Imagine labouring in the tub, submerged in nice, warm, comforting water, mellow contractions rippling through your gravid womb. You can feel your body slowly guiding the baby downwards, feel your hips gradually filling with the bulging mass of it- the forebag of the unbroken sac distending into your birth canal.
You savour the sensation of the next contraction as it wreathes your pregnant belly in pressure and pain, the most beautiful force of nature operating within you to bring forth the burgeoning new life growing nurtured inside you these many long months.
Suddenly, lost in the intensity of this particular contraction, you feel the bursting of the waters between your legs, and you can't help but it moan at the release of pressure.
Hands on your belly, you can feel it shrink beneath your fingers in slow motion. Over your emptying belly you watch as the blood and water of your womb spill out between your legs, floating like winged tendrils to dissipate into the water around you, until your own skin is submersed in the same amniotic fluid as your baby.
The tranquil release of pressure does not last a moment before the baby's head lurches forward into your pelvis to fill the space. You gasp as the head emerges from your cervix and lodges itself in your birth canal. There's a whole new flavour of sensation, a stretching, burning fullness the likes of which you could never have imagined. The sounds coming from your voice are animal and uncontrollable as you fight to process the intensity.
The baby's coming. You can feel it fighting to be born, headfirst and big.
The waters around you flow and splash again at your body as your hips roll and convulse against the pressure. Right on queue you feel the urge to push.
You spread your legs in the bloody water and let out a big PUSH. In one way it's a relief, but once you begin, you can't stop. The pressure is enormous. Gripped in the throes of childbirth you squirm and push, the head beginning to stretch you wider and wider and wider with each second.
It's beautiful, it's otherworldly, this sensation of giving birth. It's coming so fast, though- you can feel the ring of fire so intensely you desperately wish you could stop pushing, but the birth is unrelenting. Before you know it, the head has popped free, followed by the shoulders, and the rest of the body slides out with a gush.
You reach into the bloody fog in the water between your legs and retrieve the newborn, its limbs splaying reflexively, and lift it finally into your arms for the first time.
