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Charlie and I went to our first birth class last night. We don't really *need* it, to be honest. I'm doing Hypnobabies at home, and I actually really am enjoying it. Who knew it would be so much fun?

I mostly wanted to do a class because of the social aspect of it... meeting other pregnant mamas! I chose a Birthing from Within class because I loved the book, and because it seemed very likely that I'd find other semi-crunchy mamas there to talk to.

Right before we went, I started having second thoughts about the class. The book Birthing from Within is wonderful, and I enjoyed it. I loved the discussions about our expectations, fears, worries about both birthing and becoming a mother/parent. I loved the idea of sitting around with other mamas/parents doing birth art and chatting. Fun! But the book also includes pain tolerance exercises using a piece of ice. A teeeeeensy part of the book for me, but I wondered if it would be such a teensy part of the class?

Doing pain tolerance exercises would actually be totally contrary to the whole idea of Hypnobabies, which is focusing on birth as an intense series of sensations. Intense, powerful, but not *painful.*

Well, I decided to give it a try, and now I'm kind of wishing I hadn't. Expectations, expectations!

Here's what I did NOT expect.

I did not expect to be in a tiny basement with only two other couples. Which apparently fosters intimacy and that is wonderful, but it's not very many people to meet and be social with.

I did not expect both of the two other couples to be completely uninformed about birth. I mean, I expected that they had at least read... yanno, Birthing From Within! Nope. One woman had read one book (Active Birth, so a good one!), the other had not read any. At about 30 weeks pregnant.

I know that I go overboard with things like this. (Well, really, what other thing is LIKE becoming a mother for the first time?) I've wanted to have a baby my entire life. I've been totally obsessed with learning everything I can about pregnancy, birth, babies, motherhood. I am well aware that there is lots I cannot know until I go through it, but darnit... I plan to be prepared! :) I am always a prolific reader, and I've read... maybe 20 books. Plus I'm addicted to the Mothering message boards, where I read all different kinds of debates that make me go seek more information on the internet on my own. Plus tons and tons of birth stories! Oh how I love the birth stories! :)

But it honestly scared me to see a mama telling the class that she trusts her doctor, feels safest in the hospital, and hasn't read much about birth because there's so much conflicting information out there. It scared me to hear her say that her doctor told her at her 26 week appointment that she was having a HUGE baby and would need a c-section (based on a notoriously inaccurate sonogram!). It scared me to hear her say that she feels empowered going into the hospital when the reality is that she obviously had NO CLUE about the basic pitfalls of having a baby in a hospital.

Don't get me wrong; I believe a mama should be able to birth wherever she chooses. Whether she is informed or not. The choice is ALWAYS with the mama. But I wanted to sit down and rattle off some statistics for her, I did, I wanted to! I didn't!!!! But I SO wanted to.

The other woman was not so scary; she was only six months along, was reading Active Birth, and was birthing at a birthing center with midwives. It was just this one woman, C, who made my stress levels go shooting through the roof. I have this awful tendency to want to rescue everyone, and I wanted to rescue her!

So, anyways, then began the pain tolerance stuff. The teacher started out by asking us, on a scale of 1 to 100, how painful we expected childbirth to be. Well, yanno, I'm doing the Hypnobabies thing. I believe I deserve an easy, safe, comfortable birth! I believe that I can have that. But I knew that if I said I believed birth to be TOO easy, she'd correct me. I just knew it. My husband and I both put our expectations of birth at around 50, and yes, she corrected us, and told us that she didn't want us to be expecting an easy birth and get a really hard one. I responded that for me, I felt that believing I'd have a really hard, painful birth, would be setting myself up for a hard, painful birth. She disagreed. *sigh* I don't necessarily think that is true for everyone, btw... but it IS true for me.

So then she passed out the ice, and we went through a series of exercises holding the ice. Now here is one thing that really upset me. C, the woman headed straight for a c-section happy doctor attended birth, was not really feeling any pain or discomfort from the ice. All the rest of us were! (Try holding a piece of ice in your hand for 60 seconds. To me, very uncomfy!) Anyways, C tried a few different things. She moved the ice to the inside of her wrist. She tried it on her neck. She just wasn't really perceiving it as painful at all. The teacher, however, seemed determined that she WOULD feel pain, she'd find a way!

I mean, isn't it possible that this woman has a high tolerance for pain, and is going to have a super easy labor? Isn't it possible that giving her confidence about her bodies ability to cope, vs. making her feel "broken" for not experiencing it the same way everyone else did, might have done more for her birth?

I know I'm overreacting, but this seriously upset me. The whole thing upset me. It got me all discombobulated and I wound up having insomnia all night till 4am, which I haven't had in a while. (Baby makes me sleepy!) So I'm going to try to get out of the class. The other aspect, btw, is that I already know all the information the teacher is giving us. I know the stages of labor, I know how the uterus works, I have seen tons of pictures of it, I can't wait to see my placenta! I know that if I start freaking out and saying I cannot do it, that means I'm in transition and ALMOST DONE! I know that I'm a little bit bossy sometimes (ok, maybe more than a little), and I have a hard time finding a balance between chatting and being... pushy. It's the Leo in me. It comes from a good place (wanting to help), but almost always engenders a bad reaction. I'm working on finding better ways to do it, or just hushing up, but I am not there yet... and I know I won't be able to help myself in this class! And, as you can see, the result is totally stressing me out.

I wonder if she'll refund at least half of our money!