You did not fail to progress. They failed to wait.

" You did not fail to progress. They failed to wait." .

Let's go a little deeper into this. Failure for a start, isn't the right word to use. You are not a failure. Your body did differently. Using this terminology around simply what can be a variation of normal can set women up to feel, well, to feel like they failed!

Futhermore: the rate that we "should" progress in labour is often measured by Friedman's curve, a guy back in the day who did a bunch of studies on women who were in fact not experiencing physiological birth at the time and plotted them onto a graph. He said that we "should" dilate at a certain rate per hour. As if our body is a machine.

Our bodies are not machines.

We do not dilate like machines.

Nor do we necessarily dilate with any predictable pattern.

One woman might be at 1 cm for several days but have no idea, another might dilate oh-so-slowly in the first stages of labour, and then rapidly at the end....for another, she might stay at 8cm for a long time while her body takes time to rest and baby moves into position.

I'll say it again.

We are not machines.