Having My Babies

[mecurtin]

As most of you know, I have two children. The Future of Fandom is 16; the Distant Future of Fandom is 9. Both were born in a stand-alone birthing center (now closed due to the suckitude of insurance companies) run by midwives, not MDs, and with very little in the way of medication: what is generally called "natural childbirth

Comments

[suzycat]

Wow, this is interesting

[suzycat]

Not that this is me going "must have medical intervention!" btw - it's just contextualising.

[mecurtin]

No problem. I would never knock an epidural for anyone else. For me, I think it was better not to, because epidurals tend to slow the course of labor and I don't have very good endurance -- I came too close to "failure to progress" when pushing out FoF as it was.

[suzycat]

Ooh, scary. I won't have kids now barring an act of God, but my mother has very rapid labour (me = either 1.5 or .75 of an hour, can't remember which - and I was the first) so I'd always assumed it would be very fast for me.

[darthfox]

do you think it's a psych thing, or an actual neuro thing? (i'm really just asking; i'm a theoretical linguist, not any sort of psycho- or neuro- anything, no anatomist or medical type person at all. [g]) is it possible that among all the Things Happening in a woman's body as she gives birth, a circuit shorts out in broca's area so she can't, for a few moments, produce speech?

[mecurtin]

It certainly feels like "don't have enough resources to run that part of the brain right now". I don't think it just happens in labor -- people who run a really long way (marathon, etc.) also, it seems to me, have more than just catching their breath to overcome before they can talk coherently.

[anonymous]

Well, from my perspective, psych = bio. I would tend to think it might be an attentional thing, where you're just too busy to allocate resources to speech. You really only have the ability to focus on a couple things at once, so maybe all available RAM is being used, so to speak, processing the sensory and motor overload and it's just impossible to reallocate memory. There are a number of auditory and visual stimuli we are actually incapable of ignoring, depending on context. Individuals speaking or reading have a higher pain tolerance, so we can guess that it probably takes attention away from the pain. But, maybe this is one context where the body refuses to do that attentional allocation.

[yonmei]

Thanks for sharing. That's all fascinating. (FWIW, my mum tells me that while I arrived weeks late - so late, if her account is accurate, that I would think they would have induced if I'd been born these days, though my guess is she just made a mistake about which period she missed - once she went into labour, I arrived so fast that I was nearly born in a taxi. My brother and sister took longer about it, apparently.)

[mecurtin]

Were you a second child or later? For the first child to be born en route is really rare, for later children it's not uncommon. One of my grandmother's sister is famous for not having time to get her shoes off when one of her later children was born; one of my male RL friends tells about having to stop under a street light while driving to the hospital, running around to the passenger side, catching the baby, then getting back in and continue to the hospital, only driving a trifle slower this time.

[yonmei]

I'm the middle child.

[toniabarone]

*blinks* I apologize ahead of time if anything I say is offensive. Not meant to be but I tend to speak/write before I think.

Ouch. *shudders* Okay, I don't get the "Braxton-Hicks" reference, but worse than gas pains by far? *winces* Ouch. Those cripple me. I'm still a virgin, even, and have trouble believing a guy can get in there but a baby?

Though go you for the natural birth-thing. No way in hell would I have a kid without as many drugs as possible cause I have NO pain threshold but. Wow. And twice? Ouch.

But thank you for sharin' this. At least it gives me a better idea what to expect if I DO decide "lets make babies!" because mom's account is basically "spent two days in labor, had intense pain, but it's not as bad as it sounds!" and that isn't helpful. I've also heard it compared to pushing an object the size of a watermelon out a hole the size of a lemon. Ouch.

[mecurtin]

I'm still amazed that I had the second kid, frankly. It's kind of amazing that *anyone* has the second kid.

In some ways the pain is much worse than other kinds, because it's *HUGE* and you know it's coming. In some ways it's better, because you do know it's coming, and you get a reward!

[valarltd]

Braxton-Hicks are little contractions: warm-ups, practices.

They can be mistaken for the real thing.

[toniabarone]

Ah. Thanks.

[darthhellokitty]

*looks at mecurtin with admiration*
*takes her pill somewhat frantically*

[mecurtin]

See! Perfect for sex ed class!

[yonmei]

When I was 19 or thereabouts, someone leant me a copy of Our Bodies Ourselves, and I read it with interest/appreciation... and then got to the chapter on birth control.

Finished reading that chapter, and decided I was no end grateful to be a lesbian - none of the methods of not-getting-pregnant sounded appealling....