Performing ‘The Good Birth’: What I learned from my first birth experience

This is who I walked into my first birth wanting to be. This is who I wanted to emerge as. These are the rules I had set for my ‘performance’ of birth.

This was the idealised version of ‘The Good Birthing Person’ I took into my first birth almost nine years ago. I was not even aware of it at the time.

I set about slowly, tenderly unpacking the subtle layers of shame and not enough-ness I experienced in the years that followed that birth. Dissecting things helped me find the seed of the subconscious expectations I had set for myself in that first birth.

Making my expectations and subconscious goals visible and explicit helped me realised just how ridiculous they were. How they weren’t at all representative of my own values.

Which opened space for me to release them. Shake them onto the floor. Let them go.

And be free.

This is who I walked into my first birth wanting to be. This is who I wanted to emerge as. These are the rules I had set for my ‘performance’ of birth.

The Good Birthing Person is Prepared and it shows.

She reaps the reward of having done all the reading, the listening, the movement, the research, the inner work, the discussions. The reward, more specifically, is that the preparation saves her entirely from encountering any hard or difficult things.

The Good Birthing Person is Endlessly Adaptable.

As things evolve in her birth, The Good Birthing Person adapts effortlessly. She is able to breathe through any scary moments without encountering any internal resistance. She is deeply invested, but not so much that she would be ruffled by change.

The Good Birthing Person is Independent.

She is able to walk through the entire transition and take it all on without scaffolding any meaningful external supports. The Good Birthing Person does it herself.

The Good Birthing Person Looks Outwards to The Experts.

Whilst she has done all the preparation, she also believes The Experts know her birth better than she does. Birth is unfamiliar terrain for her. She does not consider she could innately know how to birth her baby instinctively. She believes it's The Experts who will know how to position her body, talk her down and guide her through.

The Good Birthing Person is Quiet.

As an extension of The Good Girl, The Good Birthing Person has no need or desire to make noise. To draw attention to herself.

She's been rewarded for quiet and punished for speaking for three decades.

She has learned to swallow her voice inside herself. The Good Birthing Person is quiet.

The Good Birthing Person Feels No Pain.

It is not that she is capable of gritting and enduing the pain, or that she has altered her pain threshold. The Good Birthing Person has done the necessary work to transcend the experience of pain entirely.

The Good Birthing Person enjoys the experience of labour in real time.

We each have these internalised, idealised version of the person we want to be in birth. Of the performance we want to give. Just as we have an idealised version of who we want to be in pregnancy, postpartum and motherhood.

It didn’t end up offering an A+ performance by my own prescribed metrics. By them, I failed entirely. There wasn’t a quiet, easeful moment in that whole process - for a start!

In Part Two, I’ll cover what unfolded in that birth, the gems I learnt from not delivering on these ridiculous, internalised rigid ‘rules’, and why I’m one thousand times grateful things turned out that way.