The best preparation

The best preparations for my first birth actually started long before I got pregnant with my daughter. When I was 12 I started taking dance classes. I was a very shy and introverted child, but somehow I fell in love with dance. I had always loved music, I grew up in a home with a father who always had the radio on, and took great pride in his record collection and his vinyl player. I don’t remember dancing though. But one day I saw ballroom dancing on TV and told my mom I wanted to go to dance class, so she took me. After that I started dreaming of becoming a professional dancer. I spent hours making up my own choreography in my room, and as the years went by I took more and more classes. I started with jazz, and then tried everything my dance school had to offer, hip hop, contemporary, breakdance, afro and yoga for dancers. When it was time to choose for high school I chose to take dance. I took 8 classes a week. Every Saturday I took the bus to Stockholm to take dance classes. And I signed up for workshops in Stockholm whenever I could. I was a part of a contemporary performance of Orwell's 1984 and went on a small tour even. But I was still shy, I was still introverted. So when it came to applying to dance schools after high school I failed the auditions on the first try and I let go of becoming a professional dancer. 

But what I didn’t know then was that dancing had given me something I still carry with me today: a connection and understanding of my body. And this was the best preparation for birth. If you know and trust your body then pregnancy and birth as well as postpartum can become easier. I haven’t read any research on this, this statement is based on my own experience and my experience working with birth and postpartum. The people who have an understanding, a trust in their bodies, a good relationship to their bodies usually have a trust in their ability to birth. It removed a lot of fear - and with it a lot of tension and pain. 

Jazz Hands

Photographer Lola Akinmade

People that dance, practice yoga, run, do martial arts, etc, etc are used to pushing themselves when it gets tough, they are used to feeling the burn and doing it anyway, they are used to using their breath during movement. I think all those things are amazing life tools, and amazing for pregnancy, birth and parenthood. 

So my best tip when preparing for parenthood? Get to know your body, trust it, become friends with it, learn to understand it. Spend time in activity and in active rest. Birth is not an isolated event that happens on one specific day. Birth is a part of life’s ups and downs, the ebbs and flows, just like the surges come and go during labour. It is all connected.