I know, I know. It sounds like a terrible sales pitch, and coming from a childbirth educator, you can easily imagine my bias.
However, I was once a pregnant woman whose closest experience to a childbirth class was watching on
How I Met Your Mother, when Marshall and Ted went to one without Lily and held one another's hands as they were told to look into one another's eyes and 'breathe each other in.' (
Season 7, Episode 4 - The Stinson Missile Crisis. You're welcome.) As an amateur cynic at the time, (since I couldn't find someone who wanted to pay me for that) I rolled my eyes at how cheesy this was. A few weeks passed and a terrifying idea hit me... This baby has to come out. I ended up taking a class and my life has never been the same since.
Sure, I'll give it to those who say you forget what you learned when labor hits... I remember profanities running amuck in my head as I thought, "This is a lot more intense than ice [from my classes]!" My first birth experience was more intense than I had imagined while practicing, and from my perspective, that is what veteran parents are saying when they say their classes were useless.
Some parents that I have talked to have taken classes that taught what to expect medically along with some breathing patterns for coping. It is important to have knowledge of the medical aspect of birth, but it is not enough. The vantage point of each participant while in birth is turned to a place of coping with the emotional, physical, mental, social and spiritual sensations. Knowledge of the medical event being
normal is reassuring, but it is not enough.
This is where
the right class can help you to reach that pinnacle of 'enough'. For me, that class is
Birthing From Within. Others find what they are looking for with
The Bradley Method,
Hypnobabies or
Hypnobirthing,
Birth Boot Camp or a variety of the many other options. That's fine! Finding what resonates with you is what will prepare you for birth.
The Right Class Helps You Feel Prepared
Birth can feel scary to some people. Every minute that passes can make mom feeling like a ticking time-bomb, just waiting to explode! It can cause an unreal amount of stress and anxiety, and as every pregnant woman has heard a thousand times, "That's not good for you OR the baby." Seriously, there is something you can do to help relieve that stress and pressure, and that's to be educated on and as best prepared for birth as possible.
The Right Class Helps You To BE Prepared
 |
Newly postpartum and wishing I had
better prepared for this moment! |
Yep, that's right. Yes, we did establish that many parents start to feel the intensity of active labor or the anxiety of a change in birth plans and feel unprepared. As the adrenaline and hormones begin to rush to help mom and her birth partner to keep up with this event, we can become forgetful and feel overwhelmed. This is a natural and
normal response to those hormones! It's now, more than ever, that parents need to practice what they learned in those classes and
breathe, breathe, breathe. As oxygen returns to our brains we can better access our memory and come up with what the next step should be in our births.
Beyond the birth itself, the right class will prepare you for what is forgotten all too much... the postpartum period. We spend so long placing our sole focus on getting that baby out that we forget to prepare and learn about what to do AFTER the baby arrives. I know that I am not the only mama to feel blindsided due to my lack of preparation for the postpartum period. For the love of all things holy, mamas,
be prepared for the postpartum period!!!
The Right Class Helps You Learn How You Cope
That's right, not how
to cope, but how
you cope. I can teach about pain coping strategies all day long, and none of that matters if you are a kinesthetic coper, but you think you want to cope with visualizations. Practice makes the master. By learning how you naturally cope you are able to learn methods that might work for you, and when your body requests your help during birth, you know how to help it.
The Right Class Helps You Learn To Trust Your Intuition
Speaking of your body's requests, let's go there! Many parents experience a moment in birth where their logical brain does not know what to do. Their intuition takes over as they rock, moan, cuss, visualize or find themselves focusing solely on the intensity of the contraction. These are not things that they intended to do, but it is what their body asked of them, and they obliged. Partners also come across this need for listening to intuition as mama slips into labor land and cannot always advocate for herself. Learning to trust intuition is vital as we step into parental roles for the remainder of our lives.
The Right Class Helps You Learn Skills That Can Change Your Life
Birth is about so much more than that one day. It directly affects mom, partner, and baby for the rest
everything. Sometimes as a parent we have to ignore the peanut gallery. Sometimes as a parent we have to do hard things. Sometimes we have to make hard choices. Seldom do things go according to plan. But in the end, we are better off for having learned that what matters most is what is inside of us. It's the strength and beauty of our relationships that count. It's knowing our options in life and making choices that give us our best chance for what we want.
of their lives. As parents-to-be and also as parents we are bombarded with thoughts and opinions about how we should do
You may not realize it for some time to come, but... Birth is the training ground for life.
Wouldn't
that be worth taking a class about?
