It’s been a loooooooooong pregnancy. Your brain is exhausted. Your body doesn’t feel like it’s yours anymore. You just want to be done with the stretching and the weight gain and the hormones and the uncomfortable nights and the sleeplessness and the swelling and the restlessness and the peeing every 15 minutes and not seeing your feet anymore. You’re ready for this chapter to end and the next to begin. So that first time you realize the pressure you’re feeling isn’t actually constant, but it’s rhythmic and it’s timeable, and are contractions, you’re ready!
How long does it take to get from 0-10cm? Remember the sitcom where they had a baby? Or that movie? It took like 5 minutes from that first painful contraction for the dad to locate the suitcase and get it packed, though he almost left without her. Oh, and they got pulled over, but the cop escorted them to the hospital, and the mom was pushing by the time they got the wheelchair to the car. Her water broke at some point during that labor. Was it before that first contraction or during? She pushed that baby out in less than an hour, right?
Except that’s not how it works.
Oftentimes you’ll feel that pressure or those crampy feelings like you’re having to use the bathroom for a while before you realize that it’s contractions you’re feeling. More likely than not, labor is going to slow down and maybe stop before it picks back up again. Quite possibly this will happen multiple times before you finally go into labor. It may not feel like it, but it’s actually a good thing! You see, there’s a lot of physical changes that have to happen to your uterus, your cervix, and your vagina in order for birth to happen. The uterus has to tighten up, shrinking your cervix from 4-6cm down to zero. Your cervix also has to soften and thin out.
These are things we don’t see in the movies. We don’t see the visits to the care provider where the mama sits at 1-2cm dilated for weeks and feels like nothing is changing. Where prodromal labor (when contractions start, they get more intense, closer together, develop a pattern, then slowly peter out) lasts weeks, where every day at a certain time they start and then fizzle out and leaves both partners exhausted from the hopefulness and the let down.
Labor isn’t linear. If it were, we would be in a lot more pain for a lot longer time. A lot more work would have to be done all at once, and our bodies would likely be screaming from exhaustion even before the pushing phase started. Trust in your body to do this work in the timeframe needed. In fact, most labors for first time moms last roughly 12 hrs from active labor (generally meaning you’re dilated to 6cm, the contractions are 5 min apart and lasting a min or more) until the birth of the baby. Sometimes labors are shorter, and sometimes they’re longer. With inductions, it could be much longer from the time they start the process, or, if your body is already ready to birth, it could be a much faster transition from one phase to the next.
Labor is one of those things that we can’t definitively label the stages and phases until it’s over and we can look back on it and say with more certainty where you were in the process of birth. But we do know that you won’t be pregnant forever. Your baby will be born. Trust in your body and your ability to birth your baby. Listen to your intuition and surround yourself with people who trust in you and your baby.
DoulaWise 