BY Ralph Wade

The Fulcrum, Issue 34 Winter 2004

I didn’t want to be there when my son was born. Blood all over the place, people wearing masks, the person I love the most in the world screaming in pain and ending with an event resembling that scene in Alien. I get nervous at the sight of a needle. I’d be about as much use as a plank of wood. I’ve never passed out cold and it would have been a bad time to try it out. Neither did my wife. Want me there, that is. She had her obstetrician, her midwife, a great hospital; the whole thing was planned. She didn’t want me to freak out and she didn’t want me to freak her out.

Arsenal beat Manchester United 3-2 and five minutes after the final whistle I got a call on the room phone that my wife had given birth in the maternity ward on the floor below. I hurried down to meet my son for the first time, overjoyed and a bit drunk.

I walked into the room and saw a baby looking at me, staring me in the eye and I just stared back at him, amazed.

He’d made it. We’d made it. All the waiting was over.

He’s six now and wants to be a scientist so he can blow things up.

It’s funny how sometimes we look back at an event in our lives and have trouble remembering how we actually felt at the time it happened. It’s like knowing what happens next in a story: it changes your perception of the whole thing.

I almost forgot how happy I was when my son was born and how beautiful an experience it was.

He’s six now and wants to be a scientist so he can blow things up. Around three years old he started having serious health problems and lost most of his hearing. After finding no solutions from orthodox medicine, good luck brought us to craniosacral therapy and Julian Cowan-Hill, an exceptional therapist who helped him regain his hearing and health.

The first time I took him for a craniosacral treatment he sat in the emptied toy basket as the therapist released compression in his temporals. I was amazed at how light and happy he seemed afterwards and at the skill and sensitivity of the therapist.

In hindsight the hospital birth, with epidural and syntocinon drip to speed it up, and in which he got stuck, seems to have been the cause of an occipital lesion. The whole occipital area was flat when he was a baby and only resolved after craniosacral therapy. He had also had bad reactions to vaccinations.

Craniosacral therapy helped him so much that it opened the door to a completely different approach to health-care and taught us to look more carefully at the risks involved in standard medical procedures. Alternative medicine offered something that actually worked when doctors had nothing left to offer. Hope is precious, as anybody who has seen a loved one get sick knows.

I decided to train as a craniosacral therapist and passed my exams in 2002. The second-to-last stage of the course was about mothers and babies, and a midwife spent a day with the class. We also watched a video of home births and water births.

This leads me to another happy event. The birth of my daughter earlier this year.

I wanted to be there when my daughter was born. I wanted to support my wife, to be there when she needed me, to do everything I could, even if that meant being punched in the face because the whole thing was my fault in the first place! My wife did too. Now I was a craniosacral therapist and could bore her with excited talk of ventricles, venous blood and membranes, not to mention cerebrospinal fluid, I could handle a little blood. I’d also helped by treating her throughout her pregnancy. I was better prepared now, I’d seen the video and read the book (Active Birth by Janet Balaskas). I was going to be there with bells on!

The contractions started at ten o’clock at night and continued through the night. I stayed up with my wife, lighting candles, burning clary sage essential oil, singing with her, tuning in from time to time and when she got into her bath I made sure she didn’t doze off between contractions and drown. All very useful things.

When the contractions got close enough together I called the midwife, at about four-thirty. The midwife arrived around six and checked everything. The contractions were much stronger. I stayed close by and tuned in off the body, which my wife said made her feel lighter and eased the pain. She knew I was there for her.

At ten o’clock I caught my wife and held her in my arms as she gave birth to our daughter, the midwife caught the baby and my son sat waiting on the landing expectantly. The sun was blazing through the skylight and while my wife was resting, after I had cut the cord, I sat cradling our baby daughter on the landing with my son. We both sang softly to her as she calmly took it all in.

She is now three months old and has a perfectly-shaped cranium. She has a great smile too.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the viewpoints of the CSTA.