I want to start off saying that if I’ve offended you by discussing my thoughts on birthing (by having thoughts that differ from yours), I am sorry. Though I feel that it matters, immensely, for me to learn and prepare for my final birth (oh yes, this will be my final birth), and though I feel it will help me be a stronger, more determined, more capable mother and woman if I stretch myself in this way, that doesn’t (honestly, pinky swear) mean I think anyone else is less strong or less determined or less capable or in any way less of a mother if she doesn’t care to think about these things, or if, having thought of them, decides to give birth hung by her toes on Neptune.

I really am self-centered enough that this is really ALL ABOUT ME. (and MY BABY).

(Though I have to tell you I’ve heard the air is very thin on Neptune, so you might want to re-think that).

(oh, I kid.)

Maybe this will explain some of my inelegant, sloppy, unintentionally incoherent analogies and plans: Reading about this labor and delivery stuff? To me it has been such a revelation . . . (I didn’t even know your body continually made amniotic fluid. My doctor told me my water was “low” with my first, and I thought, HOLY CRAP, better get the kid out before it’s ALL GONE, even though my water hadn’t broken).

It’s like suddenly I know the earth is round, and I am flabbergasted that people are still running around screaming that it is flat.

Have you accepted Jesus into your life yet? Have you been saved?

The sky is falling! The sky is falling!

When I analogized that there is maybe a right way for each woman to birth at each of her births (by comparing it to finding the right person to marry), that wasn’t supposed to suggest I thought every women should birth the same way, any more than I would suggest that we should all marry the EXACT SAME PERSON. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of even one sister-wife — you think I want to think that my husband is the right person for any other woman on this freaking planet besides me? H to the no.

And while I think there might be a best (right? most satisfying? safest?) way for a birth to go, how variable that turns out to be (one woman moos in the throes of transition, another throws pies at a clown for relief)  is one of the most fascinating things about this.

My whole point (and here I will plagiarize the Dooce): There are options! and choices! God is great! Praise be to Allah!

(the Allah part I threw in myself.)

And I think being aware of those options and being involved in making those choices makes you a (happier? more empowered? more satisfied?) person.*

(There, I said it. I am judgmental. If you choose to have a c-section because otherwise you will die, I think you are a better person than someone who would refuse that choice and that option. Sue me.)

*Ack, so maybe I don’t really believe that. What if you live in a repressed society, or you’re young, or the weight of the moral/intellectual authority of the medical establishment is so convincing you feel it best to leave it up to them? I don’t know.

I just finished my second birth book and stomped downstairs to inform Dick that we’ll be needing to hire a doula, someone who can support me and advocate for my desires in childbirth. Dick says we don’t have the money for that (I know we don’t), so I say he can do it, but he’ll have to change his attitude, read at least three books, and commit to giving me the support I’m going to need.

The kind of support I need is the kind I sort of envisioned my mom giving me when I gave birth to Sally nine years ago. But instead of encouragement and inspiration she told me she was worried about me coping with labor because my pain threshold is lower than hers and that, by the way, she and my dad were flying back to Utah (from New York) the next day, so I better have the baby pretty soon. That’s completely unfair to my mom though, because I wasn’t prepared or informed about the dangers (and cascading interventions that often follow) of induction and epidurals or the alternative pain-management techniques I could practice or ask for and the benefits to mom and baby of allowing labor to be labor. And I was even more impatient than they were to get that baby here.

But now things are different, and the more I read, the more I’m sure that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Right now I feel really dangerous. I started with Baby Catcher, which is the perfect introduction to physiological/natural/midwifery-style childbirth. I had tried Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, but found it to New-Age-hippie for me. Baby Catcher hit all the right notes — a credentialed maternity RN who became a CNM and only gradually became suspicious of routine medical policies. And it’s told in entertaining story form, so I couldn’t put it down, even as I cried at the happy (and occasionally tragic) outcomes. It’s a history of maternity care and midwifery in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s and it includes being sued, which surprised me, and it profiles so many helpful descriptions of what labor can look like (instead of how it should progress).

Then I started reading Pushed, and though it has a lot of helpful statistics, like, “a woman is four times more likely to die having a cesarean section than a vaginal birth” (p. xix) and that episiotomies increase the likelihood of perineal tearing by nine times rather than reducing it (p. 30) (outcomes for baby are similarly adversely affected by interventions), I got bogged down in the dense, overwhelmingly bleak detail. Though I did learn that the problem is not that we have technology and interventions available, but that these things (inductions, forceps, c-sections, electronic fetal monitoring) began as helps for high-risk, medically-indicated situations and in spreading to low-risk, normally-progressing labors, do more harm.

So I switched to Henci Goer’s Thinking Woman’s Guide to a Better Birth and gulped it down at once. It’s a great, simple read with appendices stretching from here to infinity of study after study that show that managed/active care (rather than supportive care) is not superior, and in most cases, unhelpful or dangerous for both mother and baby. Someone on Twitter today said “the next person to equate no epidural with ‘getting a gold star’” would be in for it, and I can understand that reasoning. I don’t want to listen to anyone brag about being a “real” woman for staying strong or being above the pain, but the problem with an epidural is not that it represents “failure” (it doesn’t — I’ve had three, and my kids and I turned out just fine, an indisputable measure of “success” if any there is), but that done as a matter of course, without study and informed choice and as a last resort, it opens the door to way too many other medical interventions that I would like to avoid.

Reading these books, it seems a miracle I didn’t end up with a c-section the first time. And before anyone leaves a “My baby and I would’ve died if we hadn’t gotten an xyz,” please preface that by saying you didn’t start out getting induced three days before your due date because your doctor was going out of town. Sure a medical intervention might’ve saved your life and your baby’s life, but unless your labor until then was medical-intervention free (or super-limited, like, to intermittent fetal tone-listening or something) , it really doesn’t mean that much. (If you were high-risk the whole time or had one of those rare complications, then thank goodness for modern medicine, because that’s what it’s for, right?)

I also feel like saying I don’t want to talk about this to anyone (Ryan, I’m looking at you) who hasn’t read the same books I have, but that’s not fair either. If someone had said anything like this to me five years ago, I would’ve slashed their sustainable-bamboo tires.

And I admit, I’m scared of the pain. I’m scared I won’t be able to endure labor without begging for relief. (So a shiny gold star would be nice to look forward to). I’m scared that when I have this baby in a hospital, someone’s going to break my waters or hook me up to a machine without my consent. About the only thing I’m confident of is that I’ll have a better birth for me and the baby this time, even if I do end up with an epidural or a c-section or anything, because this time I’ll know why.

After even the little that I have read, it seems odd to even entertain the notion “but does it matter how you give birth? Isn’t the only important thing that you end up with a healthy baby?” (odd and also absurd because going as non-medically as possible is actually safer for low-risk and even moderate-risk mothers), but I want to address it because I have a thought on it.

When I was growing up, my parents always said it was important to marry the right person at the right time in the right place. The right person would be known to you through God, as would the right time, and the right place was always the temple. I remember watching Fiddler on the Roof and my dad pointing out that he thought only the oldest daughter managed to get all three rights together. And the three rights might make God happy, but more importantly they make for easier marriages and happier people (think how sad the third daughter was to have to leave everything familiar behind to marry a nonbeliever in a time of war (when her own people were persecuted by the same group her husband belonged to); sure love conquers all, etc, but it’s a lot harder, right?).

So in the birth analogy, it’s obvious that what is important is the mornings you wake up to make breakfasts cheerfully (even if you have to fake it), and the times you tenderly comfort your headstrong five-year old when she hurts herself doing something you told her seven times not to do. Surely the twelve or twenty-four hours you spend in birth are meaningless set against the lifetime of mothering you’ll give that child.

But that twelve or twenty-four hours is the time you become the mother of that child, just as the ten-minute ceremony in the temple is the time you become a wife or a husband. In the years of a marriage, forgiving quickly and forbearing to nag over the stinky compost that sits on the deck attracting mice instead of getting stirred into your lovely compost turner are what matters, not a ritual smattering of words by an officiator you’ll never see again.

But it does matter. You can go to the right place later as long as you have the right person; you can find the right person your second time, of course you can, but the point is that your goal is to eventually have it all.

I’m not saying that the right birth for me (let alone anyone else) is a completely natural birth at home whenever the baby wants to come. I’m pretty sure I’ll be at a hospital, with a midwife, and I’ll try to do it naturally, and if I change my mind because of back labor for seventy hours or I go past 42 weeks (my current cut-off) or something changes it for me like the baby in real distress, as long as I know why, it’ll be just right.

I went to bed at 8 p.m. last night, and fell asleep immediately. I woke up a couple times to pee, and the second time, I reminded myself that I need to wake up early to prepare my little thing about sacrifice to share in Sunday School (we’re on Abraham and Isaac this week).

And then I started to dream. I dreamt I was in a car, driving to church in Maine (thanks, Charlotte ;p). It was a small car; Tom was with me, and we were younger, like in our college days. In the front seat was another college-age type guy and driving was a person from my past, someone I think less and less about every day, week, month, year, but an important person who belongs in the past. We were speeding, going way to fast. It was dark, even at close to nine a.m. in the winter. There were two little girls in the back with Tom and I; I think they were our daughters, but not really our daughters yet.

We were stopped by a cop because the person from my past was (typically) going way to fast. I did the talking and got us off with a warning, because we looked presentable and were on our way to church. We went through a dark tunnel, and now the other college-age guy was driving, and he wasn’t using his lights. We asked why he wouldn’t turn the headlights on and he said something that was probably symbolic blah-blah-blah about how the light at the end of the tunnel told him the right way even with the curves, and somehow the headlights would actually be more confusing.

We got to the church in Maine, which turned out to be a gorgeous old Victorian that a church family offered for services every week. The congregation was small, and it turned out my parents and the aunt and uncle I stayed with in Germany were there. The person from my past pulled out an iPhone and tried to show me pictures of our time together. I brushed them aside, saying I thought I hadn’t kept any pictures at all, but those pictures on the iPhone were so crisp, so clear, we were so young, and, in the pictures, having such a good time.

Then my aunt came up to me and asked if I could talk to her youngest daughter who had just had a preemie baby (but somehow it was also adopted) and she was trying to stimulate milk production so she could breastfeed this tiny new daughter, but it wasn’t going very well. I said sure, gratefully, and escaped to where my cousin was. I told her my breasts had felt full the past few days, since I’m four months pregnant, and I thought I might have some colostrum, so could I try to feed the baby? She passed the perfect, tiny baby over to me and I showed her how to latch (and there was some other stuff about aereolas and nipple stimulation, etc, but I’ll spare you that), and suddenly I was my current-day self (obviously, because I’ve nursed babies and I’m currently pregnant). And that baby went after my milk like  a sailor on shore leave and now I’m crying because I can’t wait to hold my own baby like that. I’m as excited and eager for this fourth child as I was for my first, and my second and my third, and that surprises me.

Then I woke up and realized this really puts a kink in what I was going to say in Sunday School (after I told Tom that, no, I wasn’t going to bring up anything about how the Muslims believe it was Ishmael who was sacrificed, or what I have been thinking during our family scripture study — that though the whole earth is supposed to be blessed through Abraham’s seed, it actually seems that almost every war ever fought can be traced back to Abraham through the rivalry between Christians, Jews, and Muslims).

No, I was going to say, before this little dream, that the only real thing I’ve ever sacrificed was my own ambitions, in order to be a mother, and to be a mother the way I have chosen to be. I was going to say that, of course, what I have learned in ten years of this “sacrifice” is that when I am happier in sacrificing, I think it is both a more acceptable offering to the Lord and an easier sacrifice for me to make. So the moral was that God liked Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac because there was no whining from Abraham about all the poopy diapers he and Sarah changed and all the hours they spent raising him into a kid who could actually pull his weight around the farm.

Instead I have to admit: I have sacrificed nothing.

I could say I have sacrificed this sin or that sin, and in some cases, that took a lot of work.

I could say I have sacrificed a night of sleep here or there (though much less it seems than most mothers).

I could say I have sacrificed my desire to do what I want when I want and in as much quiet as I want.

I could say I have sacrificed the life I might have had for the life I have now, but that sounds like a lie.

Now I have confused myself and have to look up sacrifice. “the surrender or destruction of something prized or desirable for the sake of something considered as having a higher or more pressing claim.”

Turns out I have sacrificed a lot, and hope to be able to sacrifice much more, because so far, what I’ve gotten in return is much higher and pressing.

(And yes, it is easy to say that when the kids are all still asleep and I can make pancakes and stuff my face in the blessed early-morning quiet.)

Last Sunday we waited in the foyer after church. Spot danced around me, describing the people from the next congregation, who were leaving the chapel in ones and twos for the bathroom, a drink, a tithing envelope. “That’s a man with a mustache” she chanted (quietly). “That’s a boy with a vest.” “That’s a big lady with a big bum.” (It was.)

Yesterday Susan or Spot or Sally, somebody spilled something and didn’t clean it up. Made a mess and wouldn’t take responsibility. I couldn’t get a confession. I resorted to, “I don’t care who did it, I just want you to be honest.” They are too young and trusting (and short-memoried) to know that I do care, and that once I’ve lavished the child who was honest with praise, I’ll still make them clean it up. Susan finally relented. “Mom, can I tell you the real, real truth now?” Of course, I said, pleased. “It was Spot,” she said.

Several weeks ago at lunch, Carina said she’d read somewhere that if your kid hasn’t asked you about sex, or where babies come from by the age of seven or eight, they already know, from someone who is not you. I started to panic. Sally was turning nine the next week, and she had never asked, or when we talked about the baby, she was satisfied with answers like, “people can have a baby once they’re married and you love your husband.”

But I thought, I know my child, my girl-child who would rather gallop like a horse than strut like a Bratz doll, who reads boy books and girl books without knowing that some people think there is a difference. Who wears her holey jeans to school with the same air of indifference that she dons her church dress and says she’d prefer to get her hair cut again because she likes it just below her ears.

Who, even though I offered first when she turned eight, and again before she turned nine, doesn’t want to get her ears pierced, not yet, not now. She is wholly, completely, gloriously, still a child, my child. Who doesn’t have a cell phone, doesn’t know how to work a computer without my help, who has never seen a video game, for whom a half hour of TV watching (Fetch with Ruff Ruffman on PBS) is a treat, one that doesn’t happen every day.

Some days she watches more TV, if I am done, for whatever reason. Sometimes she will only eat one of each vegetable in the salad, and makes gagging noises when we make her try the tilapia, despite warnings to set a good example for her sisters. Sometimes she wails when I ask her to unload the dishwasher, even though I’ve been expecting it of her for what seems like a decade. Sometimes I think she must be starting her period four years early as she screams, “You hate me,” and barricades herself in her room.

But I go up to her room later and see the twenty-seven horse posters on the wall and the picture of Jesus torn out from The Friend, and, in the front and center of her dresser, the picture of a three-year old Sally in her father’s arms, kissing his cheek, in front of the great pyramid. She knows I don’t hate her.

I came home from my lunch and asked her, casually, if she knew what sex was, and how babies are made. She shrugged and said no. I breathed in relief and went to find Tom to let him know we’d be having The Talk with Sally that Sunday.

On Sunday, after my nap, I sat Sally on the couch and told Tom that, yes, he needed to actually be there, to sit and listen, and maybe say a few things. I was surprised how apprehensive I was. I’m not shy about sex, or uncomfortable with my children, but The Talk is a delicate thing to balance.

I wanted Sally to a) feel how much we love her and want her to be happy, b) believe two seemingly contradictory things: that 1) sex is good and fun and special and 2) it’s only like that after you’re married (I want her to both look forward to sex as a wonderful, natural, normal part of life, and to resolve within herself to wait for it), and c) to comprehend some good, accurate information (I spent the years eight to thirteen thoroughly confused about one part of the male anatomy).

I started out talking about how dad and I got married, but resorted to the same thing that calmed me on my wedding day. I asked her about Adam and Eve, and what God told them, and what they did. I don’t believe the only purpose of sex is procreation, but it’s a big part, and it helps to think of it in those terms, biologically, especially as my own tummy gets rounder and rounder. I explained that sex also helps married people love each other more.

She had some questions. “Have you and dad, you know, done it?” I said, well, we do have three kids. “When do you do it?” And I told her, if our door is locked, like on a Saturday morning or a Sunday afternoon, you probably don’t want to come in anyway.

And then she asked, “How does it feel?” I looked at Tom. He didn’t want to answer that one. I said, you know how you feel when you’re really, really hungry and then you finally eat something? Or when you have to sneeze and then it finally comes, and it’s a relief? Something like that, but better. “But how does it feel?” (That was the only question I deferred until she’s older, like thirty-five and engaged. I promised to tell her everything when she is engaged.)

It was easy to explain keeping our bodies clean and pure to Sally, and why we do things differently even when the rest of the world takes sex lightly, because she’s used to choosing modest clothing from racks of stuff “we don’t wear,” and she knows that there are kid movies and mommy movies, for example, and that some good things are only good when you are older, like riding in the front seat of the car (even Spot can tell you that you have to be twelve for that). (There have been exceptions, of course, but only when mom said so.)

I remembered how, when I first went through the temple, I thought, this is all stuff we learned in Primary. Be obedient, serve the Lord, keep your covenants. The Talk is a little different, just like the temple the first time is a little different. It’s a big milestone, a moment in time that separates you a bit from childhood and pushes you toward adulthood. But I realized, instead of being disjointed, instead of being some big thing outside everything else we’ve ever taught her, it was just another step in what we’ve always been teaching her. (Forget for a moment how I teach them to yell and swear, when I forget that everything I do that they see is teaching them something.)

Tom finally made a contribution, at the end. He told Sally that she could ask us anything, anytime. In fact, we want her to talk to us about this stuff and not her friends, because we know there is a difference between sacred and secret. Of course when she’s older she’ll talk to her friends, her roommates, and that’s okay. As long as she remembers where she heard it first.

And then she asked one last question. At the beginning of The Talk, she was curled on the couch, knees to her chest, eyes half-hidden, giggles issuing from her circled arms. Slowly she unfolded, turned towards us, as her interest overcame her embarrassment.

So despite all my faults, my tantrums, my discontents, the days I shout for no reason and use the mean voice instead of the patient voice that is smart enough to know these kids are only children, only young, only innocent, Sally asked, finally, “Can I have a hug?”

And I wondered if Susan, at five, is really too young for The Talk.

A week ago, I was walking to Chrysanthemum’s house for our morning constitutional, and I waved to another friend driving by in her pristine black minivan. She is the kind of lady (Barbie) who I would normally not bother to make friends with because she is too-perfect looking (I am a reverse-appearance snob), but I met her at church lady aerobics, and she’s funny and interesting.

I looked down at myself after waving to her. I was all dressed up for my morning walk, yoga pants stretched over my pregnant bum (yes, I get a pregnant bum) and my old red fleece sweatshirt that was a hand-me-down from Mimi’s husband ten years and nine moves ago. It has holes in it from flying ashes while camping, but it is still my favorite sweatshirt.

The pockets on both sides were weighed down below the hem, sticking out, bouncing on my legs, with a small water bottle and an apple. I had my ugly beanie and funny old-lady mittens on. My face was not as clear as my pregnancy skin often is. Oh, and I was wearing my (again favorite) prescription sunglasses, also ten years old, that are quite unfashionably-shaped, but they are polarized so they give everything a soft rose tint.

And I thought, I can’t wait until I’m 50 and I can wear whatever I want, and do whatever I want, and no one will think anything of the eccentric old lady down the street. (Apologies to my young 50-year old readers.)

Then I realized two things: I already do wear and do what ever I want (obviously, mostly).

And: I am becoming my mother. (hurray!)

—

This post started out as a much-too-long comment on Charlotte’s blog.

Two words: Sex dreams. Discuss.

(not your husband) (Pierce Brosnan — younger, like in The Thomas Crown Affair or James Bond) (HOT, oh my) (okay, if I were conscious and choosing these things it’d be Russell Crowe (the Gladiator one, not the puffy Insider one) or Taylor Lautner’s abs — he could wear a paper bag* and not talk, right?) (but it was Pierce Brosnan, a Pierce Brosnan who was also every crush you ever had in your hormone-fueled teenage imaginings) (HOT)

I would probably feel guilty if a) I had not suffered through several abandonment dreams and b) I had not been rudely awakened about three-fourths of the way in. Instead, I feel just a little bit . . .  frustrated.

(also: HOT)

—

*The paper bag is so you don’t have to think about how young he is. Once he cut his hair in that one movie, he was quite presentable.

You know how they say the number one thing married people fight about is money?

I hate that it is the number one thing that Tom and I fight about too, because we don’t have one of those marriages. We have a happy marriage.

But bring out the budget talk, or, worse, the Freelance Eviscerator Taxes, and . . .  Let’s face it, it’s mostly me. (Because I always do the taxes.) (And because I am a shrew the likes that would make milquetoast Bianca look good.)

Do you fight about money the most? (If you never fight, and by fight of course I mean “discuss rationally and lovingly but from understandably different points of view” then try to make something up, because I already feel bad enough.)