by 10.30am so Pix suggested that Georgie try the shower. So off she went and I followed.

The birth centre showers are great. There are two shower heads on hoses so Georgie directed one head where she wanted and I directed the other where I was told. Holding the shower head so that always went where it should go while not getting in Georgie's way and not getting myself wet was a quite a strenuous task. It was in fact so strenuous that Ally and I had to take it in half hour sessions.

Somewhere earlier in the day Georgie had started wailing during contractions like a ghost in a bad American kids cartoon. Most of the time it was not too hard but as the contractions got stronger and longer and the pitch of Georgie's wailing got higher and louder it became harder and harder not to laugh. I got caught at one point and received stern words but that didn't stop me doing it silently. She used the wailing to help control her outward breathing and it seemed to help her so I didn't make any comment.

The shower routine continued for a number of hours. (I'm glad the Sydney catchment has had quite a bit of rain lately.) At one point I went and lay down on the bed and shut my eyes for half an hour.

Throughout the labour not a lot went through my head. I guess I spent time at various points trying to work out how to help Georgie visualise dilating her cervix but I didn't come up with anything useful. The rest of my time I spent, just being present in the moment.

At around 3pm Georgie decided that the bath would be a good idea. Pix suggested that a walk might help speed things up so as a compromise, Georgie got in the bath for about four or five contractions. After which Pix examined her. She was only 5cm dilated so off we all went to walk up stairs during the contractions. Ally, Georgie and I set off to haunt the corridors of Royal Hospital for Women, Randwick. (It became particularly hard to hide my mirth at her wailing as we walked up and down the deserted stairs in a quiet part of the hospital.) We walked slowly and thoroughly. Plodding up and down the same staircase, round in circles in the corridor at the top and bottom of that staircase and out in the cool, gentle afternoon sun light in the courtyard next to the staircase.

Between contractions I plied Georgie with water. During contractions I looked away from her to hide my silly grin. It wasn't that I thought the wailing was silly. Quite the contrary, it was a very effective way of controlling her outward breaths. It was just that it sounded like such a caricature. The others shared (at times) my mirth but all discretely hid their smiles.

We haunted the corridors, stairs and court yard for about 45 minutes then went back to the birth centre room. There is a small court yard attached to the birth centre rooms (and one of the Delivery Suite rooms) but no one else was using the birth centre so we could walk around outside there. And so we did, probably for another 15 or 20 minutes.

When Georgie got back into the bath an had another examination, she was 9.5cm dilated. The walk had done the trick.

Before the walk, the Pix and/or Leona came in every 30 minutes or so to check the heart rate. (Even during labour, hearing his heart beat amazed me. It was perfect the whole way through.) The rest of the time, they mostly left us alone unless we needed them or they thought we needed some prompting one way or another.

After the walk Pix or Leona (or both) were with us the whole time. Ally and I sat beside the bath holding Georgie's hands and Pix and Leona sat behind us monitoring the heart rate and advising between contractions. It was amazing to feel like we were all working together and to know that any help that we could possibly need was there in the room, observing, advising and supporting us. Leona and especially Pix were so amazing. They were there when we needed them and melted away when we didn't.

By the final stage, we were all quite tired so details here are a bit vague. I know that it started some time not long after 5pm and finished at 7:08pm when he was born. And that Georgie's wails got very intense and loud (so loud that I had to block my ears) And that her grip on my hand was so intense that I had to release it at the end of every contraction to stretch and flex it after the squeezing it got during the contraction.

One of the things that was amazing about Georgie during the whole thing that the sounds she made were not mindless utterances but were a focused tool for regulating her breathing and effort. Despite the sounds that were coming out her face was composed and focused even at the final stages of the pushing when the baby's head was crowning.

The pushing phase or second stage was the only time I worried about her. She was pushing with so much force I thought she might give herself a stroke or something. But I kept quiet about that small fear. After all Pix would have told us if anything was wrong.

Finally when the head popped out Pix asked if I wanted to catch the baby. It was an odd moment because I needed to do what Georgie wanted but she wanted me to do what I wanted. So I ended up going to catch the baby. It wasn't the earth shattering experience that some men (and support women) talk about. I could have just as easily let Ally, Pix or Leona do it. The earth shattering experience for me was watching Georgie do all that with such strength and composure and being a part of that effort. It was amazing to see him come out and the excitement I felt when I first saw the top of his head was awesome but it was nothing compared to how I felt watching Georgie hold him in her arms for the first time.