What is Labor Like?

I have been obsessed with birth, birthing, pregnancy & babies since as far back as I can remember. One of the first questions I had as a kid was, what does Labor feel like? Why do all these women complain so much? It can’t be *that* bad…they’ve lived through it, so the pain isn’t enough to kill them…so whats the big deal?

I’ll tell you what the big deal is. Those thoughts came from an inexperienced, very naive teenager. My labor experience is two births within a hospital with epidurals for pain management, one midwife-attended home birth with zero drugs and zero interventions and one midwife-attended hospital birth with no drugs for pain management and no interventions.

To summarize, two labors with no pain, two labors with more pain than I would wish on my worst enemy.

So what is Labor like?

I don’t know how to describe it. But I’ll do my best!

If your a first timer, I’m sorry, you might not want to read on. Labor starts off like a walk in a beautiful sunshiny park. You are comfortable, chatty…just kind of annoyed every 10 minutes. Think of it as needing to stop and take a breath every 1o minutes.

**COMMERCIAL BREAK – You know what labor brings you? A little person who likes to shove their fingers into their own poo in a pull up, while touching everything with their grubby, poopy finers. Thats what you get after all that damn hard work! END OF COMMERCIAL** Now back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

Ok. So your on your walk in the park. Soon, your picking up the pace and your stopping for a breather every 5 min, instead of 10 min. That breather now turns into something you have to focus on. Suddenly, a friend from years ago spots you and walks to chat it up. Its the last thing you want to do, so you start sprinting and they start chasing you…now, not only are you sprinting, but you need to stop every 1-2 min to catch your breath and try with all your might, not to kill your friend thats chasing you. Your legs hurts, your stomach hurts, your pretty sure that parts of you considered highly valuable are on fire…and your not catching a decent break. You sprint for a minute, then you breathe for a minute. The cycle continues until you can no longer think, your ability to function completely halts and the *only* thing going through your mind is either: GIVE ME ALL THE DAMN DRUGS YOU CAN FIND IN THIS ENTIRE HOSPITAL or….I AM NEVER DOING THIS SH*T AGAIN. 

The amount of pain the body can withstand without succumbing to death is far beyond what I imagined any human could tolerate. Now, your walk in the park is close to ending. Soon, you see the end of your journey…you can almost touch it….and VOILA! BABY! Your beautiful (or surrogate) baby has arrived and everything you just went through – homicidal thoughts, pain beyond what any human should experience, potentially breaking your partners hand bones…everything – is forgotten. Not joking. It becomes an instant distant memory and the gorgeous eyes staring back, change you. Your life gladly given for theirs, your heart expands with love every time it beats, that little innocent soul in your arms is yours. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, on Earth that compares to the reward waiting for you at the end of your labor journey.

What is labor like? Its like walking (or running) through hell, on a lake of burning charcoals for an undetermined amount of time. Hours or minutes. Sometimes, even days. It sucks.

I’ll be doing it again this March. And hopefully in 2019 for a set of intended parents. I’ll keep doing it as long as I can. Why? Because its worth it. 

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