Pink Kit Question about 'failing'

13 July 2007


I received an email from a woman who works as a doula. She has young children and has been involved with birth for a few years. She promotes The Pink Kit

Periodically she sends me comments that expectant parents give her about their Pink Kit experience. This is her most recent.

Thanks for your response.

Yes, it does need to be in bookstores and we're working on that.

Your comment is a perfect example of where individual people like yourself can help to explain a whole new outlook about birth. So, if you get comments like this or like the one before then let me know and I'll give you the PK language to help people understand.
Interesting feedback yesterday from someone who had a VBAC, she said that she felt that if she didn’t get it right with the pink kit, she had failed… who knows if that’s the VBAC stuff talking, she is very stressed out too, but that is the sort of thing we are contending with. The state of birth is already putting things in women’s heads… they just need to give it a chance.

There are so many aspects of the above comment. There's no order to the below list but important things to keep in mind.

1) Birth has become loaded with shame, blame and guilt. The above is all of those.
2) Imagine the thousands of women who feel they have 'failed' if they chose a 'natural birth' and had interventions, chose a midwife and didn't like her or had interventions, chose a doula and didn't feel she helped her and had interventions.... many, many tens of thousands of these women. Blame, shame and guilt has become the foundation for birth (By the way, that didn't exist when I had my daughter in 1970 ... it's been taught to us through the natural birth movement)
3) Women who believe their c/s was essential almost never feel they fail if they have another c/s (when using the PK)
4) women who believe their c/s was unessential are usually talking about shame, blame or guilt but it's most likely they or their baby did not 'behave' well in labour. 'Behave' is a peculiar word and if you can find a better one let me know. A baby doesn't behave well in labour when it's heart tones are high or low or there is meconium or doesn't descend or fit into the pelvis. (We can argue the meconium but if a woman chooses not to have interventions because of meconium and then there is a problem with the baby then she feels shame, blame or guilt.)

So 'behavior' is based on criteria that women don't define for their baby. The medical profession defines it. If they didn't want any definition they would birth alone without caring about those things and accept the outcome. If a woman doesn't behave well, either she acts stressed, doesn't dilate, can't push a baby out in a reasonable amount of time. Obviously I'm being short-formed here but the reason there are interventions is that 'behavior' falls outside of defined criteria.

5)The PK is not about 'outcome' or criteria for behavior of the baby ... rather it's about the skills we take into our birth, how we prepare our body, how we choose to respond to every internal message in labour... but this is hard for people to understand because birth is so infrequent in a woman's life and there are so few analogies we can use to bridge this understanding. It's about what we do at each moment based on our preparation and how to work with our baby's efforts to be born promptly. It's not about outcome at all. There are women who have had wonderful PK births with dead babies, birth defects, RHneg, personal health problems and lots of interventions. They all feel they had 'natural' births because of how well they prepared and how well they worked with labour.

If everything in our life was so loaded with an expectation of outcome failure or success we'd be fried. When we get in a car to go to a shop do we batter ourselves for every little bad driving behavior? Sure if we hit a tree or a person but normally we make lots of driving mistakes and still get to the store. Take every aspect of Life from preparing a meal to telling your son to go inside to take a bath when he wants to stay outside and play and look at it from the level of skill you have to the level of how you use your skill to the level of how you self evaluate what has just happened so you can use that as a learning experience rather than kicking yourself with shame, blame and guilt for your imperfections.

6) Learning the PK skills should give women and men confidence in their birthing body, skills to use to work with the process of labour and knowing they have done enough internal work to let their baby out more easily. Using the PK skills means you know you have worked with each labour contraction the best you can no matter how intense they become. We don't permit ourselves to start 'behaving' badly again because we know that if we behave badly then this tends to draw more intervention. And this leads again to shame, blame or guilt because ultimately we know we let ourselves whimp, whine and let go.

If we continue to work with the birth process and there are reasons that we or our baby needs medical care then we are fine about that, accept it and feel delighted we live in a country where we can get that care. We still work with our PK skills and love that we can do so along side the medical care we are receiving.

For 99% of families who have used the PK, they absolutely know within themselves whether they learned their skills, prepared their body to a level they needed to (in hindsight) and used their skills to the level they needed to (in hindsight). Most of us feel that we could have done more and should have but all of us absolutely know that without these skills our births would have been thousands and thousands of times worse. We know we weren't perfect but we know we knew how-to whereas before we just let it happen.

Sure, sometimes a woman will say things about the Pk where she feels 'it' failed but that's usually based on a belief that birth should be perfect (which has been sadly the message given by midwives and those in the natural birth movement). We have taught each other to fail as women for so many reasons and that's incredibly stupid. The PK gives all of us the opportunity to regain a set of skills to use.

If that woman's baby was in distress and she had a c/s again, would she have felt she failed? Of course not.

If that woman had a c/s again because she didn't do enough internal work and her baby got stuck on tight internal muscles then she would be silly to feel that she failed rather she should admit she didn't do the work necessary and then advocate for others to do more. We've got to get real about what we need to do for our births and we can only get real about our own body and our own baby.

The fact is we just don't put birth skills into the equation so most women and men are not preparing enough nor using their skills enough but even so most people absolutely know they did more than they would have. When we grow a skilled birthing population then people will naturally do more because being skilled will have a high value placed on it. But even with skills few births are perfect any more than few people come in first at a race or play the perfect concerto on the violin or perfectly make love, cook a perfect meal or drive a car perfectly to the store. Life is not about achieving perfect all the time or being given it. We rarely fail ourselves when we have done the best we could at the time.

Don't have a clue if I've explained that to you.

If you're out there reading this, we need desperately to grow a skilled birthing population in and around all the other messages being given. Let's put skills into the equation and then see what happens.

#12 Doula Pink Kit discussion

12 July 2007

Time flies! My last post was almost a month ago. However, it's a special time for my family. My daughter was planning her wedding (7/7/07) and my son and his fiancee came over from New Zealand to help. This was a home grown affair ... and a pirate wedding as well! I'll actually put up some posts in a few weeks.

Now I'm headed to visit some friends in the northeastern part of Arizona and there won't be internet connections. So I won't be posting much until the end of July. Then I'll try to post every day for a few weeks all the new comments we've received about people's experience with The Pink Kit Package.

It's always exciting to hear from families who have Pink Kit experiences at their births. Usually the success is so very personal and in ways other people might not regard as meaningful. But we always try to tell people that The PK works 100% of the time as long as you broaden your concept of success.

If one woman takes one inhale of breath using a PK skill she has learned while she is in intense pain and exhales that breath using her a PK skill she has learned then she knows it and will comment on the great success she had. Inside her head, she knows that without her skills she would have been overwhelmed by the pain and her breath would have reflected that stress.

This is the same for a father-to-be. Any time he can see or hear a need to immediately use one of his Pink Kit skills during labour and does, then both he and his woman will feel totally empowered at their birth and comment on it.

This empowerment IS what natural birth is about even if there are tubes coming out every hole. This empowerment IS what being in control of labour means even if a midwife just did a rough internal. This choice of using a skill that helped you cope with your experience at the moment, right then, immediately IS what makes people absolutely know that having good birthing and coaching skills is essential and should be everywhere.

Now, below is the last of the communication with Sonya.

On 20/01/2007

Hi WG

Know what your body does, on every level in the whole process. Not just on a pelvic model or on a wall chart or in a book. Know that your body makes it's own painkillers, hormone cocktail ect, it knows what it is doing. If i know all of it and I allow myself to feel my inner soft tissue, map my pelvis feel how my parts moves, I breathe in and out, it becomes a tactile, emotive physiological transforming experience I cease to look outside myself for someone to give me what I PERCIEVE I don't have. I believe that I am like any other birthing woman and I can do birth myself.

We are taught from a very young age that we are unique. No human being is alike. Okay yes this is true but what if that uniqueness is what prevents us from accepting we already have what we need because we might be different. Sounds bizarre but I remember thinking back to when I was pregnant. I actually thought that natural birth was alright for those other women but what if Im different? What is normal and okay. How would they know if I am not okay?Is there some test I can do, so they can tell me I'm like other women inside. To my suprise they couldn't tell me. I had to find it myself.

Years on after having kept a sexual preditors secret I have let go of the guilt shame and blame associated with my vagina.Only last year I reclaimed my body by doing the internal work to see if I could feel and differentuate between the muscles and how it feels to be tense and tight and the difference when I can breathe into those area. My hat goes off to B. she got to experience all that as a birthing mother how fantastic . That would be so liberating now I have experienced the difference.Almost makes me want to have baby number six. Just kidding. But It is so nice to know it now.

Thanks for the questions

Sonya:

The greatest gift about going through The Pink Kit skills IS absolutely knowing that they are truly the universal approach to childbirth that can be experienced by each of us and used.

We just need to flip a switch in our thinking about birth. Yes, there is a whole new system of birth skills now available that can be used in all births right now by all expectant families ... that women who have had babies wish they had known.

We can change birth for the positive. We have the ability to become skilled at giving birth right now.