allonan

I realised early on that I would have to be OK with peeing myself. It seemed counter-productive to labour towards opening up more and more and more with each contraction, and during this maintain an exception for bladder control. I would have to let go of that as well. (I had come across no explicit discussion of bladder control during labour anywhere in the literature and clearly this wasn’t the time to look it up, although in retrospect a birth story from Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth comes to mind, where a woman mentioned that the toilet was where she felt most comfortable. Perhaps she was troubled by the same contradiction while relaxing her pelvic floor. In any case, labouring in the loo was out of the question. I needed to keep moving.) This also meant that I wouldn’t be able to rest much on the bed: wetting the bed was an inhibition I didn't care to break, plus lying down during contractions seemed to make them shockingly longer and stronger.