Tips For Easy Labour For the First-time Mother
The first and most important tip for easy labour is company. At a time of such physical and mental duress, having a loved one beside you is going to make all the difference in the world. Make arrangements beforehand so that even if someone is held up in traffic, you won’t be left dangling.
Practice Means Perfect
Of course, there are also the labour pains to think of – perhaps almost on a daily basis by now, after having learnt everything you have from books, friends, and the Internet. You might have learnt breathing exercises and found them so impossibly easy as to border on a fraud, but beware of “stage fright.” Practise constantly, because sometimes losing your rhythm is all it takes for a smooth delivery to become arduous.
The whole labour process should be as familiar to you as the back of your hand by now, even though very few of us could pick our hands out of a line-up. There will always be an element of surprise even for the most experienced of midwives and obstetricians, but for you it will be a completely novel concept. When you’re in pain, you tend to forget most of the things you’ve skimmed through in a book seven months ago, so pick it up and ensure that you know most of the potential outcomes in a pregnancy.
There have been cases of difficult labour processes where the doctor had to explain what a Caesarean really entails in the space of fifteen seconds. This is not ideal but it is completely preventable. A tip for easy labour is doing your homework, even if everything seems self-explanatory by now.
Remember, while labour pains can be a very difficult thing to overcome, it really depends on the individual woman’s physiology. Some women take yoga classes and are still stuck in the delivery room for day and night, whereas others, for want of a better phrase, pass through the baby in less time than it takes to perform an appendectomy. Preparation is the one tip for easy labour, and everything else is smokes and mirrors.