I’d posted this on my “professional”/public blog and thought it worth posting again here. I am not a fan of Dooce and haven’t been for quite some time. There. I said it. Publicly. And I know I am not the only one. There are a couple of blogs that I don’t like much and yet I still read them occasionally. Why? I don’t know. I’m down to one a week with this one in particular and I think this last post that I read was enough to make me stop for good. She wrote a post that started with her daughter insisting that she doesn’t like oranges, even though she’s never tried them* and it ended with Dooce telling her that birth was the worst thing you could ever experience, essentially. It infuriated me and this is the post I wrote, explaining why. (*But PS, I’m confounded as to why a child of that age has never tried or been asked to try oranges before?) :
When I was about 19 years old, a friend of mine had a baby. For years afterward, she told me the usual stories. She told me about the pain, about having all these medical people crowding around you and then told me how they cut you (episiotomy). Her words stayed in my mind for the next decade and a half and for a long time, I swore I never wanted to have kids. Specifically, I never wanted to get pregnant or give birth. I’d heard nothing good about it. I was terrified of “destroying” my body, of the pain, of this cutting thing. As far as I know, that was how it always went. It never occurred to me that, hey, women’s bodies used to manage birth before doctors, before cutting.
And then… then I got pregnant at 33. The first 3 months were an emotional roller coaster and I went through a big period of adjustment. I had a hard time dealing with the in-between stage – the one where you look bigger, but no one can tell that you’re pregnant yet. By the end of the third trimester, there was a huge shift in my attitude. My body was not being destroyed (still isn’t, thank you very much, and what a stupid thing to say). I was not scared, for some reason. I was going to yoga 3-4 times each week to ease my aches and pains. I suffered from terrible back pain & sciatica and I couldn’t sleep well because my hips and my back burned. I chose not to focus on that, however.
I took yoga, I walked often and towards the end, I started swimming. I ate lots of raw vegetables and whole foods – fat is essential for pregnancy – raw milk, butter, grassfed beef. I even had sushi (at a very reputable place) a couple of times. I had a glass of wine a couple times each week.
More importantly, due to the fact that I’m a bit anti-social and kept to myself, I didn’t have many conversations with other pregnant women or mothers. I was feeling good & positive – I didn’t want to hear horror stories. I didn’t want to be drowned in negativity. Instead, I started reading books about natural birth, home birth, and various “natural” methods. I went to midwives instead of an ob/gyn. (Well, “medwives”, really, but that’s another story – I eventually wound up with an incredible birth doula and proper midwives.) This was during the “swine flu scare” so the worst I heard was one of the “medwives” trying to scare me into a swine flu vaccine. I declined, of course.
Eventually I started running into people or reading things online where a woman would start with the usual spiel about how awful childbirth is. My husband told his coworkers that I was going completely natural and they told him, “Yeah, she says that now – just wait, she’ll be screaming for drugs.” When someone started with the fear mongering, I’d tune them out and go back to watching videos of water birth. It was beautiful, really. The women in these videos & photos didn’t look like they were suffering. They weren’t screaming. They weren’t being tortured or looking miserable. That’s how I wanted to be. I realized that I couldn’t be pregnant forever, and he’d have to get out eventually, so I might as well enjoy it.
I have a few friends who have NOT had children yet and they’re amazed at my serenity & all the positive things I have to say about pregnancy and birth. Every time they hear the usual awful things, they write to me and ask if I’ll be there with words of encouragement when they get pregnant. OF COURSE. There’s no reason any woman needs to be inundated with anything but positive words during that time. NONE.
We ultimately had a (planned at the last minute) home birth and he was born 10 days early. The birth was hard & fast & intense. I walked around the house, did some semi yoga poses and then told my husband and birth doula, “I’m pushing NOW.” I was on my hands and knees. No one cut me and I DID NOT TEAR. (I attribute that to the position and to all the yoga squats.) The point of this post is not to lecture on the safety and benefits of home birth – however, I will tell you this: Laying flat on your back is the worst position for birth. You do not have to be cut, you don’t have to tear. The risk and/or severity of tearing can be greatly minimized by many things: giving birth on your hands and knees or squatting, doing yoga squats, and perineal massage. NOR is any part of my body destroyed, so just stop with all that, ok?
Sometimes someone tells me, “It’s easy for you to say all this, you had it all easy.” Did I? Or does it just sound like it because I choose not to whine about anything? Birth was intense. It wasn’t “easy” because I was lucky. It was “easy” because I worked, both emotionally, physically, and mentally, to make it a positive experience.
That’s not to say that birth always goes as planned. Things happen. But it doesn’t have to be all doom & gloom and negativity. A friend of mine had a difficult birth – she was in a hospital, induced, on her back, and they used the vacuum to get her daughter out. She still doesn’t look back & tell other pregnant women about how much it sucked. She still focuses on the positive.
There’s a name for the “fear of birth” – tokophobia. It’s on the rise. Women are TERRIFIED of birth. Is that any way to go into it? Having Felix was the most incredible, life changing experience I’ve ever known – why should women go into this experience full of fear & anxiety?
Part of the problem is other women. Misery loves company, indeed. I encountered a lot of venom anytime I’d talk about the positive aspects of birth and pregnancy. When I said I wasn’t swollen & feeling fine, people said, “Oh, just wait another couple of weeks.” The only people that were encouraging, supportive, and full of positive words are the home birth & serious natural birth community.
I am TIRED of birth being talked about in a negative light. Today, I read a post by Dooce, in which she essentially tells her daughter that NOTHING is as bad as birth, that birth trumps everything (negative.) Really, Dooce? Her daughter is around 5 years old, I think? (I’m not sure, exactly.) “The destruction of your vagina,” are the words she & her husband use with each other. Nice, huh?
I get it. Dooce makes a living off of being witty and miserable. People seem to bond over pain & miserable experiences and I think that’s sad. I think it’s, quite frankly, fucked up that she would already start to instill this attitude in her daughter. If our next one is a girl, she will grow up learning that birth is an empowering, positive experience and nothing to fear. Hell, even my son will know this and hopefully be able to help his wife feel better about the whole thing, someday. (Though, I hope he’ll marry a woman who has a mind of her own, who doesn’t buy into all this negative bullshit and who is more of a glass half full kind of person.) I single out Dooce, especially, because the woman has a gazillion readers, many women who read posts like this & add fuel to the fire (in comments) for other women to read who have not yet had children. She is just yet another part of the media that perpetuates this self fulfilling prophecy of scary & painful birth experiences. STOP. Just STOP.
Mind you, anyone who knows me will tell you, I’m not beaming ray of sunshine. I am cynical and sarcastic and not a big fan of people, in general. Or at least, I act like it. It’s not something I like about myself and I continually strive to be more positive and less smart-ass.
But you will NEVER hear me filling someone else’s head with ideas about the awfulness of anything that they endeavor to do. Birth, as with any situation, is what you make of it. You want to fill your head with ideas of all that can go wrong, let yourself be full of anxiety about pain and things you can’t control? Then yes, yes, birth will probably suck. Not because it actually sucks, but because YOU think it does. Anxiety & fear = tension = pain.
So just avoid Dooce when you’re pregnant, ok?