What’s in your birth plan? Is there a cake involved?

Being an Independent Midwife has allowed me to care for a small caseload and in that way I can get to know each woman really well and more importantly they get to know me.

Very often these women have had previous traumatic births and want it to be different this time, they want to gain control. They start by choosing me as their midwife, who will be with them throughout and together we spend endless hours preparing for the birth.

Why a cake? well this was part of one woman’s birth plan, she was going to bake a cake as her birth project.

So many of my clients carry deep seated fear and traumatic memories about their previous births and on top of this they have been labelled a “failure” ie. failure to progress and “I failed to breast feed”, it takes a lot of patience to create a feeling of positivity in these women.

Baking a cake had never came up in any previous birth plan I had read and yet it made perfect sense for this woman as a distraction from the intensity of her uterus working hard. Being in her kitchen she was in a familiar place where she was in charge and it kept her up right.

Prior to the birth as a way to counter the traumatic affects her previous birth had on her, together with her husband I worked intensively to counter all the negativity she had. We did pregnancy relaxation, positive affirmations, birth art, rebozzo and lymphatic drainage massage. It was during one of our planning meetings that the idea of cooking came up and boy it was a fabulous success! There was one point when she had popped the cake in the oven and then leapt into the birth pool I realised I was now responsible for not burning the cake as well as the birth!

This woman emerged from her birth a triumphant Mother. She was healed from her previous trauma and felt restored and empowered and as you can see in the photo the cake was a complete success!