Why you should labor alone

I was about 36 hours into my first labor when my midwife sent me to my room.

She told me I needed to be alone and ask myself why I wasn’t having my baby. She said that it seemed I was expecting her and the rest of my birth team to do it for me, which they clearly couldn’t do.

I felt a little scolded, but I did as I was told.

Behind a closed door, alone in the dark with no one to look to other than myself and my God, something shifted.

In the solitude of laboring alone, I found what I needed within myself rather than looking for it outside of myself.

In psychologist-speak, we call this shifting from an external to an internal locus of control. This means that we come to accept and operate out of the reality that “I am the one who gets to affect this situation; it is not happening to me, I am happening to it.”

I’m not sure how long I was up there, but when I finally descended the stairs again, I’d found my groove, my power, and my resolve. And it wasn’t long thereafter that I was fully dilated and pushing my baby out, an endeavor that ended up taking 5 hours of effort but resulted in a 9lb 7oz baby girl born on the love seat at home.

It was a powerful formational moment for me. Since then, I’ve attended labors during which the mama needed a similar time of isolation to make a shift that enabled labor to proceed. And the lessons of that have helped shape the way that I speak with my clients about the timing of calling me to their labors.

Here’s a pro tip: Don’t be too hasty to call in your birth team. The early part of labor, and much of active labor also, is your time to “go to your room,” find your groove, connect with your inner resources, remember who The Great Midwife is, and do the work before you that no one else can do.

In other words, use the front end of your labor process as your opportunity to situate yourself squarely in the internal locus of control. This will serve you well in labor, yes, but also in your life. Because this practice of taking responsibility for how your life unfolds is, well, life-changing. And birth can be the training grounds or the boot camp to teach you that lesson [more] deeply.

Alternatively, as was the case for me in that first labor, this might happen a while into your labor. Perhaps you’ve hit a plateau or a “stall”; where it seems the labor is no longer moving forward, and physical reasons for this aren’t apparently available to account for that. This might translate into an invitation to go to your room literally or metaphorically and press in for the needed “shift” in your locus of control. Maybe there’s some surrender or some fears-release for you to do, some resolve to gain, some re-connection with your why that needs to occur. Maybe you’re being asked to move deeper into radical responsibility and autonomy. Trust it. Don’t be afraid to send yourself to your room.

You’ve got this!