This is a photograph (a pretty bad one; sorry) of a painting I made in the class I took this past semester, an introductory painting class through the extended education program at the California College of the Arts. This assignment was a composition combining three of our "obsessions": specifically, we were to choose a place, a feeling, and a thing that were often on our minds.
I chose ancient Egypt, intensity, and birth.
After Laurel was born I read about Heqet, one of the many ancient Egyptian goddesses of childbirth. Heqet was associated with the final stages of birth and was known as "She who hastens the birth." She took the form of a frog, a symbol the ancient Egyptians associated with fertility, birth, and rebirth. Another such symbol was the lotus flower; both frog and flower accompanied the annual flooding of the Nile, which brought new life to the desert.
You may have gathered from my other posts that the very last thing I needed was to have Laurel's birth hastened! In fact, if I had known about Heqet at the time, I might have told her to go jump in the Nile.
All joking aside, Laurel's birth was terrifyingly swift and overwhelmingly intense. Medically, moving through active labor and delivery in less than three hours is known as precipitous labor, and it only happens in 2% of births. I had my first real contraction at 1:15 a.m., and Laurel was born at 3:40 a.m. That's just two hours and 25 minutes, folks.
But since labor is painful, isn't a fast labor better, so you can just get it over with? While this might be true to a certain point, it isn't when taken to the extreme. But I think many people do believe that faster is better -- although perhaps these people haven't had a precipitous birth themselves! After the birth, in fact, I overheard my own mother describing the birth as "quick and easy." Easy? She should have known better, having witnessed the whole thing!
For many months after the birth, I was in emotional shock, half-traumatized by the experience. Sometimes I felt that I had failed, that I should have handled the birth more gracefully. I especially felt bad for being unable to bear the intensity, for being out of control. But when I was researching precipitous labor just now, I found that these feelings of shock and regret are considered side effects of precipitous labor! A bullet-pointed list of complications includes "Mother's loss of ability to cope with labor" and "Emotional stress" right alongside tearing, hemorrhage, and brain damage to the baby from the speed of its passage through the birth canal. Well, there you have it!
The articles discussing precipitous labor discuss its incredible physical pain as well as its overwhelming emotional demands. They say the laboring mother may feel like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to process one contraction before the next one hits; meanwhile the contractions ramp up swiftly, each stronger, longer, and more intense than the last, giving no time to adapt. They say that chemical pain relief (not that I had any) and natural coping measures "can be challenged by the intensity of precipitous labors."
Thank you! I wish I had read that 11 months ago. It is incredibly validating.
Still, I was very lucky. The midwife made it to my house in time to catch the baby (I'll tell you the whole birth story in a few weeks), and Laurel was born absolutely and completely healthy. And with the midwife's help, the actual delivery was slowed down; Laurel was born so gently and slowly that I had no real tearing, just a minor surface abrasion which didn't even require stitches.
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So in this painting, Heqet is an ambivalent figure. The knife she holds is intended to protect the laboring mother from evil spirits, but it doesn't look entirely benign. Energy flows from her, at first regular and even, like the current in a river, but becoming more intense and distorted, like a tremendous waterfall -- or like burning lava.
The baby's expression, on the other hand, is peaceful. It looks at Heqet with mild curiosity as it emerges from the lotus, which sprouts from a green and growing river, full of plants and fish.
The black river flows off the canvas, rushing away; the green river abides.
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What causes precipitous labor? In my case, probably a well-positioned small baby combined with mushy unresisting ligaments.
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