Bradley Class #7: Planning Your Birth

Class last night was better than I expected, although I'm the only nerdy girl who did all the homework. Last week we had two assignments: one was to define a list of terms relating to birth and the other was to write up what you imagine happening day of birth.

My terms were pretty easy to define, although I will out Mistah C here and say that he had a programming error in execution of his homework. (See, I am not one of those women in class who did the assignment for her husband. He has to do his own homework - not that he would expect me to.) He and his partner divided the list into odds and evens. C had the evens, but he started counting his list with zero instead of one and as such he and his partner defined all the same terms. This was pretty funny. At least Mistah C had lots of good statistics to back up his information.

We spent the class with each person (completely out of sequence to accommodate the two gentlemen who will not be there next week) defining their terms and having a discussion about them. It was a good, lively discussion because everything mentioned was controversial: induction of labor, circumcision, Vitamin K shots, eye ointment treatments right after birth. I like lively discussion.

I was the only one who had done a birth story. I had such a hard time with it that it gave me a headache. I don't like playing "let's pretend" with the whole birth thing; I'm trying very hard to curb my over-planning tendencies to adopt a "go with the flow" attitude for birth. Imagining is partially for me starting to set expectations. At this point, I feel like I'm as educated as I can be on terms, procedures, and techniques, so it's not like writing a birth story will uncover new fun facts for me. I don't think visualization works as a technique here because I find visualization only works with repetitive tasks and I can't practice birth. It's just a tool for figuring out what you haven't thought of, but I really think a lot about this stuff.

Our birth story was very general and non-specific as a result, with no triumphant ending of, "And we held darling Bluto/Beatrix in our arms and wept with joy." Maybe it's easier when you know the gender and have tied all those expectations to the kid already, but we're still waiting to see what happens.

Speaking of expectations, I've been thinking about the effect that gender has on your expectations. It would probably make the shopping easier, but I like having a complete stranger moving in. Plus I've got one of the most non-sexist yet chivalrous husbands on the planet so I'm not concerned about fighting the ill-effects of my spouse. I'm talking about those men in the universe who talk a great game but do very little to fight actual sexism, like those who spout, "You can be President someday, honey!" at their daughters while their wife clears the table of all the food she has shopped for, prepared, and will now clean up and put away. "Now why don't you bring Daddy something to drink?"

I've read recently of a fun psych experiment you can do with your kid that we're going to do (surprise, Mistah C!) at some point. Regardless of gender, take a kid out somewhere public dressed as a boy. The comments will probably be: "What a little bruiser!" and "He's so strong!" You can take the same kid out dressed as a girl and get the, "Oh, how pretty!" "How sweet!" "How quiet!" "So delicate," comments. We'll do a couple control experiments when the kid is a couple months old and then we'll do it again when the kid's eighteen. That should make for a good college entry essay (and grist for therapy, yay therapy!).

One more thing: Bluto and Beatrix are the stand-in names we use when talking about the kid to other people; they are not the actual names in contention. We're just not naming the kid until we see what the kid looks like. Could the kid look like a Bluto or Beatrix? Hmm, good question.