Baby Steps #6: The Best Laid Birth Plans

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!