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The short answer: Yes, yes, yes yes and YES!!!! You and your partner are a birth team and, as the saying goes, you march on your stomachs! Experience has shown me that most people, no matter how hungry, are not able to stomach more than a few forkfuls of mystery meat in brown sauce, chicken à la king, weirdly gray oatmeal, or any of the other delights the hospital has on offer.

Packing for the hospital should be like packing for a day of strenuous hiking with a long drive to get there… variety is what you want, because you are packing for a variety of people and a variety of situations.

The partner

It is hard to offer support to someone doing one of the most challenging things a human body can do (i.e. give birth) if your own body is weak from hunger. Don’t plan on going out to get something – you never know what might be going on when hunger strikes and it might not be the right moment to leave. You need quick bite-sized snacks that you can eat between contractions, and larger snacks for if you have time. People in labour have very keen senses of smell and often get nauseous, so you might want to think twice about the shwarma with garlic sauce and choose something more neutral.

The birthing person

Once again, quick bite-sized snacks are your go-to food. Things like date bars, granola bars, muffins and trail mix are perfect here, but make sure to have some savoury options in case you get “sweeted” out. Many people reach a point in labour where they don’t feel like eating any more, but still feel the need for a boost of energy. I recommend bringing juice or coconut water to help with a quick boost of energy and electrolytes.

An induction

Packing food for an induction is a whole other mindset, as you will likely be at the hospital for many hours doing not much of anything and likely getting hungry partly out of boredom. This is a situation where you could actually consider having your partner leave and get something to eat, though many people prefer to bring their own food. This is where you want to have actual meals (the kind that also taste good at room temperature) as well as fun “treats”. If you have family close by who are going to just be sitting around nervously waiting for something to happen, they can always be enlisted into bringing a hot meal…

Post-partum

Most people get extremely hungry post-partum and most hospitals arrange a meal to be brought in the hour after giving birth… but not all hospitals, not all the time. In the post-partum ward, meals are served to the birthing person only, on a schedule that sometimes leaves more than 12 hours between dinner and breakfast… once again, bring snacks or get the family on board!

The other day was my doula-versary. No, I didn’t actually bake a cake for the event, it just happens to come a few days before my birthday! Here how it all happened. How a doula was born…

I was really nervous. I had never actually seen a birth before… I mean I had given birth to two children, but for one of them I had been unconscious, and for the second it all happened so quickly that it was clearly not the average birth experience.

I was at the end of the second level of my doula training, when a message went up for the collective that I was volunteering with. A single mom had requested a doula for her induction in a few days. The only hitch; she was Francophone and the only experienced doula available didn’t speak French. I volunteered to translate and be the shadow.

As with most inductions, it was scheduled for bright and early in the morning. Being November, it was dark and very chilly as I hurried into the hospital for our 6am meeting. The other doula had to drop her child off at an activity and would be joining us at 9, which gave me a few hours to hang out and get to know M. In general, I don’t usually get to the hospital so early for an induction- there can be hours of waiting before the birthing person is even assigned a room, let alone given the medication- but considering that we were complete strangers meeting for the first time and I was going to be her birth partner, getting to know each other seemed like a good plan.

We bonded over stories of our children and our birth experiences. I remember feeling like a complete imposter, realizing that this woman had already birthed 4 children and likely knew far more about birth than I did!

The other doula came as M was being given the first dose of pitocin. Her contractions were still quite light and so we continued to talk and the other doula told us of her birth experience and we spoke of love and life and more about our kids.

My partner texted. Would I be back for lunch?

As M’s contractions became more intense, we helped her stay active, walking around the room and bouncing on the birth ball.

I was naive. I expected that at any moment, the other doula would open up some sort of magical Mary Poppins-like doula bag and all sorts of creative doula tricks would come into play, with scented oils, colourful porcupine-like massage balls, and many more exciting things I could only imagine.

But it didn’t really happen like that. The massage oil was unscented, plain almond oil, and it did the job very nicely. We took turns massaging M’s back as her contractions became closer together, and we showed her breathing techniques to get through each contraction as it came. We reminded her to let out all her breath and relax completely between contractions so that she wasn’t holding tension unnecessarily.

I ran her a nice warm bath and sat beside her holding her hand as the water soothed her contractions. As the water got cold and M decided she wanted to lie down, I helped her out, dried her off and adjusted the bed so that she was comfortable. She told us that of her 4 children, she had taken the epidural for one of them and felt it had been “a total waste of time”. Nevertheless, as her contractions became more intense from the pitocin, the nurse kept repeatedly suggesting that she consider an epidural. I remember being shocked and pleasantly surprised when M said to the nurse politely but directly, “I feel like I am talking, but you are not listening to me. I have told you at least five times that I am not interested, now please stop pestering me, I am busy!”

My partner texted. Would I be back for dinner? (Did I mention that my second was born so fast my partner didn’t even have time to hop in a cab and get to the hospital 15 minutes away to be with me for the birth?)

Things started to intensify. M went through transition and it was rough for her. She was tired, mentally and physically. She kept asking the nurse to “take the baby out” and telling her that she was done being there and wanted to go home. Having never seen anyone go through transition, I found this somewhat alarming, but when I translated what she said for the other doula, she told me that this was pretty normal transition behaviour.

M also started to feel nauseous, and the other doula gave me what I consider one of the best tips of my whole doula training…or at least the most practical in terms of avoiding emergency wardrobe changes: when someone is going to throw up, quickly get them the small garbage from the bathroom. Don’t try to get them to the bathroom (you will never get there in time) and don’t use the minuscule kidney-shaped bowl that the nurse offers (think vomit tsunami).

After throwing up a few times, M suddenly announced that she felt a strong urge to poop. The other doula and the nurse perked up considerably and seemed really excited. I was still a bit in the dark as to why the news was greeted with such joy, but the other doula told me that a strong urge to poop is often what marks the start of the pushing phase, and sure enough, when the nurse checked, M was dilated to 10 cm.

My partner texted. Was I ever coming home?

Pushing began, but was in no way the quick and easy endeavour that I had imagined from wherever one gets information about pushing (my own birth? movies?). The baby was discovered to be in the OP (occiput posterior) position, or “sunny-side up,” meaning that baby was facing the abdomen rather than the back. Practically speaking, it meant more time pushing and a more difficult descent down the birth canal. I was surprised by the way that the head would come down the birth canal with each push, but then go back up in between pushes. Never the less, progress was being made and eventually after an hour and a half of intense pushing, baby was out!

It was both an exhilarating and humbling experience. I realized that while I still had a ton of experience to gain, a lot of what a birthing person needed was someone who could anticipate some of their needs and find ways to help, one contraction at a time. There is no rulebook, no fancy “doula moves”. It is often about you being there anytime, day or night, normalizing the experience, calming the partner (and sometimes hinting at them to give the birthing person a foot rub) and holding space for the birthing person and their choices.

That time where November 7th and December 7th delivered one day after the other…

A lot of people who are interviewing me as their doula ask me if I have someone else with the same due date as them. Or due the same week as them. They always seem concerned when I say I do, but that I am not worried.

I have had clients go into labour on subsequent days, but never the ones who were actually due at the same time. Most doulas joke that it is the clients who are due two weeks apart that will always cause the problems. In this situation, one client was at 41 weeks and the other at 37!

Considering that an estimated due date is just that (an estimation) and that babies are normally expected to arrive somewhere between week 37 and 42, I almost always have overlap with my clients. That said, so far no two of my clients have gone into labour at the same time yet… but I consider it inevitable, just as it is inevitable that at some point I might be down with some sort of illness, have a family commitment, etc.

Preparing for all of these eventualities is one of the things I plan for the most in terms of making sure I have a different backup for each woman and staying in close contact the last few weeks of pregnancy.

One year, I had two clients due April 14. I was super stressed about how crazy things were going to be in mid-April, to the point of having bad dreams where everyone went into labour simultaneously. In the end, neither of them even ended up having a baby in April! The first one had hers at the end of March and the second at the beginning of May.

In fact, my own babies both made super surprise appearances at 32 and 31 weeks! Sometimes people ask me what happens if they go into labour before the “on call” period starts. In fact, I am pretty much “on call” for you from the moment you decide to have me as your doula, and if your babies decide that they can’t wait any longer before meeting you, I will just be (a little) surprised but still do all I can to be there. For me, “on call” just means that I am expecting that you may go into labour at any time, and if it happens unexpectedly, well, sometimes birth is about embracing the unexpected…

So if you call me to ask “At the ultrasound my doctor said we should move the due date two days earlier, are you still free?”, expect to hear a deep belly laugh… because I know that birth is unpredictable and I am planning to be there no matter when- two days early, two weeks early, or even two months early!