Sometimes you don’t know what you don’t know until you know it — and if there is anything I can say about the six-hour Prenatal & Birthing class we attended, in two separate sessions, this past Saturday and the Saturday prior, it is that it turns out there was a lot I didn’t know. And now I am basically a midwife? Which is great because Gretchen is really tired of being pregnant and would like to give birth immediately.
Whatever Happened to Lamaze Classes?
I’d imagined the class would resemble the “Lamaze classes” I’d seen on television, but it turns out Lamaze, a psychoprophylactic method popularized in the 1950s by an apparently very mean French OB, has fallen out of favor since its peak circa my own birth. But the basic jist of it, from my limited research, is that Lamaze classes aimed to build the confidence of pregnant people to consider a more natural birth with less medical interventions by becoming well-versed in relaxation techniques and managing pain through movement and massage. Also, according to this 1984 piece about Lamaze classes, “one of the main tasks of the Lamaze teacher was to give parents the push and the ammunition they needed to stand up to their doctors—never an easy thing to do.”
On TV it always looked the same. An impossibly crowded room, women on mats in rows or a circle, husbands supporting from behind or sitting in front. Dad would help her spread her legs and she would practice breathing. Often, hijinks or drama ensued, like in Friends when, in Carol’s unexpected absence, Ross and Susan fought over who was the Daddy, or in The L Word’s unfortunate sixth season when Tom begrudgingly accompanied Max to a birthing class held in a hotel conference room (??!) to get aggressively misgendered.
We wanted to take an in-person class (we both have ADHD), a challenge when we have limited financial resources and also, so much of the birthing class industry has shifted to virtual-only. Eventually our only option was a class that took place a mere four weeks before Gretchen’s due date.
After many months of anticipation, there were were,= sitting on floor chairs in an airy little room on a quiet street, eating focaccia and hummus, looking at pictures of the womb and learning about membrane sweeps and the magic of cord blood.
Suddenly The Birth Plan Makes Sense
We’d initially looked at our “birth plan” with uncertainty — did we need to have preferences if we trusted our doctor to do what needed to be done? Why would I, an elder maiden who was very bad at science, have any opinion about birth positions, c-sections, vaginal seeding — more important than the opinion of our doctor?
When our instructor opened the class by telling us birth would be the most important day of our lives, I simply wasn’t so sure about that. For us, labor was not something we’d long dreamed of experiencing, it was just the means to an end. She admitted her position was a specific one. She’s a midwife and is highly skeptical of doctors and modern medicine, a philosophy very much in line with the “natural birth is better” angle that Lamaze classes promoted. I suspected the truth was somewhere in the middle, and left our first session a little unsure. But we had time to talk about what felt right and what felt off about it afterwards — what we learned, what behaviors of ours we were still confident would not “cause” autism. So then we came to the second session with a more targeted perspective on what we wanted to know more about, and it was great simply to have someone who’d witnessed so many births talk to us about them. Our doctor appointments have always been quick affairs, but we could take our time with her. We left the second session feeling honestly very held. Most importantly, I finally got the backup support I needed on the importance of good lighting in the hospital room.
The most I’d ever consciously learned about childbirth prior to the class remains this essay by our former Queer Mama columnist, Haley — the original piece included a short film, too, which seems to have vanished from the internet. That photo of Haley on all fours in the hospital — I never forgot it, because that was the moment I learned that “lying on your back” isn’t the optimal position for giving birth. I never sought out labor or birth stories because my own prospects for having one of my own were so uncertain, really only tuning in when the story was published on my own website. I didn’t really absorb the fact that labor didn’t always begin with water breaking and a mad rush to the hospital until watching Laboring Under An Illusion: Mass Media Childbirth vs. The Real Thing this past November.
While we didn’t decide to relocate the birth to our own bathtub, eat our placenta in capsules or eschew circumcision, we are now aware of all the ways in which What’s Good For Mom and Baby won’t always be What’s Good For Doctor and now, finally, we fully understand the purpose of the birth plan. She explained what early labor looks like, detailed potential complications, guided us through various birth positions, shamed us for eating so many cookies, reminded us that our bodies know how to give birth and gave tips for postpartum care. Then she made us food? It was really nice?
She strongly recommended having a birth doula, and we’ve gotten that suggestion a lot! But we just don’t have room in our budget for one, and would rather save for a postpartum doula.
Preparing for Family Leave
Both of us work at small companies. Gretchen’s looking at about five months paid leave while I’ve got three. I’m doing six weeks up top and then another six at the end of her leave, to avoid paying over $2k a month for childcare for as long as possible.
It’s a weird time to be on leave because I have been processing my fear and panic about the current state of affairs in the united states of america by writing or editing or otherwise pitching in to create content that’ll help queer people cope with said time. Because this is a bad time. I mean things are really bad and here we are having a child!!?!!
I haven’t felt like Autostraddle was really “my baby” for five or six years now, at least not in the sense that I’m protective of any aspect of it besides the simple one of wanting it to exist, although even that simple desire has consistently proven more complicated than I’d hoped. At this point it’s more like my child who is going to college out of state. But I do wonder how this extended break will feel. This place was, at one time, my baby, something I swaddled (with multiple co-parents), and I wonder how it’ll feel to be away from it and focused on bringing something else into the world. I think the last time I was able to completely check out of work 100% for more than a week was in 2017 when I was moving back from Michigan to Los Angeles, because I was driving cross-country with my then-partner.
So this will be new. As I imagine it is for many parents. As so many things will be, and are. And I will tell you all about it, soon enough.
Give Me Recommendations: Baby Books and Birth Movies
I’ve kept a diary my whole life, but my journaling practice tends to fall off whenever I’m living with a partner, as it has in recent months. But I want to be sure to write everything down when the baby’s here, to have a place for pictures and ephemera and saving it all for him to see one day. I bought a Moleskine Baby Journal a few months back, but despite my best efforts, I just can’t get into a routine with it. Honestly, the pages are just so thin! Even the thin, glossy ultrasound printouts bulk it up beyond measure, I can’t imagine putting more photos in here. If you kept a baby book and you liked it, let me know which it was!
Also if you’ve seen any documentaries or TV shows that you think would be good to watch to prepare for our own BIRTH STORY, let me know!
I wanted to do a baby book and also realized that I probably wouldn’t stick with it. So instead I took a suggestion from the internet and bought a calendar with big squares and tried to write something in most days for the first year. Most of the time it was something our kiddo did that day (someone she met, when she rolled over for the first time, etc) and sometimes it was just something going on in the world. I definitely missed a fair amount of days, but it was a bit easier to stick with (and to go back in and fill out when I had missed) and it was a lovely, low stress way to record our baby’s first year.
My wife also read a bunch of The Birth Partner, which they found really helpful. It’s a bit more academic and I think geared toward doulas, but still helpful. Send you so much good luck and love!
oh yeah that is a cute idea! i used to be really good at that with just normal life stuff — putting things on the calendar to remember it by. great suggestion! also i will look into that book. thank you so much.
If you’re a big Discord or Slack person, you can create a server just for you and journal there! You can post pictures, links, files, etc… have channels to dump your thoughts by topic, or by date if you prefer… I’m in Discord all the time anyway so it’s easy for me to just throw shit in there. HOWEVER, if you like to thoughtfully hand write well-composed journal entries, this approach may not be for you lol. It would be very 2025 to give baby a transcript of a chat server where you kept all your thoughts about his babyhood, for him to be like, “what am I supposed to display this on, my Holotable 42069? just upload it into my brain chip”
lol holotable 42069… probably i will just automatically update all of our memories to the ifamily cloud and then he will be able to download them via a device implanted in his fingertip activated by a bracelet that helps him navigate the underground tunnels where we all live to escape climate change, so that is a good point.
heather this is a good advice BUT the thing is that i unfortunately have this delusion that i will somehow be able to do MORE things manually and not on a device the moment this baby is born into the world so i want it to be tangible, you know?/? (also i don’t use discord and if i open slack i will open work and i must not open work!!!)
Ditto this, except I used a journaling app. When I was super sleep deprived and didn’t have the hands to carry a journal or the mental space to write extensively, I could still snap photos and take notes about occurrences of the day. It was a bonus when I needed to check things like doctor’s names, vaccine dates, sick symptoms, etc; I’d always have them right there in my phone. It also made it easy to pull photos for a one-year old photo book, which we got printed for friends and family as a victory lap when we were (a bit) less sleep deprived.
I started doodling my experiences with pregnancy in a notebook, and that has been amazing to look back on. I’ve continued it after, even with diminished time. A week or so after giving birth I mustered the energy to doodle what I recalled the most vividly about giving birth. I know I won’t remember all the little things, but drawing has taken so much less time than finding the perfect words to capture a moment, like the manic laughter I broke into when the nurse hooked me up to a breast pump and I watched my nipples go 😖😤😖😤😖😤😖😤 Baby’s 2 now and I don’t think I’d remember if I hadn’t drawn the little guys
oh that’s so interesting. gretchen loves to doodle and i wonder if i could get her on board with a notebook where i write and she draws!
+1 to the Birth Partner! Also, we used this for a baby book–it has space for pictures but it’s low pressure and has nice prompts and beautiful pages. We don’t get to it every month, so sometimes we’re doing three months at a time, but it’s been really nice to imagine reading it to her and then her having it one day: https://buyolympia.com/Item/the-first-1000-days
ooo that book looks great ! wow i used to go to buy olympia all the time but haven’t been in so long — they always advertised in bitch magazine i think, and now that bitch is gone, i forgot !
Shamed you for eating cookies? Really? Eat cookies, dip them in warm milk, seek moments of comfort wherever and however you can.