The pauses in labor can be hard to appreciate. After all the waiting for labor to start, the months of anticipation, the anxious texts from loved ones, it’s finally happening, and then… it’s not. 

The art of midwifery is knowing - or guessing - when to resist the troughs of a long labor with the tools in our midwife bag (herbs, breast pump, dance music, lunges, stairs - and yes, pitocin) and knowing when to surrender. To turn off the lights and draw the curtains, arrange the pillow fortress, and allow the body to float among the lapping waves of contractions, languid as they may be. 

Labor can be a marathon, and the turtle can win the race. Trying to rush it can push someone over the edge into true exhaustion. At other times a slowdown represents a normal developmental phase of birth. 

Often people experience a natural pause between the first stage of labor (dilation of the cervix) and the second (pushing). Midwives call it the “rest and be thankful” phase. The intensity of transition has come and gone and the reflexive urge to push hasn’t kicked in yet. The contractions space out and lighten. The birthing person, and their support team, can easily feel anxiety - what is happening? 

Nothing is happening and everything is happening: the cervix is open, the baby is perhaps rotating and preparing for the final descent, the uterus is gathering its reserves for the energy required to push. On the outside it doesn’t look like much. But after a while, the moans transition into grunts, and the grunts produce a head, millimeter by millimeter, or in the singular whoosh of a baby barreling into the world. 

Of course, there are times to step in, times when the clock is ticking and it’s necessary to get that labor rocking and rolling. But just as often it’s our work to give ourselves, as Ellen Bass says, to the stillness.

Respite

by Ellen Bass

And then this morning, on the seventh day of crying,
a calm came over me like the one I remember.

I’d been laboring all night
and into the next afternoon, the white
room filled with doctor, midwife,
photographer, friends. Someone
suggested they all leave us alone.
I lay with my head in my husband’s lap,
and in that quiet, contractions ceased,
pain stopped. A stillness
came over the enclosed world
like the cool emptiness coiled in a basket
of sweetgrass. Like the air
inside a bell. I couldn’t stand it.
I thought I should get going again,
get back to my work.

Many times since, I’ve wished
I’d lain there longer:
a kind of Eden, a bestowed peace.
But today, when the respite came,
I didn’t move. I lay limp as a lizard
on a lizard-colored rock, spent.
I didn’t question it, this hush.
I felt my breath enter
and leave. The small wind of it
in the mesh sacs of my lungs —
like that too brief gap in labor
that I couldn’t give myself to
then, hellbent, ignorant as I was.