Why Birth First Aid?
The First Time I Ever Resuscitated a Baby on my own I remember the first time I had to resuscitate a baby on my own. It had been a fairly average first labour. It started in the middle of the night and trotted along into the new day. The mother was surprised at the intensity of the surges but she rode them quietly and stoically. The emergence of the baby was slow and as her mother crouched, she was born gently onto the floor onto a soft pile of towels. Some mothers scoop their babies up immediately, while others take their time, looking, smelling, and touching. Still, others need to take their time, first processing the enormity of the event before being able to look and engage. As long as the space is warm and the mother and baby are left undisturbed all are variations of normal. In this case, the mother was slow to interact with her baby, I believe she was initially taken aback at the sight of her newborn. It became evident that this baby was not responding after being born, not showing much muscle tone and not breathing. Helping Babies Breathe I had recently been trained in the Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) programme as a facilitator through Operation Smile and worked as a volunteer for some of their educational missions in Africa. What I love about this programme is its simplicity: its focus on normal birth, preparedness, its understanding for working in low-resourced and out-of-hospital settings, as well as the all important MotherBaby needs like skin-to-skin and not cutting the umbilical cord. As a skilled birth attendant, you make a difference In the HBB programme, we are taught that the majority of babies are totally fine at birth and require little more than skin-to-skin contact with their mother – but that around 10% require gentle assistance in transitioning from womb life. These are some of the skills we will be focusing on in the upcoming Birth First Aid series of workshops that I will be offering for the month of November. Extreme neonatal resuscitation is rare in healthy pregnancies and births and usually is an indicator of some other underlying issue. Why Birth First Aid? If we are attending births on a regular basis, especially when a birth is left to unfold as it should, we come into contact with the beauty and simplicity that is birth and we receive the regular imprint that birth works and that birth is safe. But every once in a while, nature throws us a curve ball, and in the same way as we expect someone who works with children to be prepared if a child chokes, we want to be prepared for those rare times when a mother or baby does require assistance. In the case of the birth I was describing at the beginning of this post/letter – it felt clear that this baby was struggling. Muscle memory from my HBB training kicked in, and with her cord still attached and intact, between her mother’s legs on the floor, we worked together to gently remind her that she needed to breathe. And she did… I invite you to join us We will be gathering weekly for the month of November on these dates: 2, 9, 16, and 23 November 2022 via zoom from 11am – 2pm SAST (GMT+2) COST: 130 Euro / 130 USD / 1250 ZAR All sessions will be recorded and made available to you for one month after the call For more information or to book your place please email me at truemidwife@gmail.com What we will cover over...
Read MoreCome and Join me for a Doula Course with Michel Odent and Liliana Lammers
Michel Odent & Liliana LammersONLINE 28, 29, 30th of October 2022 “Birth is an involuntary process and an involuntary process cannot be helped. The point is not to disturb it”– Michel Odent Twelve years ago or so when I was a student midwife, I was invited to attend the birth of my sister-in-law in Edinburgh. At the time I was in my second year of doing apprenticeship-based midwifery training and working as a doula, having done a local South African doula course. At this stage, I was feeling disheartened about birth work. The coach-orientated approach in both the doula and home birth midwife modalities that I was witnessing left me questioning my calling and instincts. Although there was talk of trusting birth, there was a deeply ingrained belief that birth could not happen without the assistance/coaching/help of others. Around this time I was also rediscovering the books of Michel Odent and I felt the contradiction between what he was describing in his books as well as what I felt intuitively, and what I was seeing and being encouraged to do as a doula and student midwife. I decided to look online to see if Michel had written anything about doulas. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that he held doula courses in London along with a doula called Liliana Lammers and that one was being held a few days before I was due in Edinburgh! So with some minor adjustments to my travel plans, I found myself in a circle of women and Michel, sharing 3 days of intensive sharing and learning. This course would change the direction of my birth-keeping journey from then on onwards. I remember sitting and listening to Michel and Liliana share their wisdom, science, and stories and feeling a lightbulb of excitement and illumination lighting up inside me, an irrepressible bubble of joy at ‘finding my tribe’ as I tried to scribble down each moment in the hope of capturing the valuable information and beautiful stories, whilst still capturing the essence. The Original Inspiration for my Book From this experience, the little book, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour was also born – an attempt at capturing the essence of what I had learned from these two wonderful guardians of birth. I have been blessed to teach and present alongside Michel over the years but I have not seen Liliana since we were all together all those years ago. We have kept in touch – I have reached out to this incredible mentor over the years when I have needed to feel reinspired or not feel so alone in this way of approaching birth. I have had every intention of returning to one of their courses, to fill my cup as they say, but have never made it back to London. A Unique Event and Opportunity So I am especially pleased that the Paramana doula courses are now happening online and I am excited to be joining the next one as a participant from 28 – 30 October 2022. A Special Discount if you book through True Midwifery This event is organised by Sarah Bertin of Doula Douce and she is offering a 50 Euro discount to those booking through True Midwifery. You can redeem your discount using this unique discount code: TrueMidwifery50 when booking your ticket through this link Free Book Promotion We are also offering a free book promotion of my book, The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour to those who book for the course between today and Monday (13-17 October 2022) I personally feel this is a...
Read MoreTwenty-One Years a Mother…
I was twenty-one when I first became a mother and that was twenty-one years ago today. I look back on that day…and I look back on the last twenty-one years and I am grateful. I am grateful for this path of Motherhood that in many ways was hoisted upon me but which, in the end, has cracked my heart open and taught me to love in ways I did not know were possible. Today is San’s 21st birthday but we also bid farewell to him this week as he spreads his wings to fly off to Dubai for work. This is a whole new stretching of the Mother heart and as hard as it is to have him move so far from home, I am grateful for the opportunity to further embrace what it means to love. And today I very simply honour this very precious birth day. I honour the young woman who became a mother today 21 years ago. I honour the little boy who has grown into a beautiful and gentle young man today. And I honour myself today, with the greyer hair, the love I have loved, the expanded heart, the tears that have come with that and the extra laugh lines on my face. Happy birth day ?? My Mother Was The First One To Touch My Baby I Was 21 When I Realised I Had A...
Read MoreHonouring my Mother on this day of her Birth
My mother is an obvious connector to birth for me – she birthed me after all. But the imprint my mother left me with around birth runs deeper than that. And today, 69 years since she was born at home in Athlone, and 12 years since she died in a car accident, I would like to honour her and the deep lessons of birth she imprinted in me. My mothers’ own birth story sounds like something from a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. She was born at home in Athlone, on a hot windy Cape Town day, the second child to my grandparents. While my grandmother sweated and grunted and birthed the large round baby that was my mother, across the street, a house burnt to the ground, consuming not only the entire house but a woman inside it too. Birth and death in the same street on the same day. Because she was born so close to Christmas, she was named Carol. A huge relief to my mother when she found out that that the alternative had been Julie. The Little Green Statue my mother clutched while she birthed me After generations of birthing their babies at home, my mother was the first in our maternal lineage to birth in a hospital. She wanted to birth at home but she was far from home, a single pregnant woman living in a communal house in Switzerland. She wanted to birth at the communal house but the man whose house it was, stamped his feet and proclaimed that under no circumstances would that African girl squat down and birth in his house. She was too far from the alternative midwife run birth centre she felt would be a good alternative and so some friends chipped in to pay for the nearby and very exclusive Stefanshorn hospital where my mother was induced a week before my/her due date. She was left to labour on her own, on her back with a fetal monitor strapped to her. She held onto the little verdite statue, a bust of an African woman she had been gifted back in South Africa by a grateful woman when she was a rape counsellor. This little statue was her doula, her birth companion, her connector, back to South Africa, as she birthed me far away from home. My sister’s birth 3 years later, was a planned home birth in Bern, the birthing pool set up in the lounge. but my sister decided to trigger her labour early and emerged on Easter Sunday while the midwife was away on holiday. So we drove with my mother’s friend to the hospital and I remember sitting on my haunches, colouring in at a low table, while my mother laboured and birthed in the next room. I was expecting a little brother called Michael. I had been singing to him for months and was surprised when I was introduced to a little sister called Kate. Six years later, we were living back in South Africa, this time on a farm an hour outside of Ceres and we had to do the long three-hour drive to Mowbray Maternity hospital so that my mother could birth my little sister Gypsy. For my sister Jasmin’s birth, I was at school. It was 1991 and what had once been the ‘whites-only’ part of the local Ceres hospital, had recently been opened for all South Africans to use. Jasmin’s claim to fame is being the first coloured child born in that section of the hospital. My mother said she slipped out like a bar of soap. Living rurally,...
Read MoreWhen you sit with a woman in labour, allow yourself to become soft…
Notice yourself. Your own breathing. Allow it to become deep. Allow it to become soft. When you sit with a woman in labour notice yourself. Your body. Your breathing. Sit quietly in a corner. Or lie down. Avert your gaze. Droop your head as though in prayer. Close your eyes as though in meditation or sleep. Or make your eyes soft soft soft and look at nothing on the ground. Allow your breath to become deep and expansive; fill your lungs, your rib cage, your entire being. Allow your breath to become deep and expansive like the waves of the ocean. In and out. In and out. Become so huge that your arms embrace the room, the world, the universe. Hold the woman in labour in an unseen embrace. Become so huge and expansive that you disappear into nothingness. Stay with your breath. Your softness. And the soft sighs and moans of the woman in...
Read MoreI was 21 When I Realised I had a Superpower…
I remember a surge piercing through me. I was a lion, crouched at the top of a cliff, impaled with spears, roaring, in immense pain. But also in that moment, the most incredible strength coursed through me. I arched my back and roared. I felt my body opening up. Immeasurable pain. Immeasurable ecstasy. Unbelievable strength. And exultation. Two weeks before my estimated due date, the first surges tickled me awake by urging my bowels to empty themselves. I was 21 and labouring for the first time. I was naive and innocent going into my first labour. I had no clue what to expect and Mistress Labour slapped me in the face. I had to quickly put my big girl panties on. The first few hours of early labour, gentle surges swaying my hips as I breathed them down, I thought, “I’ve got this…this is easy…you just breathe through them.” Yeah right…. When that first active surge slammed into my cervix I thought: “FUUUUCK!” I felt like a cowboy who’d lost control of his horse. But somehow I was able to grab the reins and somehow with each surge, I stayed atop that bucking bronco called labour. Yeeha! And after 12 hours I pushed out a 5kg baby boy. Giving birth to my first child, and birthing myself as a mother, changed and saved my life. I was 21 when I realised how strong I was. I was 21 when I held my warm and slippery baby against my chest for the first time and I realised how much love I had to give. The seeds of love strength had always been in me but it was being given the space and time to navigate my way that watered those seeds and allowed them to sprout into the woman, mother and midwife I am today. And for that, I am truly grateful. And those seeds continue to grow… I look forward to being a gnarled old tree one day. To protect the seedlings still to...
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