We’re Pregnant! Now What?

I found out I was pregnant in March 2009. Of course, after several weeks when I finally shared the news with friends and family, I was given the pregnancy standard What to Expect When You’re Expecting. This book gave me a general sense of what was “normal” from week to week, information I suddenly craved. Although I’d seen my sisters and close friends go through pregnancy, all of the little details and changes in my own body became a lot more interesting. But what the book failed to do was get me thinking about the kind of birth experience I wanted to have when the time came. In fact, I went through the entire first trimester barely thinking about the birth at all.

Because most everyone I knew went to an OBGYN during their pregnancies and had an epidural for the births of their babies, I just assumed that’s the way I would go—it really didn’t matter to me, as long as the baby came out healthy. I’ll admit, it even crossed my mind that having a scheduled c-section might be the easiest way to go, as labor and pushing out a baby didn’t sound all that enticing to me. And just a few months earlier, I had read the book It Sucked and Then I Cried by one of my favorite bloggers, Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com. She shares details of her first pregnancy, the fairly traumatic birth experience she had, and her ensuing post partum depression. From what I gathered from those words, a medicated birth was the way I would go one day.

But my perspective started to completely change when I was five months pregnant and read Heather’s blog post about the birth of her second daughter. She ended up having a completely natural childbirth and a “sacred and spiritual” experience, to which I thought, “SACRED AND SPIRITUAL? I WANT THAT TOO!” She recommended a few books geared toward helping women educate themselves about the various birthing options and the history of how birthing became so medicalized in the first place. Although I was a little skeptical about this alternative path I could take to having my baby, I immediately bought two of the books she suggested: Your Best Birth and Birthing from Within. Opening this door and starting to make myself more aware of the birthing industry—yes it seems it’s an industry of sorts—was the best move I could have made. It ultimately led me to discovering the option of hypnobirthing, which was the key to creating not only a positive birthing experience but indeed my own sacred and spiritual one.