Or witnessing this – Blooming Birth is for blokes too. Virtually every man we spoke to for this book said he, too, felt utterly unprepared for the reality of his baby’s entry into the world. If properly prepared, your baby’s dad can have a hugely positive influence on how you experience this birth. So, even if he’s not an avid reader of birth books, at the very least get your partner to read Chapter 8: Blokes, Birth and Babies.
By the time you finish reading this you may not actually be looking forward to giving birth but you’ll certainly feel more confident about it. You’ll know you can’t control everything that happens, but you’ll understand more about what might. You’ll understand the maternity system and how to negotiate it so it serves you best. You’ll know how to get the support you need, before, during and after the arrival of your baby. And you’ll know where to go, what to read and who to talk to if you need more help or information.
Finally, we don’t have any hidden agenda here. Neither Julia nor I are obsessed by natural birth and New Age philosophies have largely passed us by (we will not, for instance, be asking you to mould your vagina in clay or write poetry to your fetus). We genuinely do not care if you want an elective caesarean, an epidural at the first twinge or a troupe of nuns in your delivery room singing Land of Hope and Glory as you push – as long as it’s a genuinely informed choice, based on what you know about yourself, and about your realistic options. We want you to cope brilliantly with this birth – whatever crops up – so that you can become a healthy mother (of one, two or more) with no regrets or lingering upset. We want you, in short, to become the kind of mother who forgets that she ever needed a book like this.
Chapter One: Pregnancy for busy women
‘Nobody can really tell you what to expect when you’re expecting because every woman feels it differently. My sister adored her expanding belly and said she felt like a sexy goddess throughout her pregnancy. I felt like an increasingly mad, swelling gorilla.’
FAITH, 32, MOTHER OF HARVEY (2)
EIGHT POSITIVE THINGS ABOUT BEING PREGNANT
1 Your love for this baby one day will be stratospheric.
2 People will treat you as if you are deeply special (well sometimes, at least).
3 You are not alone. Around 596,000 other women in England and Wales alone are having a baby this year too.
4 You have maternity choices and rights like never before. You have the right to question your caregivers, change hospitals, midwives or doctors, see your records and make informed decisions.
5 The laws on maternity leave have never been more in your favour and there are organizations to help you sort out what you’re entitled to if you’re confused. (See Resources.)
6 You are giving birth as the ‘doula’ movement is taking off in Britain – you can now find one-to-one emotional and practical support throughout this pregnancy and birth, even if the NHS can’t provide it.
7 You can still be glam: clothing companies are finally waking up to the fact that you may not want to wear leggings and bloke’s t-shirts for nine months. High street shops like Hennes, Dorothy Perkins and even Mothercare are coming up trumps; designer maternity lines are springing up all over the place and online maternity shopping is a constant temptation. (See Resources.)
8 You can look forward to nine months free from tampons, pads, PMT and condoms.
Welcome to the Alarmist Club
Brace yourself. You are pregnant. You’re probably floating in a world of stupendous self-admiration right now (you’re growing an actual, real BABY in there). But you may also have noticed that people now want to start scaring you about all the things that could go wrong. This will get worse. Over the next nine months you will be fed a load of neurosis-inducing claptrap about what you must eat, drink, breathe, think and do to keep that baby ‘safe’. There will be some good, solid, sensible information in there – things you really need to know – but it can be hard to isolate this from the endless conflicting advice you’ll get on how to ‘optimize’ your chance of producing a healthy baby. Pregnancy, these days, has become pathology. Friends, relatives, colleagues, books, websites, health professionals and even complete strangers will conspire to fill you with fear, guilt and self-doubt. You’d think it was some insane, risky, reckless ordeal you’re embarking on, not something basically ordinary, that women have successfully achieved since time began. In this chapter we’ll give you the ‘need to know’ information, and hopefully lay some of the neuroses to rest.
We won’t provide you with medical minutiae about obscure conditions or rare complications. Other books have done this far better than we ever could (though we’ll give you resources and ideas of where to look if you need to know more). Instead, we’re going to give you a solid sense of some of the oddities you might experience over the next nine months, along with practical tips from professionals and other women about how to handle them. We’ll show you that you can, indeed, have a basically healthy pregnancy whilst remaining a viable member of ordinary society.
Goddess or gorilla
Pregnancy can make you feel unbelievably beautiful; replete with hope and womanliness. It can be a blissful time, not least because those of us who’ve spent the last ten years trying to disguise our flabby bellies get to show them off in tight tops. Pregnancy can be a time when you’re treated like a goddess by your partner; a time when blokes in white vans look on protectively as you cross the road; when people give you seats on the bus (well, occasionally) and when strangers congratulate you. You may, as the months go by, look more and more fantastic, and feel amazing: have thicker hair, better skin, stronger nails and a beatific glow. It’s a time, in short, when you feel that life is the oyster inside the pearly shell that’s you.
But this may not be the whole story. For most of us, pregnancy doesn’t feel like glorious fruition all the time. At times it can feel distinctly disempowering to be up the duff. You can’t control what’s happening to your body and you may feel as if you’ve been hijacked by medical professionals and, indeed, a small alien. You may be constantly vomiting. You may have mood swings. You may feel shattered. You may also swell to the size of a house, sprout varicose veins and become a borderline psychotic. Pregnancy involves huge contradictions – physical and mental. Pregnancy books often use words like ‘blessing’, ‘joy’ and ‘gift’. A pregnancy may be all of these things but at times you can feel more like an overstuffed mammoth than a fecund goddess; more axe murderer than earth mother. Much of this is hormonal. Much entirely reasonable, all of it normal.
Staying sane in pregnancy
The good news is that though you can’t do much about the hand your pregnancy deals you, you can influence how you react to this manic, blissful, awful, amazing, fundamental new condition.
YOU CAN CHOOSE TO:
become well-informed but not obsessed.
take what people tell you with a pinch of salt until you know it’s true.
research and understand important medical matters that affect you.
embrace what works for you and reject what doesn’t.
Most of all, you can remind yourself, when you are being prodded, poked, advised and bossed, that it is still your body and your life – even if you do look like an inflatable hippo when you’re in the bath.
That