It's totally unpredictable. And you can't control it, no matter how hard you try.
I got a call last Sunday morning from a client's husband saying that his wife's water had broken. And she wasn't due until the end of September. Surprise! Luckily, I wasn't in Chicago visiting my sister, or in another state visiting friends. We were in town, so I dropped everything, grabbed my doula bag and put my DONA pin on my shirt, got my family situated with basic instructions and frozen pizza, and headed out the door. And despite the many interventions used to get this baby out, I loved it. It definitely wasn't an ideal birth, but I loved that I got called when I least expected it, and stayed up all night when I wasn't planning on it, and witnessed the absolute miracle of a child being born on a Monday morning when I otherwise would have been sleeping.
When people ask me why I am a doula, or why I love birth so much, I usually say something like, "I just love to push my body--it's such an empowering accomplishment!" or "I love trusting that my body can do what it was created to do!" But last night I was lying in bed thinking about it, and I realized that the real reason I love birth so much is because you can't control it. Unlike almost everything else in this on-demand culture, labor and birth cannot be manipulated to happen when and how we want it to. Not that people don't try, but when they do, a less-than-ideal outcome usually results.
Labor connects us with our bodies in a very unusual way. It just happens, and it doesn't stop until the baby is born! It takes a great deal of determination, focus, and self-discipline to come to grips with this fact, to turn inward, and let your body do what it was made to do. No matter how little sleep you're running on. No matter what time of day or night. No matter if you had plans to go shopping that day. Birth demands that you drop absolutely everything and come face to face with who you are in your deepest, most intimate parts.
At the birth last week, the mom said, "I wish I could just take a break from labor for a little bit, go out and grab some dinner, and then come back." I totally empathized with her, but the reality is that she couldn't! And that's the beauty of it.
There is a power in being powerless. In trusting that someone much greater than you has you in his hands. There is a beauty in giving up the control that we so desperately struggle to have every single day--in joyfully submitting to the power of labor and the divinely inspired design for birth. It is so empowering to be free of fear, in spite of the pain and your lack of control, and to embrace every single moment with thankfulness and trust.
And this is why I love birth so much.
