When I think back to my first pregnancy I remember the excitement ... and the slightly sick mix of nerves and outright terror at the realisation that the person inside me was going to have to get out, and it was getting bigger. So I did what any other first-timer does, I turned to the books. Ah, the good old pregnancy books, my personal favourites where the ones with pictures of extra hairy 1970’s mums in mid-push, just what a nervous twenty-year-old with a low pain threshold wants to see, but I couldn’t get enough of them! If I hadn’t had the books there were always the legions of mums eager to share their own birthing stories. You see labour stories are like war stories, everyone wants to tell theirs in full explicit and gory detail. There is jostling for whose labour was the longest, volume and velocity of breaking waters, and just how many stitches they ended up with. (I swear if there weren’t laws preventing these things they would be up on the table comparing episiotomies.)
But in the midst of all of this there is always one, one brave soldier who regales the gathered crowd with a fantastical tale of whale song and water and baby being gently ushered down the birth canal to a quiet candlelit room where small children played harps and frolicked by the blah, blah, blah ...
Thank you, brave soldier, you have single handedly made me believe that my plan to accept any and every painkilling drug available to be the cowards way out, I saw the way you raised a disapproving eyebrow when I mentioned epidurals. Well, screw it─I’m scared and I’m going to do it my way! So scared, in fact, that I was hooked up the friendly epidural machine by the time I was three centimetres dilated, which, by the way is the weirdest feeling─but not unpleasant when I considered the alternative.
So I delivered a healthy baby girl and took my place at the mother and baby group as a survivor with my own thrilling tale to tell. (Twenty-three hours, broken placenta, massive hemorrhage, bedridden for thirty hours, and three tanks of gas and air.)
