Apparently it's "revelations-while-hypnotized" week

To follow up on Gail's hypnosis-induced surprise insight, I had one at our last class as well. At various points our instructor has asked to imagine being in some lovely place, perhaps someplace in nature. I seem to have settled on this spot that my Dad and I backpacked to in Colorado over 10 years ago now (I can't believe it has been that long!). The weather was perfect and summer wildflowers were blooming everywhere. You could look from our tent across a small clear pond, and up out of a small bowl shaped valley to a rocky ridge that marked the continental divide. One morning we woke to see two large stags standing in dramatic profile at the top of that ridge.

I think I was about 19 when we made that trip. I was very surly, pining for my fling-of-the-moment girl back home, and still in the very early part of the awkward and painful decade of parental relations that followed my coming out (we've since worked things out pretty well and they love Gail to bits, but that's a story for another day). My dad, though, in his own somewhat awkward and stilted way, was taking this all in stride. In retrospect it is rather sweet. As a parent now, I have a bit more empathy for how strange I must have seemed to him, and how desperately far away. But outdoorsy things we could do. Of his three daughters, I've always been the most game for outdoor adventures, and at some point I became his most likely companion on such outings. We could plan a trip, walk in the woods, set up camp and cook dinner in pleasant company, without too much difficulty and tears, so that's what we did.

I found myself trying to edit the painful parts of this memory from the image, and as part of that, I found myself trying to remove my Dad. He didn't really fit in with the whole natural relaxation for birth theme (it seemed like there shouldn't be any other people, maybe just those flowers and the pond), but I just couldn't quite get rid of him. At some point I realized he might be sticking around for a reason, that there was some piece of me that really wants to have my father at our birth.

It will never happen. My parents live a 5 hour plane ride away. My father is a family doctor with a schedule to keep (he has actually caught many a baby). We'll be trying very hard not to schedule anything birth-wise, which would mean he'd need plan to be out here for weeks to be sure of being here, and in many ways I'd rather not have either of my very medical parents (my mom is an advanced practice nurse) anywhere near our attempt at a home birth. I can't imagine going through the decisions we had to make when Leigh was in the process of taking her own sweet time to join us with my parents anywhere nearby, even though I do love both of them dearly.

But it does seem somehow nice that my Dad, who I'm often guilty of kind of forgetting about and putting off to the side, has found his way into this particular corner of our preparations. He's a quiet and thoughtful man. He thinks deeply and conveys his thoughts slowly, often getting a bit run over in a family that contained four extremely opinionated and outspoken women, and now also contains 3 kids-in-law and 3 (soon to be 4) boisterous grandchildren. I may be guilty of sometimes failing to appreciate his peaceful and calming presence, and unfailing love, but I will endeavor to carry it with us as we move forward, even if he won't be here in person.

Imagine Our Perfect Birth

In our hypnobirthing class we did an exercise called "fear release." In this technique, you imagine yourself in a safe space, visualize your fears around birth, and then destroy or dispose of those fears. For instance, you might imagine a book containing pictures of the things that worry you. You tear those pages out of a book and burn them. You then replace the frightening images with peaceful images of a birth going just the way you want.

I honestly don't have many fears around the birth. Leigh's birth was long and much more difficult than we expected, and we survived just fine. As a bonus, this time my vagina and uterus won't be involved at all, so I'll probably be able to walk afterward.

I went into the fear release hypnosis pretty confident. I imagined scary scenes, most of which just had to do with my confidence as a person, not specifically around birth. I burned all the fears up and felt free. Then the hypnobirthing instructor told us to imagine ourselves  in the moments after birth, having had exactly the birth experience we desired. I got stuck. I was supposed to imagine myself as happy and fulfilled as I could be, but I suddenly felt sad.

In the picture in my head, I wasn't holding my baby. In the moments just after birth, Lyn gets to hold the baby first and put it to breast. I will be right there touching those little fingers and toes and glowing with pride, but I will still be just a supporting player.

So there I was, imagining one of the greatest moments of my life and I wasn't really part of the action. I started to wilt, worrying that the baby wasn't going to love me or that I wasn't going to love the baby. Suddenly, I was facing my real fears and they were right in the stinking middle of my beautiful birth fantasy. I realized that I will miss being being  the center of the birth experience this time, and I do have some grief around my baby starting his or her life deeply connected to someone else, not to me.

So I did the only sensible thing with my beautiful birth picture -- I moved the baby into my arms. Yes, in reality I'll have to wait for just a few minutes longer than Lyn to hold my delicious baby. But it's my fantasy, dammit. In my fantasy Lyn and the new baby have an amazing labor, peaceful and joyous. I catch the baby, place it on Lyn's belly, and we both drink in this new person, bonding as a trio as the baby wriggles its way up to the breast. Then Lyn hands me the baby. We have our long-awaited moment to get to know each other, and my joy and wonder erase any sadness that we were separate for so long.

Hypnobirthing Class

This weekend, we had our first hypnobirthing class. When Lyn first proposed the class to me, I was nonplussed. Why should we spend money to take a class on childbirth and hang out with hippies? We've already had one childbirth class, we hang out with hippies all the time, and we've been through one labor already. However, I'm the backseat driver this time, so I told Lyn I'd be up for whatever kind of class she wanted. Lyn researched several options and then signed us up for a privately led hypnobirthing class. We got a book in the mail. Lyn read the book from cover-to-cover immediately. I poked it a few times to see what it would do. Still pretty inimpressed.

Then we started listening to the CDs of hypnobirthing scripts. I was hooked! I love this self-hypnonsis stuff like crazy. I want to be hypnotized all of the time. So I was excited for the first class. We got to see some great birth videos (which were surprizingly quiet and subdued). Having been through birth before, I get a really really big kick out of watching babies get born. It's like getting the high from the birth all over again, but you get to go home and sleep through the night.

I think that hypnobirthing will be good for us. We had planned for a homebirth with Leigh. I labored hard from Saturday afternoon through to early Sunday morning to no avail. We tried lots of things to move labor along, but nothing worked and finally Leigh passed meconium and we were off to the hospital. I had an epidural and pitocin, rested for a number of hours, pushed, and then Leigh popped out at 7pm on Sunday. I'm happy with my birth experience overall, but we're really hoping to be able to complete at home this time. For most of labor, I was in a really great place, singing through each contraction. For hours we thought a baby would be coming at any time, but instead my contractions got more painful (or less comfortable, as the hypnobirthers would say). Singing didn't work anymore and I didn't have any other tools to help me to relax, rest between contractions, and get the job done.

I'm hopeful that hypnobirthing will give us the tools that we need to make it over any rocky places and to restart Lyn's labor if it stalls. I'm also hoping it will help with positioning, not going overdue, cleaning up our house, and making us millionaires soon. Bring on the brainwashing! I'm writing affirmations, erasing the word "pain" from my vocabularly, and pushing Lyn and myself to practice so we can have baby #2 at home.

P.S. WE (both) FELT THE BABY MOVE OVER THE WEEKEND!!!! Sorry for the all-caps, I'm a little over-excited.