Partum Me?! Wait… I have to get him OUT??

As of today, I am TERM!  37 Weeks.  Any day now.  The little dude inside me could come out right now and he’d be able to breathe, eat, and of course, poop all on his own.  I have a viable little human being in there.  I still can’t believe it.

When I was about 18 weeks pregnant, my husband and I went to dinner with some friends who were also expecting their first child.  My friend Lisa was due just a month before me, and recently gave birth to a beautiful little boy.  As we were sitting at that dinner, she asked me what I was most worried about.  I replied that I wasn’t so much worried about anything as I was curious about what kind of little person I was growing in there.  What would he look like?  Whose personality would he mirror the most?  Who would he grow up to be?  After waxing poetic for a minute or so, I asked her the same question she’d just asked me.  Her reply came without hesitation.

“Well, I’m just worried about how I’m going to get him out.”

Up until that point in my pregnancy, I had never even thought about labor.  And to be quite honest, I didn’t think too much about it after my conversation with Lisa until I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes.  At that point, even though she still fully supported our plan for a vaginal birth, my OB reminded me that I would need to be flexible when the time came, in case our “big boy” needed to be delivered via c-section.  Since then, I’ve had to consider what is most important to me in terms of how the little person growing inside of me enters this world.

I’ve gotten a lot of opinions, both solicited and not, about how I should look at the birth experience.  I respect them all, especially those that come from the intelligent and thoughtful people that I call my friends.  For some couples, the birth is a personal journey for the parents, and so they work very hard to come up with detailed birthing plans that will allow them to have the greatest experience possible.  For others, labor and delivery is simply the medical procedure that a mother and father must endure in order to get to the end result: a healthy baby.  I like to think that my goals for the birth of my son fall somewhere squarely in-between those two extremes.  I would like for the story of our son’s birth to be one that my husband and I look back on with pride – a collection of moments that make us proud of our strength as both individuals and as a couple.  But at the same time, I want to come out of this knowing that I never once put my own personal experience over the health and safety of my son.

We’ve opted to go into L&D with a list of preferences, but we won’t term it as a birth plan because we want the staff to know that we are willing to work with them if our son has needs that we haven’t anticipated.  We’ve also decided against having a doula because we believe that a healthy dose of skepticism is okay, but in the end, our doctor and maternity nurse will help us make the right decisions about what to do.  I know that both a plan and a doula can enhance the birth experience  and I’m open to the idea of using them if we have a second child and I feel like I want a different experience the next time around.

But right now, as I finally get around to really thinking about “how I’m going to get him out?” I’m thinking that the best thing I can do as his mom is to just take it one moment at a time and promise him that I’ll do whatever is necessary to make sure he’s healthy.  Knowing that I put him first from the very first contraction is the only birth story I’ll ever need.