Labor hurt more than I thought it would.
Honestly, I'm not sure exactly what I expected. (Labor is famously painful! Pain is arguably its defining quality! The word labor is etymologically inextricable from the concepts of hardship and suffering!) Many women across the world experience labor -- either by choice or by circumstance -- without the benefit of pain medication, so I suppose I imagined the pain to be strong yet endurable. I fancy myself someone with at least average pain tolerance. Perhaps I envisioned my experience would be like that of so many television women: brow glistening appealingly with the sweat of effort, wincing but resolute as each contraction brings a brief but intense cramp, panting with relief and bantering with my husband during the shortening oases of time between them, until it's time to push -- and then Pop! comes the baby.
Instead, the pain annihilated me. When we arrived at the hospital around midnight, my water had already broken and I asked for an epidural immediately, but the anesthesiologist wasn't able to get to me until 3am. I spent those three hours in back labor, while GR spent the time getting increasingly freaked out watching it happen. The pain erased my inner monologue; the only thoughts I was capable of generating were OW and I CAN'T. There was no oasis of relief between contractions, only high peaks of unbearable pain followed by smaller peaks of pain that were merely agonizing. I squirmed and yelled and blubbered and flailed my arms in odd directions. I stopped responding to GR's worried questions.
Epidurals, as far as I'm concerned, may as well be magic. Within a minute or two of the insertion, the pain-fog dissipated and I became a person again. I whiled away the next few hours watching Aquaman and Toy Story on mute in the darkened room, feeling contractions as intermittent periods of uncomfortable tightening and pressure. GR (now content in the knowledge that I wasn't, in fact, dying) dozed in the chair next to me.
In most areas of life, we consider it self-evident that pain is bad -- or, rather, that while pain is an essential biological signal, the desire for pain relief is a no-brainer. (If you're able to eliminate your pain, the conventional wisdom goes, by all means do so!) The pain of labor is pretty unique in that there is a significant chunk of people who believe that there's something morally righteous about experiencing it -- that the desire for relief makes you weak, or selfish, or insufficiently committed to motherhood. In 2009, Dr. Denis Walsh (prominent British midwife; man) chided women for wanting epidurals. Speaking to a reporter about an academic article he'd penned advocating natural childbirth, he marveled: "A large number of women want to avoid pain. Some just don’t fancy the
pain [of childbirth]." Scoffing at this absurd phenomenon of a human disliking pain, he asserted, "Pain in labour is a purposeful, useful thing,
which has quite a number of benefits, such as preparing a mother for the
responsibility of nurturing a newborn baby."
Dr. Condescension here is an easy target, but as any formerly pregnant person familiar with the discourse on the topic can attest, the pressure to at least consider natural childbirth is ubiquitous. Going natural -- experiencing the full pain of labor, from soup to nuts -- is not framed as a morally neutral choice: it's desirable, honorable, better. Opting for pain relief is giving in, giving up, taking the easy way out.
Friends and family, I issue the following invitation, effective immediately: Please come to me, urgently and with all due sternness, with any causal evidence that my decision to get an epidural is interfering with my ability to lovingly care for my infant son (who is, by the way, at this moment snoozing on my chest, mouth open, hands adorably tucked under his chin). I will admit the error of my ways, schedule a lecture circuit expressing my contrition, and join Dr. Walsh in advocating the utility of laboring painfully.
Otherwise, you can find me cheerfully recommending epidurals to anyone who asks.
