Childbirth Class #1

We had our first birthing class last night. We both think we're going to like the class and the instructor a lot because of her ability to not only draw on years of experience but also because her philosophy of the birthing process seems to match up with ours - plus she's realistic and involves humor in her approach. The class last night was a lot of theory, sort of, and discussion about the birthing process and our expectations of the experience. One thing we both liked was how she didn't call Dad the "coach" during labor and delivery. (She said that when she and her husband hired a ski coach for their son they looked for someone who had been skiing before and when they hired a golf coach for their other son they hired someone who had seen golf before. Many dads have never seen a birth and none of them had actually done it before themselves, so they couldn't really be called "coaches.") She calls Dad "co-creator and protector of the space." And every time, too. She never slipped up. Her reasoning on that is that Dad created half of the baby, he creates half of the marriage, he created half of the home environment and so during the birthing process he should be seen as such, as a co-creator. And as the protector of the space, it's his job to make sure Mom feels safe in her environment - safe enough to relax and do what she needs to do to have the type of birth she needs to have. Kelly said afterwards that he felt a sense of relief at not looking at the process as a "coach," that that was scaring him a little because he really doesn't know how to coach me through childbirth. But, he said that being a co-creator and protector of the space is something he feels very comfortable and confident doing.

Even just after going to this one class...and after discussing some things with our midwife and reading things in books and on line...we're thinking that our original view of "how things will go" is going to change. We think that some of our ideas were shaped by just thinking we'd do things the way other people do them or by the way other people told us we'd do them. And we don't really want to do things that way. I'm being open and ambiguous right now, and mostly on purpose, because we don't have anything established or really figured out for certain. But we're rethinking perhaps where we want to have the birth and how many people we want to alert right away and the type of experience we want it to be for us. We like knowing there are options - more than we initially came up with on our own - and we like the thought of exploring those options.