Labor Pain

Here are the circumstances of my birth. My mother, who hadn't planned me and in fact was on the pill when I was conceived, didn't realize she was pregnant for four months. Her labor was excruciating, lasting 63 hours, and when the doctor tried to break her water, he found there was none. Only one in three million babies goes without amniotic fluid, but I beat the odds. This of course spelled trouble; it was feared, among other things, I would have no kidneys and would be severely deformed.

Next, I tried to come out sideways, but for some reason the obstetrician forewent a Caesarean, electing instead to spend seven hours turning me before plucking me out with forceps. The last thing the doctor told my mother before she went under anesthesia was that she should "expect a monster."

Nevertheless, there I was in Sigalit's kitchen in the Mill Basin section of Brooklyn, and I didn't like what I was hearing. "What happens to people as they approach a rebirthing session usually reflects their actual birth experience," said Sigalit, my rebirthing therapist, as she served tea. We were waiting for the others in the group session to arrive. "For instance," Sigalit goes on, "I just got a call from a woman down the street who's bringing her husband. He's still in bed and doesn't want to get up, which means as an infant he probably didn't want to leave the womb!"

I snickered, but I wasn't terribly sympathetic. I had worked out my birthing experience--so I hoped--by parking the wrong way on a one-way street and getting a ticket, and I still managed to get there 15 minutes early. "Others are probably delayed because of construction on the Belt Parkway," Sigalit said. "Maybe they got stuck in the birth canal."

An hour later, the latecomers and I were huddled in the basement. Sigalit put on a soft New Age tape, and we opened with meditation "to quiet ourselves and become fully present." Then we said our names, how we were feeling at that moment, and what we hoped to get out of the seminar. Of the 12 gathered, it turned out only five were students; the others were rebirthers (two students failed to show, stillbirths, presumably). Sigalit, I learned, is a drug and alcohol counselor who had come from Israel 13 years ago. She got interested in rebirthing to overcome fears of giving birth herself.

Continued on page 2: »