Blind and Powerless: the Condition of Labor and Life
I learned a new term yesterday: prodromal labor.
I started noticing regular if mild contractions around 12 pm. Around 3, we started prepping for labor, just after I took this picture. By 6, they had been about 6 minutes apart for hours, but they still weren’t very strong. By 9 pm, they decreased and then stopped altogether. After 9 hours of contractions, the show was over.
Apparently, this is not uncommon for third-time mothers and beyond. But it was certainly new to me.
I felt a mixture of relief and frustration: I was relieved that I would not be laboring on into the night, welcoming our baby already exhausted and sleep-deprived; but I was frustrated that we had just spent all that time timing contractions and setting up the space (we’re planning a home birth after having one accidentally last time) and, most importantly, preparing mentally and emotionally for the whirlwind that is childbirth.
All that stress and adrenaline and planning for nothing!
But there was another layer of frustration too. During those nine hours of prodromal labor (real contractions that are regular but that start and then stop, not leading to delivery), we were in a state of constant uncertainty: was this really labor? should we call the midwife? when would things pick up? should I rest or try to stay active to encourage the contractions?
And when things weren’t picking up, hour after hour, I began to feel embarrassed, like it was somehow my fault that things weren’t progressing. My husband and doula were sitting around waiting on me, not to mention all the people I had texted to say I was in labor, preparing them to help with our other kids or whatever else would come up, and there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING I COULD DO.
I couldn’t make the contractions stronger, nor could I made them stop. Nor could I tell with any even remote degree of confidence what was actually going on with my body. I felt a kind of performance anxiety, but I was only a spectator myself, waiting along with everyone else to see what my body and baby would do.
At some point, when things were still not progressing, a friend texted me some very helpful words: “Don’t try to control or even understand the process. Submit to it. Praying. And knowing that you were made for this.”
You see, the contractions weren’t particularly painful, so on the surface, there was nothing all that terrible about what was going on. But emotionally, it was miserable. The uncertainty. The lack of control. The excitement and fear and confusion and embarrassment all going round and round in my head and heart.
Until I decided to let go. As an over-thinker, trying not to understand something is about as foreign as it gets, but that’s what I had to do. I couldn’t make sense of it, and the more I tried, the worse I felt. So I stopped timing, and I stopped thinking about what I should or should not do (or at least I tried to). I tried to humble myself and just let whatever was happening happen. And an hour later, the contractions stopped.
Reflecting on the experience, it struck me how much this represents our lives all the time, if only we stop to admit it. Though we like to pretend, we are not omniscient, and we are not omnipotent. Rather, we see only the narrowest strip of reality—and that dimly—and control only the most elementary aspects of our lives.
Labor—the great mystery and miracle of the female body pushing a new life into the wide world—serves to magnify that reality. It is a profound sense of powerlessness when your body is engaged in an all-consuming effort, often quite painful, to accomplish something that you cannot even begin to control. You are helpless, and worse, you often don’t even know what’s happening. Many women feel like their bodies have been hijacked, like they cease to exist in a sense because their bodies have taken over and then, often, medical personnel are monitoring and medicating and poking and prodding that body with little to no inclusion of the actual woman in the process. Sometimes the labor can be so strong and so fast that women say they can’t catch up with the process, likening the sensation to a kind of rape.
Of course many times the process can be beautiful, peaceful even, or at least nothing like the traumatic experiences described above. But the fact remains that a woman is not in control of her labor. She is, however, in control of how she reacts.
Labor—and life—requires that we accept what is happening to us with calm humility. We are not in control. We cannot see what’s coming. All we can do is respond the best way we know how, make the best decisions we can with the limited information we have, and trust the process. Submit. Let go. And wait.
