ABSTRACT
In this paper I am looking at how women and their partners may be helped to use the transformations of pregnancy and childbirth to prepare for looking after a small baby and being a parent. Significantly there is no word to describe the totality of this phase and in our culture they tend to be regarded separately. Breen (1985) shares this view. I see them as inextricably linked and as a powerful period with enormous potential for growth and change. I shall call this phase the child-bearing year, to cover the woman’s responses to pregnancy, to childbirth, to the early months of motherhood. In pregnancy there tends to be a focus on the birth as an isolated event with little relation to any of the other experiences and of enormous dread, foreboding and fear “to be survived”. I want to discuss the possibility that the labour is, in fact, not isolated but the most intense, regressive metaphor for the holding needed by the labouring woman, akin to that which the new baby also requires.
