Читать книгу Stand and Deliver!: And other Brilliant Ways to Give Birth - Emma Mahony - Страница 21

… all that you need to get you through labour. Believe it or not, there is an extraordinary correlation between a relaxed mouth and a ripe cervix. Not that extraordinary when you consider that a good kissing session probably preceded your current state of falling pregnant in the first place. Ina May Gaskin encouraged the women she attended to practise ‘horse lips’, or blowing raspberries, after discovering a direct link between a relaxed mouth and lips and, well, the labia, or other set of lips we girls have. During one birth on The Farm, a four-year-old girl stood beside her labouring mother demonstrating how to blow better raspberries between contractions. The mother copied her, laughing, and shortly afterwards a new sibling arrived.

Also effective on the lip front is French kissing your partner (now imagine how that would go down with the starchy midwives on an NHS labour ward). In Spiritual Midwifery, a Farm resident called Marilyn, who had already had two children, describes her home birth:

Rather quickly, those monumental tidal waves of energy which women on The Farm called ‘rushes’ [contractions] came upon me for the third time. Had I discussed this with Gerald beforehand? I don’t remember. He was reclining next to me, and at the start of a heavy contraction, I found his mouth and we French kissed. Whew! Here comes another! We kissed again, from the start to the finish of the contraction. My mouth must have been opened cavernously wide, because later Gerald told me I nearly sucked the denture out of his teeth. I’m glad he chose to tell me this later. I didn’t need anything inhibiting me while I was testing the midwives’ adage: ‘It’s that loving, sexy vibe that puts the baby in there in the first place, and the same loving, sexy vibe will get the baby out.’ And it did. I didn’t tear with Annie, who weighed six pounds.

The lips manoeuvre is not something you even need to wait until the birth to try. If you have been with your partner for so long that you often forget to include kissing in your lovemaking any more, try out Marilyn’s denture-sucking French kiss with a view to what’s happening down below at the same time.