Send Jesus an Invite to Birth

Ten out of ten recommend inviting Jesus to your birth. I have to admit that I did have an unmedicated birth that worked as God designed my first time birthing but I didn’t intentionally invite God to that birth. He’s always welcome obviously but I wasn’t intentional about letting Him know I wanted him all up in it. Nonetheless, he was there and was showing me how I was made. He showed me I was going to share His truth about birth to whoever possible until the day He calls me home.

Before I had my first child, I wasn’t a doula. I actually didn’t even intend to become pregnant. We were blessed with this beautiful surprise my first year of marriage.

At the time, I was an intense planner and something as unplanned as a child should have turned my world upside down but something was telling me it was going to be okay. I did however do my due diligence to start investigating… I asked every mom I met about their birth experience and did an internal experiment for moms who were unmedicated, medicated, and moms who did both. Can you tell I have a degree in science? Nerd alert!

Never failed. Every mother I talked to was satisfied with her unmedicated birth and talked of it with joy. Every mother who did both preferred the unmedicated birth by far. Medicated moms told stories that were just flat out terrifying to me. The mother’s talking about their medicated birth seemed to be quite traumatized by their experience. Traumatized by either the medicine’s side effects or complication that happened to them or their baby. They also seemed to have had a lot more complications in than the moms who were unmedicated. Unmedicated Moms seemed like birth was an enlightening and positive experience.

Naturally, I tried to rationalize the information I was given. Did these unmedicated mothers just have super easy Peezy births? Or did the medication make the births of the medicated mothers complicated?

At the time, my belief system encouraged me to not hop online to do some research. I didn’t want to fit in the box of someone trying to be “Dr Google”. Like many, I believed my doctors knew everything and they had some sort of special system of info us commoners couldn’t get access to. On top of that, I believed that even if I could, I wasn’t on the level of intelligence to interpret data like a doctor was. Even though I wrote research papers in my undergrad and interpreted data to write them without issue. Don’t ask me to make sense of it guys. I literally can’t. But I digress.

I chatted with my OBGYN about wanting to have an unmedicated birth and asked for more information. I basically got a political answer that seemed to go above and beyond to tell me he supports natural childbirth but no actual resources to do so.

I went home and talked to my mom about natural childbirth. My mom really pushed for me to go unmedicated. She had horror stories about her epidurals and told me her mother begged her not to get them. She said my grandmother told her “You don’t want the drip either! It complicates things, the epidural slows birth too. Don’t do it.” The drip meaning “pitocin” LOL. And then my mom told me that I should really take a Lamaze class. She said it would be really helpful in educating me since she didn’t really know how to.

Where I live, we have a Facebook page called Northshore Birth Options. I have no clue how I came upon it but that’s where I found my Lamaze class. A lot of people shared different options for classes in the area and a doula even called me to offer her services. Like most first time moms, who know nothing about birth, I told my husband that the doula was too expensive and not necessary. YUP! I said that. I cringe when I think about it.

My cheap butt, who had spent thousands of dollars on how stunning I looked for my wedding events and wedding, didn’t want to put out any money to prepare me for birth. So we took the free Lamaze class that our local hospital taught. Which I have to say, from what I can remember, was not that bad.

I learned so much about birth that reduced fear. I know some of it was a bit outdated, but at the time it was enough to make me feel comfortable that this process was something that I was designed for. I wasn’t totally convinced I was designed for it, but it had helped for sure.

The part that sticks out most to me, at that time, is that we learned the root of where the Lamaze technique came from. I haven’t fact checked this, but we were told that there was a convent that used to take in expectant mothers in history, when being pregnant out of wedlock was unaccepted by society.

Nuns would keep the mothers there until after they had the baby. They would help coach them through natural childbirth with the Lamaze technique and then care for them through postpartum. The mothers had reported being satisfied with their births and said that they did not suffer. They claimed that the technique either reduced pain or eliminated it!

So I began telling people that I was going to try and go natural, but because I had never experienced childbirth… We would see what happened. To be completely honest… I genuinely did not think that I would have an unmedicated birth. I was just hoping for one.

I’m going to get into what I think God means by women submit to your husband and men serve women like Jesus serve the church. I feel it was revealed to me in birth and I pray everyday my spouse and I can figure out how to do it in real life. In birth, we did and it’s was a fool proof system.

The night of my first birth, I went to the hospital, and I just kind of let go and let my body do its thing. Most importantly, my husband was super calm. He remembered every single bit of the Lamaze technique, and I let him guide me through it. I followed his lead and trusted him completely. But one thing was for sure… It wasn’t easy.

It was, what I would call… Intense. But something in me never really questioned that I couldn’t do it. Until… My mother walked in and said “You know, baby, you can always get the epidural.” Yeah, I know. Plot twist. Mom turned on me and changed her mind completely. All of her encouragement went down the toilet when she saw her baby working really hard and doing something really challenging.

I did what I have seen every single one of my clients do in birth. I looked to the person who knew me the most intimately in that room. I began to doubt myself and wonder if I could do it. I needed someone who knew me on a different level to tell me if I looked ok doing this. Instinctively, I looked to my husband and he looked at me before turning to mom and said without doubt “She can do it.” That one sentence was all I needed to go forward. All I needed was his validation that I looked like I was genuinely doing this without losing my mind.

He continued  the Lamaze technique and I’m being really straight up with you guys. It worked. We did a tango back-and-forth of him guiding me through the method and me telling him other coping mechanisms that were also helping. We did a dance of communication and maintained that the whole labor. Not all of it was pain free but it was nothing I couldn’t manage. Not only did I not suffer but the experience was romantic, intimate, and euphoric.

Sure, birth was a super physical process, but I found my body did it kind of regardless and the main thing was maintaining a calm positive mental state to move forward. Maintaining peace so that my husband and I could work together to figure out what the next comfort measure was.

Anything that came in the room that was not peaceful had to leave. My mother and sisters were in the room at one point all at the same time. And while none of them were voicing their fear, you could feel the presence of it. While I was fine and safe, I appeared like a normal natural, laboring woman. And that looks… Very primary looking. Like you literally look like a gorilla.

My husband knew it wasn’t comfortable for me to labor in front of them so he asked them to step out. It was the best decision. He was really intuitively observing my needs and caught on to anything I wasn’t able to verbalize.

After our baby was born, I couldn’t believe we actually did it. And much of the experience felt very out of body. Our experience felt very supernatural. It felt like I was half in this world, and half in another realm.

Some time passed after he was born and things just clicked. There was a whole world of birth that I understood now. I had no explanation for it other than God must’ve just intrusively given me these thoughts. I was in a season of my life where I was living of this world, and not for the next. This experience in addition to my sweet new baby woke me up to Gods plan for married couples and birth.

He woke me up to the truth that our bodies WERE designed for this and they were designed to do it with the man whose ribs we came from.

God even put the answers to questions that I hadn’t even asked yet in my mind. I didn’t

even get the opportunity to ask the question “But what about the mothers whose bodies did not do this as smoothly as mine?” And “Why did I, an undeserving sinful woman, receive this blessing? Why me and not them?”

The answer: In the beginning birth was perfect. The enemy tainted birth and everything else. Even to the undeserving but God will redeem those women in this life or the next if they believe He will. While some women may be victims of the enemy’s plot, many women can still have the birth they desire. It’s possible for more women than what our deceitful culture is conveying. God still protects a trues statistic of over 90% of women. And where the enemy has impacted the others, God will turn the tribulation into joy.

In short, birth is over medicalized and we’re allowing it because we’re deceived that most of our births will end up like the smaller percentage of women who have complications. We’re also sold that we can’t have a birth without suffering from the pain of it. Also, deception. We just don’t have a community educating woman on birth and how to do it without suffering. One day I’ll make a blog post with all the stats that I found afterwards proving this. God’s promise is still GOOD.

I hadn’t read the Bible nor gone to church in like 7 years but this biblical understanding of birth had been intrusively planted in my head. I knew it was from God and biblical. It was calling me to Jesus and it felt impossible to resist. I reclaimed my faith as a Christian and I’ve been seeking Jesus ever since. Nine months after my son was born, I became a doula passionate about showing women that in MOST cases… Birth is still untouched by the enemy and can be everything you dream.

My second birth I was a bit more intentional about inviting Jesus to it and I don’t regret it one bit. A story for another blog. To be continued…