When I say my birth experience was close to what I visualised, I mean that quite literally. I was there, in that same place I had imagined many times before.
That morning I went out shopping to distract myself. The waves had started, but they were still small and manageable. I knew I had a long way to go, so I treated them exactly the way I had practiced: breathing through them, riding them like waves.
Each surge would rise, peak, and then fall away again. I counted my breaths, knowing that by the end of each one the intensity would soften. With every wave I imagined myself opening, and my baby moving closer to me.
It all got quite exhilarating as we headed for hospital and learned for the first time that there is absolutely no safe way to sit comfortably in the car when in labour.
When we arrived, I was already 7 cm dilated. Within an hour of entering our room, my baby was ready to be born.
I gave birth kneeling on the hospital bed with it raised almost upright so I could lean forward over it. Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah was playing from my phone. It was the same music I had used during my visualisations, and it anchored me in the moment.
I had come to the hospital prepared for every scenario that could go wrong. My partner knew exercises I had learned from studying Spinning Babies so he could advocate for them if needed. I had imagined different possibilities and how we might navigate them.
But in the end, none of those resources were needed.
What I experienced wasn't what I would describe as pain, having learned to reframe my interpretation of the sensation. It was intense — incredibly intense — but it felt more like my body was a vehicle moving through turbulence while something far greater was in the driver's seat. Just as your body heaves involuntarily when you're sick, my body was heaving through my pelvis and creating the urge to push.
I suddenly realised...
During the contraction, I wasn't pushing.
My body was.
With every contraction my baby was being pushed down and out without me consciously trying to do anything. I was upright, leaning forward, and my body was simply doing the work.
For months I had feared tearing. I believed the hardest moment of labour was still ahead of me — the infamous ring of fire.
But the hardest moment had already passed.
Transition had been the most overwhelming part, and it was almost entirely psychological. In one particularly intense wave I remember pulling my partner close and kissing him deeply — a grounding moment that anchored me through the intensity until the surge passed. In that moment I felt my body soften again, as though the connection itself had released a fresh wave of oxytocin, the hormone that drives labour forward and helps the body surrender to the process.
Once transition was behind me, I was simply riding the process.
When my baby’s head began to emerge, I remembered something I had written into my birth plan.
Between contractions I asked my midwife,
"When my baby's head is crowning, how will you prompt me that it's time to slow down?"
She told me she would let me know when we were approaching that moment and gently offered gas and air if needed. I declined as I wanted to prepare to pause.
The room stayed calm as labour continued. Between contractions my partner and the midwife quietly discussed what they could see as my baby's head gradually began to appear. Her hair was red.
When I heard that I started to cry with joy.
A couple of minutes later she said,
"Okay, we're getting close to that moment now, so feel free to wait for the next contraction."
So I did something that feels completely unnatural in labour.
I stopped pushing.
At first it felt like my baby's head moved slightly back inside, as if my body had closed a little, a little like a Kegel exercise.
And yet the pressure didn’t disappear.
The weight of my baby's head remained there, creating a slow, steady stretch against my perineum. The contraction faded while the head stayed there, resting and waiting for the next surge.
There was relief in that pause.
When the next contraction came, my baby moved a little further out. I didn't do any pushing as I let my body and gravity do the work.
The process repeated itself over several contractions.
There was a burning sensation as my body stretched. When I mentioned it, my midwife reassured me that this was completely normal.
Each pause allowed my body to adjust before the next movement forward.
Slowly, gradually, my baby’s head emerged.
And when she was finally born, she surprised everyone by arriving with her tiny hand beside her face.
For a brief moment she was lifted free, and I could finally shift from kneeling to lie back on the bed. As I leaned back and gathered my baby girl into my arms for the first time, the intensity of everything that had just happened dissolved into a quiet moment of awe. After months of imagining this moment, she was finally here — warm, alive, and perfectly real against my chest. It was the most rewarding moment of my life.
She soon began attempting to crawl her way up toward my breast, even lifting her tiny head as she searched.
It was only much later, in the calm after everything was over, that my midwife mentioned it.
There were no tears.
She asked if I had done perineal massage during pregnancy.
I had.
But I knew that wasn’t the whole reason.
The real reason was that when the most delicate moment arrived, everyone in the room understood what needed to happen.
No one rushed me.
No one urged me to push harder.
We allowed my body the time it needed to stretch.
At the moment when tearing risk is highest, pushing harder isn’t the answer. This is the moment to slow down and allow your body to open gradually.
And this is why that conversation mattered so much. Because it had already been written into my birth plan, my midwife had time to consider it before labour even began. When the moment arrived, she was ready to guide me calmly through it.
There was only one small moment where things threatened to shift.
My placenta didn’t come quickly after the birth. I had written in my birth plan that I hoped to avoid Pitocin, but I accepted it when it was offered to help my body release the placenta. I wasn’t worried about anything once my baby was in my arms — until nearly an hour had passed and the possibility of surgery was mentioned.
At the sixtieth minute I pushed one final time.
And my placenta was born.
I could relax again, knowing that nothing would take me away from the moment I had waited so long to hold.
A birth plan can help us prepare for the moments that matter most, but birth itself rarely follows a perfect script. Sometimes the most important thing a birth plan can give you is the confidence to adapt when something unexpected happens.
Even with those small adjustments, the heart of my birth remained exactly what I had hoped for — my baby girl safe in my arms, and a new found confidence in my personal capacity to face the most exhilarating transformation of my life — becoming a mother.
