08/09/2025
💫 The Slow Reversal 💫 Let’s talk about how MOST births begin…with the slow reversal.
For 9-10 months your body’s job has been to keep baby safely nestled in the womb. Closed, tight, intact, strong, holding. The mode has been: retain and sustain.
So, when 38…40…41(?) weeks come along, while your expectations may be a flip-of-the-switch labor initiation, your body is actually making the sloooowwww shift into birth mode. And this may take days and weeks (especially for a first time mom).
Probably not the news you wanted to hear, but it’s the news you need to hear! Because it will make your birth easier and much more peaceful if you understand it. 🤍 I promise.
Here’s how the the slow reversal progresses:
💫 Your body and your baby begin passing chemical and physical messages to one another.
💫 Like this: One day it may be the baby’s head pushing down further and creating pressure on the cervix which changes the cervix just a bit. Another day it may be your uterine muscle being super active (Braxton hicks or a few real waves) and pushing baby down further.
💫 At some point your baby will release chemical signals into the amniotic fluid that signify maturity of the lungs. Your body takes this message and makes incremental changes toward birth.
💫 These little messages are passed back and forth, back and forth until they compound enough to bring your body into full-blown birth mode. Which is only characterized by birth waves coming longer, stronger, and closer together. Very steady, and intensifying.
👉🏽 What I want you to know: the slow reversal isn’t labor, it isn’t even early labor. It’s all the prep work done in the days and weeks before labor initiates and you may feel it or you may not.
You may feel things like: loss of mucous plug, increased pressure on bladder/bum, lightening or your baby “dropping,” using the bathroom more ( #2), tiredness, colostrum production, more frequent Braxton hicks or even occasional “real” surges, amniotic fluid trickling and stopping, period-like cramping.
If you feel these things, the slow reversal has begun! 🫶🏼 You aren’t yet in birth-mode but your baby has begun to get ideas and your body is responding.
