Nunani: A gentler pregnancy

RACHEL QITSUALIK

“Oh, it’ll be fun. Don’t worry,” I told her.

She smiled back, still looking unsure. Someone in the background wisecracked about painkillers, and I frowned inwardly.

My friend was heavily pregnant — as in due any day now. She was a first-time mother, naturally nervous about it. I still remember my own terror of the experience. Sympathizing with her, I was trying to make her feel better, telling her that it wasn’t all that bad. It would be fun.

A load of crap, of course. There is a reason they call it “labour.”

It’s only magical and beautiful when you’re the father; for the mother, it means being treated like a piece of meat under white lights, the high point of the performance a blur of surreal agony. The baby is magical — not the labour.

The experience is worse for first-time mothers, the whole thing complicated by fear of the unknown. Inuit culture has always taken this into account, hence the tradition of making light of labour. In Inuktitut, other women traditionally try to put a prospective mother at ease, assuring her that labour is easy.

My pregnant friend, however, was white, and I quickly noted that white people have a different way of handling it. I noticed that the tendency among Qallunaat is to make black humour of the situation. But while it did seem to help my friend a bit to hear jokes about how painful labour would be, it also seemed to make her more nervous.

I couldn’t understand this southern way of doing things. Why make a new mother more edgy than she has to be?

Inuktitut and Qallunaatitut have always differed greatly on approaches to childbirth. For example, Inuit women traditionally gave birth in a kneeling position, allowing gravity to assist in the delivery. This is virtually forbidden in the South, presumably under the assumption that it will harm the child. But I have never heard of the Inuit way resulting in infant death — neither in reading documented accounts of early Inuit, nor in remembrance of traditional culture from when I was growing up. So I remain puzzled.

Every culture has its preferred way of doing things, so one culture has to forgive what seems eccentric in another. And there are few phenomena that human beings get so eccentric over as childbirth, which is extremely ironic, since it is such a common, inevitable, self-regulating process.

Childbirth does, however, represent the fate of the future. Looking at the state of our progeny is a bit like taking the pulse of our culture.

This explains some of the mingled awe and terror with which childbirth is regarded. It has always been viewed as a doubtful time for both mother and infant, spawning whole bodies of superstition. In Europe, for example, it used to be hoped that children would be born on a Sunday (a holy day), making the child immune to evil spirits. Many folklorists also think that this protective intention is the origin of the ritual of sprinkling holy water on a newborn. In ancient Mexico, a mother would wear a snail-shell amulet, in the hope that the baby would emerge as smoothly as the snail from its shell.

Among Netsilingmiut, mothers in labour sometimes recited numerous names. If the labour relented while uttering a particular name, it became the child’s first and most important one. I’m not sure if other Inuit peoples used this practice, but it is possible. Inuit have always been very tricky with their names for infants, traditionally heaping names upon newborns in order to confuse shamans or spirits that might try to attack the child.

Yet all such customs have one driving emotion behind them: anxiety. Birth, like death, is an x-factor. Human beings thrive upon prediction, and thereby control, of their environment. It is maddening to know that something so inevitable at once remains so mysterious.

Yet while we might chafe under what seems like nature’s tyranny, we can take comfort in the fact that we are also under its care.

My friend’s labour went perfectly well, of course. As it turned out, there was no need for the anxiety. So why don’t we take a lesson from Inuit tradition? At a time that is so difficult for new mothers, the rest of us might choose to alleviate — rather than aggravate — their stress.

Pijariiqpunga.