I’m on the seriously scary downslide toward getting this baby out of my body, and though I haven’t quite experienced the frantic “nesting” rituals that everybody likes to tell you about, I have encountered the frantic need to fill my head with tips, tricks and techniques to tackle this birth-process full-force. Enter: birthing classes.
Months ago I gave up on reading all of the baby books I purchased. Piles of all-inclusive medical guides to childbirth (including everything that can go wrong), sitting nicely in a stack on the coffee table, gathering coffee cup stains. Somewhere in the end of my 1st trimester I realized that I was way over my head and on information overload, and so I just quit cold-turkey for a little while until I could sort out what I felt we needed to know.
At one point recently my mom asked me if I’d taken any classes – more specifically Lamaze, which she had experienced back in the 80s when she was pregnant with my brother. When I revealed that I hadn’t taken anything at that point, I suddenly felt a twinge of panic mixed with a hefty dose of guilt that I was up against the rails. Is that what I’m supposed to be doing? But it’s nowhere in the manual!
But in researching “birthing classes” I started to feel as overwhelmed as I did when reading dry medical textbooks.
Instead of jumping into the commitment of 8-week courses for natural birth methods which I knew nothing about and frankly was frightened by and not very interested in (I’m no hero… I’m open to some forms of medical intervention), I tested out the waters and picked out a few smaller hours-long courses, from partnered yoga to breastfeeding, and finally (in my opinion) the grandmommy of them all – the day-long expectant parent workshop at Cayuga Medical Center.
Succinct, precise, and humanized like no book could ever be for me. Anthony and I attended the class over the weekend with many other expectant parents. It took everything that I had started to learn (and become overwhelmed with) from books and wrapped it into a nice package of really valuable info, with an edge of comfort that there’s no way I could find in texts.
That comfort and ease of mind came in the form of two of the nurses from the maternity ward at CMC that were leading the course that day. I think I can safely speak for the room full of people there Saturday when I say that they really brought this first-time birth experience down to a level we could not only understand but also relate to and feel confident with. And knowing that these ladies were possibly two that we’d see in the hallways and checking on us during that fateful labor-day – the more at home I felt, and bodaciously goddess-like that my body knew what it was doing without me having to worry about it too much.
I just want to note for those of you who’ve seen the documentary “The Business of Being Born” and were scared by some of the medical findings and statistics of hospitals regarding birth (a fantastic film, by the way, I’m not knocking it – I learned a lot from it, though quite freaked out) – these same fears were addressed and discussed during the class. We are so very lucky to have a down-to-earth and for-the-good-of-mommy-and-baby birthing facility right here in our own community, which is a complete 180 from the “baby factories” of the bigger cities.
That said, what I took out of this course and the others that I attended, was that I was certainly on the right track the entire time, though I took a break in the middle there to just play things by ear. The theme at these and many courses is to “fill your tool bag” with as many things as you can use and refer back to – learn and absorb what you can. But when you’re expecting and starting to feel overwhelmed and worried and out of control, my advice is to take a class – humanize the experience – because there are people out there like you having the same lack of confidence in the process, and there’s no better way to alleviate your worries than to convene and laugh and talk it all out. Sometimes we just need a little verbal reminder to just breathe.
