Well, since no one else has posted anything yet, I'll just go on about myself as if I wouldn't have anyway... As I mentioned my former "freedom" in my previous post in a way which may have sounded wistful or idyllic, I would like to temper that statement by quoting Janis Joplin in saying: "freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." While going from living on your own schedule to being at the mercy of someone else is a difficult transition, no matter how arbitrary and meaningless your old schedule was, with love and new found patience you come to see exactly this: "Wow... my former life was kind of empty... and I dare say I was kind of a suckier person by comparison and would have remained so had it not been for the instinctive formative influence of this little baby person..."
I would hate for anyone to get the wrong impression, as they often do, about my family and others who share our situation. It's not that my now husband and I had not planned on eventually getting married and having children. There were many times, particularly those following an evening/morning/afternoon of unrestrained passion, that we would discuss all the wonderful, hypothetical future outcroppings of our relationship. Everything just came to fruition a little earlier than expected. I think of it this way: if our life were a movie on an old vhs video tape, it was like we were in the middle of a long opening of sex scenes and party scenes which had already gotten their point across and were beginning to bore the onlookers, so someone pushed the fast forward button for a minute, and as a result we had to haul ass like crazy people for a little while figuring out what we were going to do. We were fastforwarded through the engagement scene and the marriage scene, which was still quite nice I must say though a little rappid and slightly blurry, through all the many studying scenes of myself and my husband adjusting to his new job, and then my graduation scene, and finally this mysterious pressence took its finger off the button at a really great moment when I was about a month away from giving birth and finally reunited with my beloved husband.
My husband and I had to live apart throughout most of my pregnancy. He graduated from college about a week or so before we found out I was pregnant and took a job in a city about an hour from the town where we had gone to school. I had to stay on in said college town and finish up my degree, all the while praying I wouldn't go into early labor thus sabbotaging the entire effort. My husband moved in with his parents to save money, while I crammed about a year and a half's worth of credits into one summer and a fall semester. Praise be! It worked, my husband flourished at his job and I graduated without having a nervous breakdown and without a moment to spare as I was about to proverbially explode.
So, after graduation I finally got to move in with my husband, and yes, his parents. Before, whenever I would tell people I was going to be moving in with my in-laws they would always look at me with some puzzlement and ask: "Are they... foreign?" And I would pause for a moment imagining myself with a kercheif on my head and my arms full of parcels trudging toward a train headed for a land distant in time and space. "No," I would answer, "we're just poor."
Thankfully, the extended family housing situation didn't last too long, and it honestly wasn't that bad. We had found a house we wanted to buy through friends of my husband's parents, and what I have neglected to mention until this point is that all of us (my husband, and his family, and I) had been working our asses off for months to renovate this old, old, previously totally fucked up house, in which I am now proudly sitting. The whole house renovation shitstorm (you can measure my emotional agitation by the sudden increase in expletives) is a story for another day, but it suffices to say that after months of gruelling labor it all turned out beautifully.
Anyway, back to the real story, during the last month or so of my pregnancy my husband and I finally got around to that now decades old tradition of young couples expecting their first child and enrolled in a birthing class. After hearing/reading that lamaze was outdated, and staring in terrible awe at the horrendous grainy, black blood in all the photos documenting the Bradley method, my husband and I were at a brief loss, then we started hearing all these wonderful rumors about something called hypno-birthing. Finally, my midwife officially recommended it to us, after I told her I was looking for a natural way to manage birthing pain. She gave us a sort of brochure complete with contact information, and off we went.
If you're not yet familiar with the tenets of hypno-birthing, but you have gone through child labor and given birth, hold on to your hat! If you are now wearing a hat, you might be about rip it from your head and throw it on the floor in righteous, incredulous, indignation. You see, the birth hypnotists teach that all labor pain is more or less in your head, and if you wanna be hip, or "hyp" rather, you gotta just put it outa your mind, Mommio, and think about rainbows and shit, yeah... I kind of hate to say it, but this sweet little lady with her soft voice and guided meditations actually got my husband and I to buy this schpeil and hand over quite a little sum of money in the process. I'm making it sound like a scam now... and... and... well, it's not like the entire experience was without value. We met with this woman (the hypnobirthing instructor) once a week during the last month or so of my pregnancy, and she did succeed in totally eliminating my fear of child birth, however ignorant and misguided the origin of my fearlessness turned out to be.
You see, leading up to our education in hypno-birthing I had been ingesting all this new-agey material on the perils of the "modern" pathological philosophy of birth, that is material condemning the torturous techniques hospitals have employed over the years to basically wrench control away from the mother and father and nature itself, in order to insure that the baby is extracted in a medically controlled environment. It's true that episiotomies and ether used to be given as a matter of course, and women's bodies were covered in a steril sheet they were instructed not to touch while they labored in the most unnatural and ineffective positon possible, flat on their backs, so that the doctors could have absolute dominion over their poor helpless vaginas. Then, after the deed was done, the baby was whisked away from its mother down some hall to be cleaned in preparation for display while the mother was stitched back together and the totally estranged father smoked his one millionth cigarette in an even more distant wing of the hospital. Today, these techniques have been replaced by women too often being administered drugs to induce labor at the doctor's convenience, etc, but on the whole I now believe with absolute certainty that with the number of options a woman has available to her today, we are much, much, much better off than we have ever been before.
Well, the main body of hypno-birthing literature was written in the 1970's while most of that old-fashioned heinous shit was still considered standard procedure. And while the hypno-birthing movement, along with other natural child birth methods of that era, like Bradley and Lamaze, should be credited with helping to change the way most individuals and institutions alike view the process of birth and how it should be handled, they are also very successful (hypno-birthing esp.) with conjuring and directing a great deal of paranoia toward all forms of medical intervention. And this spawns the now very popular idea that a "good" birth is always a completely natural birth, and a good birth and a birth involving medical interventions of any sort are two mutually exclusive concepts.
To come straight to the point, I think epidurals are GREAT, and if administered correctly, as mine was, well, I really just don't know what I would have done without it. I was ultimately glad I had taken the mildly dilusional brain-bath hypno path toward the ideal of a natural birth. My initial expectations of child labor were so utterly unobtainable I felt no guilt what so ever when my plans changed completely at the unexpected onset of deep incredible pain. I couldn't wish it away, I couldn't dream it away, I couldn't let my body smoothly slide down an imaginary rainbow of relaxation safe from the pain's grasp, so I demanded an epidural, and that was that. It was one of finest and most genuine decisions I have ever made in my life. Free from pain, however preternaturally, I was able to get about an hour's rest in preparation for the exhaustive pushing phase.
Pushing is something you learn not to do in hypno-birthing, by the way. It was the second forbidden p-word, after pain. The idea was that no one was to even suggest to you the concepts of pain or pushing throughout your, well, you weren't supposed to use the word "labor" either... you were supposed to imagine your baby gently dancing down the "birth path" to meet you. No, I'm not making this up. You weren't supposed to use the term "birth canal" because that denoted something both manmade and too narrow. Your new hyp vocabulary was supposed to replace all the negative concepts in your mind with positive ones and hence render you incapable of experiencing anything unpleasant. Wouldn't that be swell? I thought so.
So, having come to these beliefs like a child unto God, I was exstatic as any mother should be when one fateful morning my water finally broke. Off to the hospital we went, cockeyed optimism intact, to make sure I hadn't just inexplicably wet my pants. A little while after we were admitted, the good news was confirmed. We alerted our families and the whole chaotic group soon arrived en masse. For hours of flushed, giddy innocence I laughed and joked with them. My father and I came up with an idea for a taqueria we would call "Taco Bano" while I bounced across the room on the birthing ball, like a five-year-old on one of kangaroo balls with the handle on top. All the while I was thinking, "wow, they were right; it really doesn't hurt at all."
Some critics might interject at this point that I hadn't been holding up my end of the hypno-birthing bargain. One is supposed to meditate diligently in preparation for the birth, not behave hysterically imagining vulgar names for hypothetical taquerias. Believe it or not, I did kick everybody out eventually, and started meditating to the cd just as I was supposed to, and I was in and out of the bathtub doing the same, just as I had practiced at home. But, despite my honest efforts, my body gradually spiralled out from my control as the pain slowly took on a life of its own.
After my cervix had dilated to 6 or 7cm, the way I felt can be pretty well summed up by the opening line of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis": "As (I) woke one morning from uneasy dreams (I) found (myself) transformed in (my) bed into a monstrous vermin." Yes, I literally felt as if a fundamental disconnect between mind/spirit and body had transpired and I yearned to leap from my skin at once. I felt like a wretched poisoned cockroach dying in some dirty linoleum corner of an insensitive and unimportant person's home.
-INTERMISSION- story to be continued when my daughter is in a better mood...

Attn Moms: Is Your Vag Courageous?

I originally conceived of The Red Vag of Courage a day or two after my daughter was born. I wanted to put together a darkly funny, pleasantly vulgar book about childbirth and motherhood. The idea was these magical talented women with tons of time on their hands would errupt from the wood paneling of my college apartment and be so inspired by my clever title that their own stories would spring forth onto paper so I could compile them with my own and... But that was just the problem. I really didn't have the time or other resources to gather the stories, much less the expertise to put a book together. So the idea has been festering in the back of my mind ever since. Then, a friend of mine kept talking about this new fangled blogger thing. Yes, I know it's not new! But, I'm a recently reformed technophobe so cut me some slack. Anyway, I eventually realized that my vision is a project perfect for the world wide web of bored, bedraggled mothers like myself just itching for a creative outlet or at least a little comedic relief. In short my goal is to furnish this blog with the stories of other mothers. Credit for the stories will be attributed as the author requests, you can use your real name, a pen name, or remain a anonymous. It's completely up to you. And I PROMISE PROMISE PROMISE to be honest. I will not steal or cannibalize your stories. Generous, courageous, creative mothers submit your stories to: theredvagofcourage@gmail.com, and your story will appear here shortly.
I'm a relatively new "stay-at-home-mom"-btw, that's something we all need to work on-s.a.h.m... mmmm... an outmoded and inaccurate title indeed. Someone should come up with something better than that. Anyway, I am the mother of a nine month old girl (my first, and destined to be my only for the next few years, Trojan willing.) My daughter is the apple of my eye, the Ren of my Stimpy, the boss of my mob... she kicks my ass, bathes my soul, and opens my eyes to love, beauty and depths of feeling I had not known I was capable of experiencing before.
Before the immaculate conception of my daughter (my boyfriend and I had taken a shower about fifteen minutes prior) I had never invisioned myself as a Stay@home. I had not planned on becoming a parent for a long time. A LONG time, some time in the distant, misty, post grad, possibly tenure-weilding future. But as fate would have it during my the last semester of my junior year as an English major, an unsuccessful bout of coitus interruptus led to a wholly and stupidly unexpected interruption of a different variety, all of a sudden I could no longer drink, I could no longer smoke, I could no longer pop adderall like a WWII fighter pilot, and I soon realized that my last semester as an undergrad was going to coincide almost perfectly with my last trimester as a bloated but relatively free woman.