No class

I'm glad AR is getting something out of these childbirth classes, because for me, it's an interesting form of torture sitting in a room with 20 other expectant parents listening to the birth coach tell us what happens during labor, having gone through about 30 hours of it myself.

I always knew this would be the hard part for me. After all that time, I ended up having a c-section, and I haven't really gotten over the feeling that I messed up somehow. Intellectually, I know it wasn't my fault that my cervix never dialated more than 8 centimeters after 24-hours of hard labor followed by 6-hours of pitocin-induced contractions, and I also know that I'm lucky to have had the option of medical intervention, because babies and women can die when a birth stalls like that, but I still wish I could give it another shot.

So watching those videos of a women giving birth, I feel like I'm sitting in the locker room watching the coach diagram how the final play was supposed to go after I fumbled on the 2-yard line with 5 seconds remaining in a championship game. I keep replaying it in my head thinking, what if we had done this differently? Would it have made a difference if I had done that?

The answer, of course, is no, but that doesn't keep me from getting a little weepy when I'm supposed to be learning massage techniques to use on poor AR while she's having contractions. Don't get me wrong - I'm looking forward to supporting AnnaRay through labor, and I'm glad to be learning ways to help her get through it drug free, because I know she can do it if she wants to (and if there are no complications.) Taking the class is also helping me to get over all this now and not relive my experience while AR is just trying to get through hers.

But I don't know if I'll ever really get over it. It's been more than three years and we have this happy, healthy child - why isn't that enough?

Part of it I think is evolutionary; we have this crazy drive to reproduce, even though we know it's going to be uncomfortable, painful and - for millennia - possibly fatal. But I think there's also this pressure women feel to have the experience - to learn the secret handshake and earn the badge of honor. I don't know whether to laugh or cry about that, because for all I went through - nine months of discomfort, nausea, shortness of breath, back pain and the hours and hours of hard labor - it might have well have happened to someone else. That's the dirty little trick evolution has played on us: we have the drive but lack the memory, so we're sure to go through the experience again and again.

I want to tell my friends who have struggled unsuccesfully to get pregnant that they haven't missed out on much. Anna and The Boy have no biological connection and could not possibly be any more mother and son. Meanwhile, it's easy for me to forget I gave birth to The Boy for all I remember my pregnancy and labor. But that sounds insufferable and obnoxious coming from someone who got to carry to term. I had the experience; the only thing I missed out on was a few hours of draining and painful pushing. Of course, that seems like the most important part to me, because it's the experience I didn't get to have.