What we can learn from natal mode

Waiting and slowing is so fucking hard, and we all need to do it more

Photo by Enrique Guzmán Egas on Unsplash

A few of the women who come to my pregnancy yoga classes are nearing the last stages of pregnancy, and I’ve been sending round the article that was sent to me at this stage: The Last Days of Pregnancy: A Place of In-Between, written by Jana Studelska.

She names this liminal place of being neither the person you once were or the person you are about to become, and the agonising discomfort of having to stay there:

“But whether we recognise it or not, these last days of pregnancy are a distinct biologic and psychological event, essential to the birth of a mother. We don’t scientifically understand the complex hormones at play that loosen both her hips and her awareness. In fact, this uncomfortable time of aching is an early form of labor in which a woman begins opening her cervix and her soul.”

I remember finding this re-framing helpful - that the awkwardness of this stage was exactly as it should be, that it didn’t need to be fixed. Similar to the pain of labour, the sensation was both a reflection and a vehicle to carry you forward into the enormity of a new state of being.

Still, what discomfort, the waiting, the retreat from life as we know it. Not really being able to do anything, go anywhere, whilst holding on for an event that’s likely to require every bit of strength within you. Long days, last days, inhabiting time differently. Attempting to prepare while knowing true preparation is impossible.

As part of the breastfeeding training I’m doing, I’ve been rewatching Youtube videos of breast crawls, the journey that all newborns are capable of making from a mother’s tummy up to latch onto the breast. God, it never gets old. I find it impossible to watch without crying and without feeling total awe at the design that made the continuation of human life possible.

Also, when I’m watching, I feel like I understand why the history of obstetrics happened - how interfering and hurrying things up felt so alluring. Watching these babies make their slow ascent, it feels really - well, slow. It’s like watching a snail crawl towards something - the urge to pick it up and just help it a little bit is strong. I cheer the babies on from the sidelines, and notice my own urge to skip closer to the end of the video, to the money shot of the baby latching on.

When a baby crawls on its mother, she’s moving towards the smell of her mother’s breasts, which have a similar scent to the amniotic fluid she’s used to in the womb. Her contact with her mother’s skin increases the oxytocin so necessary to establishing breastfeeding and also benefits her gut biome as she comes into contact with her mother’s bacteria. As she crawls, she will come into contact with her own hands: the sucking at her hands is helping her develop her suck-swallow reflex that she’ll need to perfect to feed.

It’s all perfect as it is. The process is asking us to step back and watch and trust. It’s at odds with how fast we’ve become accustomed to life being, and how much we want to feel in control, to become a player in someone else’s story.

As a postnatal doula, I get to observe from a more neutral place than I observed myself as a mother, with empathy instead of the judgement I brought to myself. When I see a mother stuck on a sofa breastfeeding, wondering if they are doing things right - both technically and in a vaguer sense of doing the best for their child, of doing enough - it’s much easier for me to sense that this is exactly as it should be. This slowness, this waiting, this lack of “productivity” (even though you’ve just produced a human are and now responsible for its health and happiness), this process that feels like being unpicked and remade as a person. It feels like a parallel universe from a project meeting or a glass of wine in the cinema or seeing a friend or that summer you took magic mushrooms in Bali. But it’s still real, it’s still the real world, arguably more real than that project meeting. Arguably more important and more real and more valuable, even if society doesn’t see it that way.

A lot later down the line from the last days of pregnancy, from being nap trapped or unable to find time to wash my hair, I am still learning things by being invited to wait, go more slowly or let go of controlling things when I spend time with my children. I still enjoy the feeling of achieving things, preferably at a decent speed, at being in control or doing things my way, but my children constantly show me that I’m wrong. They seem to be using a more intuitive, feeling brain than than the one my adult self relies on. Often they’re right about a memory or a decision, or the way they approach something produces much more interesting results than the way I did it. When I interfere I interrupt their own process of learning and development. Their detours are valuable: the roses, caterpillars and clouds they’ve showed me along the way, the stories and pictures, the best days spent with no plans, just pootling, are the proof of it. I am wrong, I stand corrected.

I should tell them that more - that they’re right, and we’re all getting it wrong.

It’s taken me years to unpick some of my own attachment to getting things done in a certain time, to learn to trust the uncomfortable process of things, to learn to let go a little bit, to question my sense of urgency, to know that what feels slow and long might be just right. Might even, with hindsight, feel fast and short. Motherhood taught me all of this. It invited me to learn it and I tried - am trying - to say yes. Time or achievements are not linear in their world and it’s good for me to encouraged - forced, sometimes - to enter this squiggly universe, to embrace the sense of staying still, of going backwards, upside down and all around.