THE GODDESS MYTH
Giving birth to her first child at home without medication was a foregone conclusion for Margaret Nichols. Pain would yield to will, and that would be that. Throughout her pregnancy, the 40-year-old New York City meditation teacher pored over the natural-birth canon, books like Ina May Gaskin’s Spiritual Midwifery and Bountiful, Beautiful, Blissful by Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa. She became active in an international Facebook group dedicated to home and water births, stockpiling mindfulness tips to help her override the physical agonies of labor. She rented an inflatable blue birthing tub made of phthalate-free vinyl. Practically all her friends had given birth at home, and they assured her that the 118 gallons of water, warmed to roughly her body temperature, would function as “nature’s epidural.”
When Nichols went into labor last November, she felt elated, primed and cozy. She was surrounded by a midwife, a doula and her partner Jeff Hubbard. But 30 hours later she was in pain beyond imagination, howling what she later called desperate “animal-kingdom noises” as she hurtled in her midwife’s car toward a local hospital. There, she eagerly accepted anesthesia, took a brief nap and gave birth to a healthy son she named Bo.
Back home, Nichols commenced the course of exclusive breastfeeding that is prescribed to pretty much every new mother in America. She had hoped to nurse for two years. But after 5 months she developed lactation issues, which were exacerbated by a previously undiagnosed thyroid problem. She would have to supplement with donor milk and formula. Feeling like she hadn’t “succeeded” and that her story wasn’t “worthy,” she went dark on Facebook.
The beginning of motherhood for Nichols was thus tainted by disappointment. Seven months later, she describes a kind of “mourning” that her biology wouldn’t submit to her ideals. “I prepared so much for the birth, but the one thing that’s not talked about as much is how much support we need, and how vulnerable we are afterward,” she says.
You could argue that Nichols set herself up, that nobody should
