A lot of women don't, but I looked forward to prenatal classes at my midwife's clinic when I was pregnant with my first child. My inner Tracy Flick liked being a student again, scribbling notes and taking my first public stand in favour of being A Good Mother. At one point, I raised (okay, possibly waved) my hand and asked: "When do we do our birth plans?" To my surprise, the woman running the class – a lovely maternal type wearing a caftan – shook her head and told me to give it up. The best plan, she said, is no plan at all.
That's not a common refrain these days. Birth is the greatest of the great unknowns, the most uncontrollable event of one's life. I, perhaps like many women, tend not to do well with words like unknown and uncontrollable. I'm a writer, and my first instinct is to research a problem into submission, to plan the hell out of what's ahead, and thereby conquer it. Let's just say I like Google.
And so women prepare and prepare and prepare for the big moment: On one end of the spectrum is the ultimate birth strategy, the scheduled C-section; on the other is the doula-assisted "birth experience," where moms-to-be role-play the birth. One couple I know were asked to draw pictures of what they imagined "the moment" would be like – in metaphor ("a lot of water imagery," says my friend now, one C-section later).
Of course, preparation or no, when it happens, birth is usually a big, bloody mess. Is that gap between the dream and the reality the reason why so many women talk about the birth of their children with such disappointment?
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