Previous Loco Parentis columns can be found here.
It’s better if I just get that on the table right away. The truth is, I really, really don’t care about birth. I’m not interested in the details of my own birth, I don’t want to talk about my son’s birth, or my second kid’s upcoming birth, and I definitely don’t want to spend any of my time pretending to listen to the details of someone else’s birth. I just straight up Do. Not. Care.
Maybe I should be more surprised by this. In general, I’m very interested in women’s health issues. I think my problem in talking about birth is two-fold.
First, I don’t like how people assume that anyone who’s ever had a baby is just dying to discuss childbirth. I don’t want to hear your “birth story.” I don’t want to tell you mine. I actually feel quite protective over the details of my son’s entrance into the world. To me, it felt like a private event. Invite-only. I am not interested in giving you the recap.
Just because I’ve had a baby does not mean I want to talk about “placentas” or “cord blood” or “water birth.” For me, giving birth to my son was just a means to an end. It was, ultimately, the only way to get him out. It was a biological necessity. You know what else is a biological necessity? Eating. But just because I spend a lot of time eating doesn’t mean I want you to engage me in a conversation about “salivary amylase,” “bile juice” or “feces.” I understand that the process is an important one, but I’ll pass on the details. Thanks.
The second reason I avoid conversations about birth is that we’ve turned it into a competitive sport, and I really don’t like that. More and more I feel like there are right and wrong ways to give birth. And these are moving targets. Depending on who you’re talking to, the right way to give birth might be at home, unmedicated and standing up. Or the right way might be in a hospital with a full support team ready and waiting. Sometimes pain medication is right. Sometimes it’s wrong. There are judgments about vaginal births, cesarean sections, fluids, cord-cutting, skin-to-skin time, antibiotics, episiotomies, the number of people in the hospital room/house/bathtub. Before I’d even given birth to my older child, I was so sick of all the opinions and judgments it seemed best to just keep the whole thing to myself.
I don’t mind sharing my experience with a mom-to-be who is honestly looking for information and wants to hear about a wide variety of experiences to help her prepare and make her own decisions. But this kind of open-minded discussion sometimes seems like the exception, and not the rule.
Even if that changes, though, I don’t think I’ll ever be up for hearing the word “placenta” while I’m eating.
my birth story is a punchline because it involves both irritable uterus and sad nipple syndrome, so no, I don’t want to talk about it either. My new policy? the right way to give birth is the way that you did it.
“I don’t mind sharing my experience with a mom-to-be who is honestly looking for information and wants to hear about a wide variety of experiences to help her prepare and make her own decisions.”
This is what it’s about for me. I’m pregnant with my first child and desperate to read/hear as many women tell me what birth was like for them as I can. Part of it stems from the fact that research is a way for me to calm my anxiety about this big thing that’s going to happen to me, and part of it is astonishment and enjoyment that it seems to be so DIFFERENT for everyone.
That being said, I feel you on how competitive it can seem, and how there is a weird disconnect between undergoing what is essentially a medical procedure and the expectation that you’ll want to then discuss it at length with strangers.
Everything you said is what I was going to say. Yes.
“The second reason I avoid conversations about birth is that we’ve turned it into a competitive sport, and I really don’t like that.”
I went into nursing school dead-set on becoming an L&D RN, and within a week, I decided I was better suited for research. This sentence sums up literally every reason why that happened.
Coming to mothering boards after having gone through wedding boards , I realized how similar the posts were between birth and wedding planning. Each are about one day in your life where you as a bride/mother-to-be are the center of attention. They both mark the beginning of life long projects that are far more important than the one day that marks their beginning. And I always find myself slightly worried about the husband/kid of the woman who can’t quite let go of telling you how amazing that one day was without ever talking about the phase of life they represent.
This is a fantastic observation
My mom and my aunt had a lot to say about childbirth when I was pregnant with my first. It made me super-uncomfortable, until I remembered that they were on the sort of older edge of the “Our bodies Ourselves” generation, and for them, being able to talk about childbirth, to discuss and even HAVE options when it came to it, symbolized a kind of self-determination that was even more important as they lived out the biological script society had been pushing on them since birth. My mom was once told as a child that her private parts “belonged to her future husband,” and her first OBGYN told her, “don’t worry honey, if you can get him in there, I can get him out,” which was not the response she was expecting to the information that she had been doing some reading about the birth process and did he recommend any books? When you’ve had experiences like that, the point isn’t to compare whether you’re tough enough to give birth without drugs in a spotless but isolated farm house (or mostly spotless school bus, where a friend of mine was born), the point is merely to prepare, to compare options, to educate. Apart from my aunt and mom, no one else I ever talked to wanted to do anything but compete on some level, but it went a long way to forgiving those phone calls that would start out asking about something mundane and transition with no segue at all into a vivid description of back labor. I mention all this because I think on some level the trend for “sharing” those stories, and the competition that can come with that sharing, started because of women like my mom and aunt, who felt they had to warn other women in the face of a medical establishment that wouldn’t let them participate in their own births, and now that more women are able to make decisions about their births, the conversation has evolved into one that is as much comparing the quality of medical care received as it is comparing or sharing experience. My not very organized take on the subject (I hate telling my story too!).
“If you can get him in there, I can get him out.”
I get what the OB was saying, but it was a helluva lot easier to get him in there! Such confidence!
No. Shit. Especially given what he was saying was basically, “don’t you worry about birth, you’re not going to be needed when the time comes!” Moy mom ended up finding another doctor, and hated having my brother in the hospital so much she had me at home, something I wouldn’t even consider.
I like this post and I like you. You know what I don’t like? Hearing about other people’s cervixes. Ever. If your birth story would make an entertaining sitcom episode (like Nicole’s did), I’m happy to listen to those bits, but the other stuff, no, never, nope, life is a rich tapestry but I don’t even understand how you could be okay with me thinking about it.
When I had my oldest child, it seemed like it was enough (if you wanted boasting credit) to give birth without medication, perhaps at home in a tub. By the time I had my youngest, I was starting to notice a disturbing tendency for doulas or partners or people generally in attendance at the birth to comment, publicly and approvingly, when laboring women were calm and witty between contractions. Now, when I read the birthing boards, the homebirthing ladies are worried about whether they’ve adequately planned the buffet for the midwives. Some women just want to throw something in a crockpot and have some snacks around, but I have heard some use words like “tablescapes” in complete seriousness. Also, suddenly there is such a thing as a birth photographer. The logistics attached to a boast-worthy natural birth have gotten so cumbersome that the growing “freebirth”/unassisted birth movement almost makes sense. If I thought I had to clean, cook, decorate and dress for guests and photographers, and be entertaining while having a baby, I would honestly prefer just to dig a hole in the woods and not have help.
It is my unshakeable opinion that if you are in the part of the having a baby process where you have to try to move the baby from the inside of you to the outside of you, you are the most important person in the room. Whatever other people in that room need should be provided by people who are not you. Anyone who expects otherwise should be escorted out of your presence.
I am so so relieved to not about birth stories anymore. People who did it differently retell, to their children, the story of their birth, but I just can’t. One huge advantage to having older children is the whole birth story is replaced by boasting over GPA or college acceptance. So with any luck, avoiding the first is good practice for avoiding the later ones?
I am so so relieved to not about birth stories anymore. People who did it differently retell, to their children, the story of their birth, but I just can't. One huge advantage to having older children is the whole birth story is replaced by boasting over GPA or college acceptance. So with any luck, avoiding the first is good practice for avoiding the later ones?
I went out with a group of women, some of whom I knew well, some not so well, and the conversation ended up going to childbirth. We ranged from home birth in Belgium to scheduled C-section, but the youngest kid amongst us was three, and most of us had an oldest who was at least 7, so the conversation was frank, funny, and not full of either one-upsmanship or reverence. Childbirth had become an amusing anecdote, which is where it should firmly be.