There is nothing more anxiety-inducing for a woman, pregnant for the first time, than the thought of a child’s head coming out of her vagina. I can assure you, nothing. Ask anyone. Ask the woman sitting on the train next to you what her deepest worry was during pregnancy and she will most likely say her vagina.
I had a client once who wrote on her birth plan: ‘’I am particularly attached to my vagina and plan on using it for years to come. I’d like to keep it in excellent working order and I ask you to be kind to it.’’ This is the only birth plan I have ever seen received by hospital staff with joy and laughter, and deep respect.
I spent the nine months pregnant with my first child stalking the aisles of baby stores and getting the hard sell on $5000 bedroom sets from middle-aged male sales clerks, declaring loudly what a good parent should buy. My parents flew 1200 kms to come and help me paint a room my child would eventually sleep in once in the first two years of his life. I bought and folded more tiny pjs than he would ever wear. I had bottles and pumps and sterilizers at the ready – just in case. I ran around accumulating and all the while underneath I was repeating to myself: but how will a head come out of my vagina? How will my body survive? There was another voice further down that also whispered: how in hell’s bells are you going to raise this child? You’re a mess!
Now that I am 15 years into parenting, I understand that it’s the raising of those little humans that is the real hard stuff. Each fear in its own time. But that’s a piece for another day.
We need to take care of our vaginas and shout it at every person that comes near. But it begs the question: If we are deeply afraid for our vaginas when giving birth why then do we spend tens and hundreds of hours researching and buying things to ‘’get ready’’ and rarely do we have the conversations necessary about said vagina? Why did I spend 17 hours researching car seats when what I was really freaked out about was getting my vagina all busted? The discord between what is an emotional hurdle and what we focus on doing in pregnancy is often startling to me.
Let’s look at what we need to be ready to bring a baby home and keep him alive. We certainly need to buy some things or ask our friends to give us the stuff they are no longer using. We need to think about hygiene and warm clothes for baby, feeding them, and getting them to sleep. We need to gather together all the stuff and make a big nest out of it. This is an important stage in moving toward becoming a parent; we need to show ourselves and everyone else that we can provide, even if we’re terrified that we can’t. We pile stuffed bears and wipe-warmers, bottle-sterilizers and bassinets and cribs and playpens into our spaces. We spend the weeks and months following the birth clearing out all of this plastic shit and sending it off to charity in garbage bags.
What if I propose that being ready to birth, and parent is all about facing the dragon? What if we look all of those dragons in the eye and make a plan for staying the course when the dragons arrive? Because they will arrive. They arrive in the form of an infant’s cranium barreling through your vag and a tough negotiation with your midwife about an episiotomy or no. It is the 3 a.m. dark thoughts that we have perhaps ruined our perfect lives by having this screaming creature. Deep down we know we have dragons to face and we look for ways to show ourselves and everyone else that we are ready regardless. So, we buy a nose-sucker to distract ourselves and we chicken out on the face to face discussion with our doctor about their c-section rates.
I like the Pema Chodron quote: “Like all explorers, we are drawn to discover what’s out there without knowing yet if we have the courage to face it.” It takes a lot of courage to dive into the unknown of birth and parenting not knowing if we are brave enough. There was a moment in my son’s infancy when I looked around the devastation that was my home and realized that courage is just walking forward. Courage isn’t a quality we have or have not. Courage is the act of staring each dragon in the eye and doing our best to keep our feet planted on the ground. Breathe and repeat.
Right now, your neighbor is bathing her kid in the kitchen sink and one night every once in awhile their baby wears a tea towel pinned on as a diaper because she forgot to leave the house for 6 days? What if that says zero about her as a parent? What if the diaper has nothing at all to do with her worth? I would like to hug that mama and tell her she’s doing great. And she should go and take a nap.
What if the dragon is all the perfection we lay on ourselves and our deep fear that we will be inadequate? What if we have constructed a false notion that childhood should be perfection and we are the designers of that perfection? It’s a hard fall when you realize your kid’s life will be messy just like yours. That’s a big dragon to face.
Maybe it’s time to sit and have a tea and not write a list of things to buy but rather a list of ways to care for yourself, your couple and explore summoning up courage in the face of hard things. That could be real preparation-difficult preparation but real.
Also, the nose-sucker is really important so get that too!
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Please tell me what a nose-sucker is. I probably should have had one!
It’s a clever little contraption with a nozzle you stick up the baby’s nose, a little reservoir ( that traps the mucous) and a tube you put in your mouth. And then you suck all of the snot out of baby’s nose. It’s disgusting and thank God my husband grew up in a Jamaican family where they do it directly with their mouh. Gag. He was an expert at the nose sucker and appreciated the reservoir system. Gag again.