Some of you have been wondering who the teacher of our birthing class is, so today I thought I would post a picture. This week she taught us how to do the deep guttural “OOOOOOHHHHMMMMMMMM” that made her so wonderful as the Mystic in The Dark Crystal and the high pitched cackle of her evil side.
She really wasn’t as bad as she has been, but she talked about feces a lot. She started with the advanced stages of labor and let us know that the ladies were going to poop non-stop. “Don’t worry, they’ll clean it up!” was her constant reassurance.
The helper was back and they brought out the birthing ball to show us how to deal with someone in the hysterics of advanced labor. The helper was great and we got the good tip, “try not to eat onions before you get in the face of a woman in labor and tell her that she does not need meds because it will all be over soon.”
I wanted to ask the most obvious question, “Should I remind her to go number 2 before she gets into the advanced stages?”
The best part was when she brought out a piece of gutter pipe to represent the curve of the birth canal. She stuck it between her legs and took us there big time. Then, she took a baby doll with a umbilical cord and placenta sewed to it, placed it between her legs, and tried to shove it through the pipe. When it wouldn’t go, she screamed, “This one’s a C-section!” and thrust the baby over her head as if it was Excalibur being pulled from the stone.
So, she made a lot of great sounds and she squatted over for most of the class. That was great. What really bothered me though was the ignorance of the rest of the class. I’m not saying that the other couples are not intelligent, they are. Yet, I got a feeling that the reasons they thought this woman was crazy was very different from the reasons that we did. Where we see her antics as over the top, they see her ideas as rebellious and problematic .
One of the fathers stopped her discussion of how the woman should move around, squat, sit on the ball, and everything but just laying in bed during the earlier stages of the birth and how we should make sure the hospital knows that we will not just do what is convenient for them with “Where will the Dr be through all this and what will he say about my wife knelling down during her birth?”
I was a little bothered. From everything we had read and seen in videos, the Dr wouldn’t even be around until the woman was fully dilated. It was plain that many of the parents see birth as a medical procedure and nothing more.
Then, another guy asked if there was anyone in the class that had not been adviced to take the drugs. We were the only ones who raised our hands. Of course, no offense to those of you who chose to take the meds, but why are these people taking a 7 week class on the birthing process if the mom’s are just going to drug up and push when the Dr says to. We knew that we were one of 2 couples that had chosen a midwife over a Dr, but I thought they at least wanted to try and have a natural birth.
The teacher was a little surprised as well. She told him that the Dr should be right there helping and that most hospitals are a lot more liberal about letting the mother create a birthing plan and respecting her wishes, but most of the couples seem happy to let people who really know nothing about childbirth run their birthing. We’re from the Bible belt and we are more forward thinking than that.
We’re going to talk more about birthing plans next week. I want to see our teacher’s Skeksis come out more and her tell these people to grab a little research and watch The Business of Being Born.
Hmmm, maybe I’m liking her a little more now that I picture her as a wise old Mystic.
