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Okay, welcome to Part Two. So here I am, three years later, second pregnancy. Going into it, I was optimistic. We had moved, but I had a great new doctor and had heard awesome things about the hospital at which I was planning to deliver. I felt pretty good about my first experience with labor, so I expected good results for this birth as well. But like I mentioned before, there were some things that I felt were lacking and I wanted to try to have more ownership this time going through. What I wanted more than anything was to be able to labor without Pitocin. I hated feeling like my body was fighting the contractions instead of working with them (as I had heard natural labor described). I thought surely my body would know what to do this time so that induction would not be necessary, and I really, really hoped it would.
You know how sometimes you meet people or someone comes into your life for a certain reason? In retrospect, I feel like that had happened to me. I didn’t know that there was more out there that I needed. But one encounter helped me to see that there may be. Backing it up again, now to before I was pregnant with Kal, but thinking about becoming pregnant soon. It was early November 2011, and baby Caleb and his momma came to our house for his newborn session. I asked his mom about her birthing experience as I often do, and I remember being really weirded out by the calm, no-big-deal way she described it. She had a natural hospital birth and everything went fine. She talked like she had been in control and knew what to expect. So, I asked her how that was and she told me she had taken a 12 week course outside of the hospital that had helped her be totally aware of all of her options and how she would handle any unexpected occurrence. She also knew tons of laboring positions that she and her husband had practiced, so they knew just what to do when the tough contractions came. I was envious of her control over the experience. I took a mental note of this thinking maybe I would ask her for more info about the class when I became pregnant.
It took me a while to finally message her for the class info. I think I was in the middle of the second trimester, when I was starting to show, feel the baby, and become more and more aware of the need to start thinking about labor. Fortunately, a class would be forming in a few weeks and would finish just a couple of weeks before my due date. My brother Stephen and his wife Jessica were also expecting a boy and had been taking a Bradley class in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Jessica encouraged me to pursue this more extensive education as well. Paul was (surprise, surprise) very skeptical. He was still impressed with how I handled Sophia’s birth. To him, I didn’t need a class, I was going to go in to the delivery room and come out a champ again. The fact, however, that I was bearing his child may have afforded me some bonus persuasive influence, and we ended up going.
Enter Jen.
She turned out to be an amazing teacher. It didn’t take too long for Paul to be excited to go to her birthing class. We started to enjoy our regular Monday night class “dates” and drive to the office in Creve Coeur where she teaches. It was a time for us to really break away from everything else going on and focus on the baby and the labor and our relationship too. We made great friends with the three other expecting couples in the class with us. Two of the moms had had previous C-sections because of a breech baby (something that absolutely DOES NOT need to result in a C-section-there are natural methods of turning a baby, we learned about in class), and wanted to be sure to do everything they could to deliver their next baby vaginally. Through this class they armed themselves with knowledge. Both of those women later achieved a V-BAC (vaginal birth after caesarian). The other couple was planning a home birth from the beginning. I honestly still had some stigma attached to that at the start of the class and thought that was a little strange, but hey! Jen encouraged an open and non judgmental atmosphere. She welcomes all birthers and wants each couple to be able to find their own ideal birth. So we all really got along and respected each other. We will always have a great bond with those sweet families!
Sometimes some of the things Jen would mention in class really surprised my husband. For instance, in the US, we spend more than any other country on maternity care and have an abysmal maternal death rate compared to other countries. Or the fact that the World Health Organization says Cesarian Sections should be between ten to fifteen percent of all births and in the US, it is 32.8%! Paul found these things hard to believe, but he would check her facts the next day and always discover that she was right. Our perspective was widened. One thing that blew me away was learning about cord blood. You know how you always hear about cord blood banking? I just thought that was extra blood, turns out that blood is the babies blood, that is being transferred to the baby from the placenta. If you wait about two minutes after delivery, the cord will stop pulsing and all that blood will be in your babies body where it should be. Another reason to wait is that it gives you more time to deal with a dilemma in the instance the baby doesn’t breath right away. After I delivered Sophia the cord was immediately clamped and Paul asked if he wanted to cut it. To clamp immediately is pretty routine in hospitals. We were surprised to learn that this deprives the baby of up to 40% of blood volume! Learning that was a big deal to me and we decided this was one of those things we wanted to make sure didn’t happen with our second child.
We were learning so much more than we ever did in that hospital class we took before Sophia. Again, that class at the hospital was nice and helpful. It aided in our birth experience with Sophia, but the class focused on what we needed to know to be a good patient at that institution. Not much more. Now that I know what an all-encompassing class can be like I can honestly compare the two. In Jen’s class, we learned EVERY option we had. She didn’t talk about epidurals like they were cruel and nasty, she only presented options as well as possible consequences in a pro-con way. It was truly enlightening and empowering. I could see us now being in control of our birth situation and I loved it! We owed it all to Jen and her class.
I don’t expect everyone to choose the same birth scenario I did. We were able however to come to the perfect conclusion for us because of the knowledge we gained from taking this class. I had felt before that birth made me the victim. That no matter what I did, my body would be put through the most horrible of pain and the goal was to just get through it-whatever means necessary-only to be able to someday black out the horrific experience. Women have even said that to me all my life, jokingly: “the only reason we have more than one baby is because we forget how badly it hurt!”. This feeling was starting to change as I learned how normal and natural birth is to a woman’s body. And how your body has it’s own ways of helping you cope, that can work better than drugs if not interfered with. The first day of class, Jen described birth as a bodily function. That totally stuck. It was just as natural to my body as a BM, only I don’t do it everyday. But somewhere in my primal state, my body knew how to do it. My mantra became to trust my body, trust my baby, and surrender to the nature of it all.
Jen became a real friend and ally. She absolutely loves her job. Her personality yielded itself so well to be accepting and helpful. Her mission is to give couples the tools to find their own ideal birth and the answers they need and options they don’t know they have. She did this for us. A birthing course will likely not cause you arrive at the same conclusions we did, but if I can encourage an expecting couple anywhere to do anything it would be to get some good childbirth education. Jen Jester’s website is www.birthwisely.net. You can also look for Bradley Method or Plum Tree Baby birth classes in your area. One of the BEST things we have ever done for ourselves. Really.
Thanks again for reading. I’ll do my best to post my next entry about deciding to have the birth at home soon!