1. When you really think about it, most grown women in this world have given birth to at least one child. There are basically kids who do it. There are elderly women who do it. I am at a really good age to have kids. If a 6-year-old and a 60-year-old can do this, I should be able to do it just fine.
2. Obviously throughout history a ton of women have died in childbirth. That's gotta make any prospective mother think twice about the whole childbirth thing. But the health care situation in America is pretty fantastic when it comes to helping women survive childbirth. I'm overall healthy; I think it would take a lot going wrong to put my or Baby D's life in serious danger.
3. I keep going to these hospital tours and midwife appointments and stuff, and the tour guides/midwives keep "enlightening" me with info that I already knew from personal research. I think that's a pretty good sign. I haven't learned anything new about the childbirth process recently, so I feel like I'm pretty well prepared.
4. Either way, this kid's gotta come out, right? So either he comes out vaginally or he gets cut out, but either way, by August for sure he will no longer be in me. So why stress? My freaking out about it will not make a difference as to how he emerges; it will only stress me and Carl out.
5. Pain is lame, but I feel pretty equipped to deal with it. When I was younger (read: under age 15) I had some health issues that at least to me felt like a very big deal. I was in pain very frequently and often it was excruciatingly intense. I pretty much had these scriptures tattooed to my mind and every time something would flare up, I would just think it over and over again and turn off the rest of my mind until the pain went away. Nowadays, any kind of pain I go through feels like not that bad in comparison. And now I always remember that any negative experience I pass through, passes. Every pain and sorrow I've ever experienced is just a memory now. I haven't been through labor yet, obviously, so the jury's still out on that one, but I do feel that as far as things go, I am relatively well prepared to deal with any sort of pain I might face.
I think my childbirth philosophy boils down to:
1. Studying up on the process and being mentally prepared for it [if ye are prepared ye shall not fear].
2. Realizing that no matter what, that baby is going to exit one way or another--so why stress and fret and fear? The process will take less than 48 hours, and afterward it will just be a memory anyway.
3. Remembering that a zillion women have done this and lived. This isn't exactly a unique experience you're going through. Plenty of people without access to quality health care have done it. Plenty of freakishly old and freakishly young people have done it. Plenty of people with startlingly low IQ's have done it. If those people can do it, why can't you do it?
I think it's a pretty functional philosophy. It's been serving me well so far.
The big thing I found myself thinking about last night as I practiced my hypnobirthing is that I really don't like the feeling of floating away. I think in hypnobirthing, that's a sign that you're doing it right: that you start feeling like your spirit is separate from your body, and you're kind of floaty and peaceful. It always freaks me out, though, when I get to that point.
So now I feel caught in a dilemma. I haven't been practicing as diligently as I could be with my hypnobirthing, because if I get too caught up in it, I start feeling like I'm floating away, and I strongly dislike that. But I think that's part of what makes hypnobirths so gentle: your mind is detached from your body and its pain, so you can focus on other things. But I just focus on how much I don't like that feeling.
I think I might actually prefer feeling pain to feeling floaty. O.o;
So, who knows. Not me.
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