Hippie-birthing

So this baby business is starting to feel real. For one thing, it’s moving around all the time—which, by the way, is awesome. This is the best part of being pregnant, by far. (There isn’t much else to recommend it, frankly.) I call it Sir Moves A Lot, even though I don’t know the gender for sure—I just really feel like it’s a boy.

Anyway, in preparation for all this realness, I signed up for a Hypnobirthing class. Please believe that I am in no way of the mindset that I do not want any kind of drug-induced pain relief during labor; I just want to manage on my own as long as possible, because sometimes if you get an epidural too early it can lead to unnecessary medical intervention and even a c-section, which I want to avoid like the plague.

So the Hypnobirthing technique is supposed to help you deal with the pain, among other things. (The goal is to do it unmedicated, but again, I’m not even going to pretend like I want that.) That said, the very phrase “Hypnobirthing” makes me feel so hippie-dippy; I just picture Edina in AbFab when she’s going through one of her faux-flower child phases. “Hypnobirthing, dahling, hyp-no-bir-thing!”

Anyway, I just took my first class last week, and my homework was to start listening to the CD that comes with the course materials. It’s really just this chick with a soft voice and a lilting British accent saying things like, “you are feeling very caaaaaaaaaalm, and relaaaaaaaxed, all throughout your body,” over the sounds of new age-y music. As a professional cynic, I’m not sure how this is supposed to work, and yeah, I really can’t relax, ever. I don’t think I unclenched my butt the whole time I was listening to the CD because all I could think about was my work deadline and how much I had to do the next day. Supposedly this stuff starts burrowing into your subconscious with repeated listens, enabling you to make yourself relax on command. We’ll see.

As much as this goes against pretty much everything I believe, however, I want to stick with it. In the first class, we watched videos of women giving birth under self hypnosis. Those bitches were CALM. They didn’t even make a sound when their babies were coming out. So I’m gonna give it a whirl.