One of my best friends is pregnant. She’s due in May so she’s about 6 1/2 months at the moment. She’s coming over tonight for dinner and a chat while Paul is out and she wants to talk to me about birth. She’s having a home birth, which I think is fantastic, and I’ll all for answering her questions, helping her plan things and get everything in order. I’m not as sure of how much to reveal to her about the pain of childbirth. I mean, it’s different to different people and one person might think it was the most horrendous thing she’s ever endured while others think it a pleasant experience akin to a walk in the park, so to speak. I was somewhere in between. I didn’t exactly find it easy and it was a different kind of pain than I was expecting, but it also wasn’t this blood-curdling, screaming, cursing, “get this thing out of me” experience that is all too commonly seen on sitcoms and in the horror stories that some mothers like to tell when they’re together.
But do I try to describe what it feels like and what the aftermath is like, even though this may scare her? Or do I pat her on the head, smile and tell her it’s not that bad so she can think about pink bunnies and blue skies up until her water breaks and reality sets in and KICKS HER ALMIGHTY ASS? I wish someone had told me truthfully what labour was like, not just that ‘it hurts.’ I was fully expecting the contractions to be uncomfortable and moderately painful, but I’d always had it in my head that pushing was the worst part. If only I’d known that the reverse was true, I might’ve been more prepared and not looked at the midwife in sheer panic when she said I was only 5 cm dilated and probably had another 4-5 hours to go. I truly felt that that was physically impossible, what she was telling me. There was no way my body wouldn’t just implode if this pain went on for more than 30 minutes, 60 max. Hours, let alone 4 or 5, seemed so vast an expanse of time that the years it took for the Rio Grande to carve its way through eons of rock to form the Grand Canyon was a more tangible time frame to me. So you can see my dilemma. Reality and being a good little prepared Girl Scout on the one hand and blissful ignorance on the other. Which one does a good friend ensure?
I need to find out which she’d prefer without giving away my plan. Maybe I could casually ask her a hypothetical question and see what her response is. Something like “So, if someone pissed in your soup and you had already eaten it without noticing, would you rather know about it or just go about your life none the wiser?” or maybe “Hey, here’s a conundrum for ya. If you knew that your husband had taken one up the ass one drunken night in college and someone else knew about it, would you want them to tell you or keep their mouth shut?”
The things I ponder for my friends.
February 21, 2007 at 6:37 pm
i say ignorance is bliss. of course, i’ve never given birth, but i’m pretty sure i’d rather go into that thinking the best not the worst. then again, i probably wouldn’t want to know if my boyfriend had taken it up the pooper during college either….
February 22, 2007 at 8:45 am
and…. which did you go with?
February 22, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Paul came home earlier than expected so we didn’t get round to talking about it. I was going to go with the gentler approach but in the past, Paul has been less than tactful when discussing birth by saying something like “Oh my god, blood was flying around everywhere” which is ever-so-helpful. So we’ll leave it for another day.