Please Prepare Me

Last year in August I was introduced to a song by Beautiful Chorus called ‘Please Prepare Me’. 

It was at a gathering of parents and birth workers and one of the women shared that this is the song she listens to when she’s driving to support a birth. We sang it together and it was beautiful not least because the woman sitting next to me had the most gorgeous singing voice.

I understood immediately why anyone would want to listen to this song knowing that they were about to witness the birth of a new baby and I was reminded of all the times I took such a drive during my years as a registered midwife.  

I’ve been on call a lot!

For hospital births, for births at the freestanding midwife led unit and for births at home.

Most of my on call was for the women who birthed with our Caseload Team in Belfast. I used to get called out of my bed frequently and I remember those drives to the hospital in the middle of the night with fondness.

I can still feel myself driving.

The route was deeply ingrained into my tissue memory, I could have done it blindfolded.

Down the main road, first exit off the roundabout and onto the motorway, exit at the ‘Balls of the Falls’ (another roundabout), take the fifth exit this time and swing her right onto the hospital car park.

The statue that sits proud in the middle of my exit roundabout is really called ‘RISE’. Though it has only been there since 2011, it has become an iconic landmark on the Belfast horizon (to me at least). I love looking at those two spheres when I am sitting in traffic pondering geometry, perspective, parallax, construction, architecture, money, muscle and whatever else it may take to imagine and then build a structure like this. I’ve never bothered finding out what it meant to the person who designed it or what it is called until just now. A quick internet search revealed that the inner sphere symbolises the sun and the outer sphere the halo around the sun. The statue represents the sun rising over a new era in Belfast and Northern Ireland.

Interesting!

Who knew?

I’ve only ever known it as ‘The Balls of the Falls’ or, better still, ‘The Westicles’ (the Falls Road is in west Belfast). Just thinking about this fact makes me smile as I remember how much I loved working among the amazing community of people in our maternity unit during my caseloading years. There are many qualities amongst my former colleagues and the witty sense of humour that led to naming the statue is one of my most cherished ones. 

Often I was the only driver on the road. 

The roads in Belfast are illuminated by streetlights and neon shop lights and it is difficult to appreciate a clear night sky.

That was only possible once I had parked my car.

Though Belfast skies are often hung heavy with rain during the day, I got to see the moon and the stars surprisingly often at night walking across the dark hospital car park. 

Every single time I took this journey, the magnitude of what I was about to witness made my heart race a little faster and my nerves tingle. 

How would this new human conduct their grand entrance? 

Every time, without fail, the nerves were gone as soon as I laid eyes on the labouring mama. Once we were on the journey together there was only each moment. 

We unveiled the birth story as we went along. 

‘Please Prepare Me’ is a prayer and as I was singing it amidst the women in the circle last August  there was a moment when I wished I’d known it back in the day. 

‘Please prepare me

To be a sanctuary

Pure and holy

Tried and true

With thanksgiving

I'll be a living

Sanctuary for you’

Beautiful Chorus repeat this little mantra eight times. 

Eight times! 

I am sure that’s no coincidence.

The number eight holds significance in mathematics, religion and spirituality all across the world. It is the number of new beginnings, of eternity and one of the early numbers to appear in the Fibonacci Sequence.

And the words themselves are reverent.

They describe exactly how I want to show up in service to women, to my daughter, to my man and to my mother and father.

It is how I’ve known them to show up for me. 

You prepare me so I can be who you need me to be.

Show me what you need from me to feel safe.

I will gladly and gratefully give that to you.

I will be your living and breathing sanctuary.

To me this beautiful lyric offers us a way of being with woman. 

'What do you need in order to give birth?'

Wouldn't it be beautiful if you were asked this question at your appointments?

One of my clients recently expressed a desire to be witnessed in her power.

She wants to be witnessed in what she knows she can do, she wants her partner and doula to affirm this to her. She wants her midwives to be on board fully. She doesn't want to be doubted and she wants to lean on her team if she feels her self-belief wane.

Other people want pain relief, all of it!

Some want data.

They want perspective. 

'Could we look at it all from a different angle?' (the parallax effect again).

After having explored things from all directions, some parents choose interventions, wholeheartedly and with full conviction, others seek to avoid them at all cost!

Everyone is different and when we meet each other without judgement, pure and in service to each other, that’s when the magic happens in birth; at home or in an obstetric theatre, it doesn’t matter. 

Birth is birth and in our modern world there are many more factors at play than the mama/baby within their family context. 

We cannot know in advance which variables will determine the unfolding of a birth.

That’s the mystery of it and no amount of collecting data about each pregnancy, birth and postpartum will give us the power to make any predictions.

I strikes me that modern obstetrics is mostly dealing in estimates and yet it claims more than its fair share of authority in birth.

Estimated due date.

Estimated fetal weight.

Estimated amniotic fluid volume.

Estimating how dilated a cervix is.

Estimated blood loss.

And so on.

The ways of obstetrics are overall crude and though modern medicine is amazing for those mothers and babies who truly need it, the disadvantage of this structure is that it is so biased towards physical observations that it takes immense effort to catch glimpses of what happens on the emotional, spiritual and hormonal planes. I realise only now the extent to which I allowed my guidelines to limit me in that way.

Pregnancy, birth and postpartum are made of so much more than just the physical and on balance, I think that at this stage in history the medical model causes as much harm as it does good.

That's why we need to work on finding perspective again.

Modern obstetrics is further limited by the fact that it sees the physical as purely mechanical. The three P's are still being taught to midwives and doctors as the main drivers for birth progress. The size of the Passenger and Passage and the Power of contractions is what determines birth according to the medical model. 

This is entirely ludicrous and it explains why doctors and midwives now almost always recommend induction of labour for 'big' baby or resort to simply using synthetic oxytocin for making more and stronger contractions when birth 'stalls'.

Have you read any of Dr Sarah Buckley's work around the hormonal blueprint of birth? There's a feedback loop between the mama and the baby.

The baby can initiate a slowing of contractions in labour. Is it any wonder that one of the known side effects of using synthetic oxytocin is that babies might get distressed and need to be born by caesarean because of it? 

Babies also signal when they are ready to be born, they play a part in how labour starts (we still don't know all the processes of a spontaneous labour). What really are the effects of cutting gestations short so frequently?

There's so much we don't know.

Do you ever wonder what labour would look like if we were to honour the self regulating mechanisms between the mama and the baby in our policies and guidelines? 

I have taken to listening to ‘Please Prepare Me’ a lot before my clinics, before my zooms or before taking a call with a client. It grounds and humbles me, my interactions with my clients are richer as a result.

And then just a couple of weeks ago, during one of my pregnancy yoga classes, yet another train of thought was put in motion:

I'll admit that it happened entirely spontaneously. I had forgotten to think of a song for our guided relaxation and as I was guiding the mamas and their bumps into Shavasana (the meditation at the end of each yoga class), I opened my Spotify on my phone and started scrolling in search of a song.

'Please  Prepare Me' scrolled into the centre of my screen and there it was. A thought unfurled and expanded through my mind and body.

Your baby prepares you for giving birth.

Your baby prepares you to feed them.

Your baby prepares you to parent them.

You are your baby's sanctuary now, in pregnancy, and forevermore.

I invited the yogini in my class to explore what it would feel like to know that your baby is guiding you into birth and parenthood and has been from the moment they were conceived. 

I played them the song as they lay in relaxation.

They loved it and asked for the link to the song so that they could do this meditation at home.

'Please Prepare Me' is a mother's song to her baby and her baby's song to her, it is a midwife's song to the mother, it is a woman's song to her midwife, it's a lover's song and it is our soul's song to all of our fellow souls. 

It reminds me of the famous Ram Dass quote:

'We are all just walking each other home.'

If you don't already know it, go and have a listen. I'd love to know how you hear it!

Are you pregnant and would like to prepare for birth with me? 

Send me an email to [email protected]