Is it possible for someone to just be too tired to give birth? When a labour has gone on… and on… and on…?

To have your craziest problems affirmed as normal and your darkest worries brought into the light, shared and diminished.

What do you know about affirmations? I like to think of them as totems, held by the speaker to ward off all fear and darkness. The comforting sounds of a mantra repeated again and again…

You don’t need help to sneeze. You don’t need help to cry. You don’t need someone to watch you, or coach you to have a poo.

It is your responsibility to decide where you wish to birth.

It is your responsibility to decide who will support you in this birth.

As we all know our facial expressions reflect our emotional states. I’m happy so I smile, I’m angry so I grimace, I’m miserable so I frown.

We look around us. The sky, the sea, the stairs and the handrail.

We notice that the stairs are wooden, worn deeper in the centre and covered with a sprinkling of fine, white sand. And then we look to the hand rail.

‘For too long, women have been told that their bodies are the wrong shape and size, that they’re too hairy, too dirty, too smelly, too old, too fat and that they don’t work properly.’

While happily residing inside mum there have been dim lights, smooth surfaces and constant sound.

Your body is complex. Perfectly designed but complex. Labour is a delicate dance between both your baby’s needs and your own.

The most important thing I wish you to know though is that the placenta is owned by you.

Many women feel pride in this scar, but if it was not in the mental and emotional birth plan it can seem shocking, unsettling and can distance a woman from her body and birth experience.

But when in labour what does that actually mean? So many women I work with want something more tangible to go on. A checklist or timing. An app. Or just someone to tell them.

I am not a medical form, or a process. A risk or an inconvenience. A window in your schedule.

The idea that labour is a pass or fail situation and that the woman herself is the fault for this unnecessary mishap bakes my brain.

A doula is a non-medical support person, there solely for the mother and birth partner in the lead up to birth, during the labour & birth and postnatally.

Firstly, don’t fear change. It is what it is. Don’t feel that you need to jump into action the minute you hear of any alterations to your birth hopes. Just take the information and sit with it for a while.

Well, is that actually a problem? In short the answer to that is no. Your birth space can still be very much as you would like it to be.

It was a seismic shift in family roles. The pecking order reassembled.⠀And my heart just grew and grew to accommodate them all.⠀