On Sunday Sarah and I went to the first of two classes to learn how to deliver a baby the natural way. We had a choice between taking six two hour classes or two six hour classes and with scheduling problems and football games we decided together that with the Patriots playing early home games on Thursday that we needed to opt for the Sunday classes. The official name for the class on the receipt from Isis Maternity is “Natural Ch1”. It was yet another adventure into adult sex-ed.

We were early so we walked around the area where they sell various motherhood products. The rack of specialized bras caught my interest since they had a number of clever tools to extend the standard bra into a milking machine. The most space-age of the bunch is the Easy Expression Bustier Hands Free Pumping Bra. It looked like it was inspired by the Austin Powers movie where the femme bots were shooting from their nipples.

The class itself began with the dreaded introductions. We didn’t have a tennis ball and have to memorize names. The name tags were helpful for avoiding that. Instead each couple would interact to learn key facts about the couple next to them and then would introduce the other couple to the group. The group was about 10 couples. During this exercise I ran the numbers in my head and determined that 70% of the women doing natural childbirth are also certified yoga or at least part-time hypno-yoga instructors, 20% are from foreign countries who don’t speak much English, and the rest are people like Sarah and me who have medical reasons for being denied anesthetics.

Two of the couples were scheduled to go to a natural birthing center and had received a mysterious and short letter in the mail the previous morning telling them that the birthing center was closing suddenly due to staffing reasons and that they would have to go to Newton Wellesley hospital to deliver their babies. We discussed this situation and it was suggested that staffing reasons may have been a code word for some impropriety that forced the shut-down. Maybe a newspaper reporter should do some investigation. It sounds like a juicy and lurid story akin to when those fertility docs where fertilizing eggs with their own sperm.

Our classmates contained of a narrow range of people with the most common being the funny goofy guy cracking the jokes they wished they could have in high school and the earthy-crunchy woman kicking him in the shins repeatedly but giggling along with him. Everyone had gotten their partner pregnant so they were all comfortable with each other’s foibles. One couple was a long distance relationship and most questions for them revolved around whether he would have time to get to the hospital fast enough from Long Island to be involved in the birth.

After the intros we did a word association around the room against the word childbirth. Most people’s first reaction was “pain” or “miracle”. I used my expert improv skills to raise the first word that came to mind and said “goop”. The fear of childbirth was followed by a fun game of find the internal pregnancy parts on the diagrams of a regular or pregnant woman. I was responsible for finding the bladder and was looking for it near the stomach figuring it had to connect somehow but then was redirected closer to the end of the intestines. Other key parts that were hard for people to find included the stomach, amniotic sac, and the mucous plug.

The instructor had a special baby doll and hipbone that she could use to demonstrate the baby going through the pelvis and the various orientations it could be in. In general it was clear that unless the bones themselves were flexible there was no way the baby could fit through the hole so she bent the bones and snapped the snaps to tighten the baby into a tuck and managed to force it through the bones with various twists of the head during the motion. It was like watching a contortionist put their whole body through a squash racket.

Pregnant women late in their pregnancy generate a hormone called relaxin that makes their bones and muscles more loose for stretching to fit that baby through the pelvis. The relaxin can lead to a pregnant woman waddling walking style. Given all of the complexity for this important event evolution has equipped the baby and mother with tons of feedback mechanisms and tools to make the process go right. It makes you think that these strange receptors are interesting targets for pharmaceuticals to connect to.

The baby can be in about four major configurations with the most useful being the head down with the back facing the right way. If the feet are down, breach, then the doctors call it a win for modern science and use a C-section to cut it out. In this case they use could general anesthesia so you can’t eat food in the hospital as you might choke on it if you throw-up from the anesthesia. Instead the hospital provides ice chips for sustenance. Some people have gotten clever and made ice chip flavoring syrups to make this more fun but the whole snoopy slurpy ice chip plan sounded like it was unnecessary.

If the babies head is in backwards then the baby is pushing-up against the mother’s spine instead of the soft stomach as the uterus contracts. This is called back labor and basically pinches all of the nerves in the spine and hurts like hell. So among the goals of natural childbirth is to get the baby flipped around before or during labor so that the head is pointing both down and the right way. Doing this is a lot of making room for rotation by crouching on all fours and rocking hips. This led ultimately to a lot of pregnant women on all fours getting deep tissue massages on their buttocks from their husbands and moaning.

Among the important roles that I have to play as a father is to provide massage support and encouraging statements. The role of the father has evolved twice in the past forty years. The fifties father was just in the waiting room or a bar with cigars and whiskey. The post sixties father was supposed to be a super-coach knowing every possible scenario and barking out key rational commands for the delivering mother to follow while she was controlled irrationally by her pain. The second and short lived plan was apparently created by men and women didn’t like being barked at and doctors didn’t like men who were mainly ignorant of the delivery process trying to explain how to have a baby to mothers screaming in pain. So the new role is to make encouraging statements and to provide helpful and timely massages.

The encouraging statement is not that simple of a task. Apparently if you took a hypno-birthing class they provide a full encouraging statement cheat sheet. But the general idea is to provide firm but gentle statements. For example when your wife says “I can’t do it” instead of saying “You have to do it” or “You can do it” I am supposed to say “You ARE doing it”. My guess is that in the moment I will forget this and make some unwelcome sarcastic but really funny if you think about them closely remarks. The class is supposed to cure me of this but I am a lost cause on this front.

The instructor had been a doula where her client was giving birth in a hospital and the mother was asking for a bar to hold on to so that she could squat to push the baby out and the nurse had told her that she didn’t think it would help. “I don’t believe in gravity”, the nurse said.

The course also included watching two videos of babies being born. The first was right before the lunch break (Yum!) and also after a brief discussion about looking at the color of the water when it breaks in case it is green or brown which can be dangerous. The other was near the end of the class. The first movie showed a woman who seemed to get very far along in terms of dilating without even knowing it and then the baby came fast in the hospital after taking a very hot shower with her husband massaging her back. The second movie woman was a midwife from Mexico and her Japanese sculptor husband who all got together naked in the swank blue tiled family hot tub ultimately with their two sons to experience the birth of their first daughter together. The Mexican woman looked like she was in a trance and was focusing on her husband walking backwards behind her while she walked forwards.

What I learned from the movies is that hot water and semi-nakedness are the two key components of the labor process.

The class spent significant time discussing walking through in detail the various phases of labor beginning with when labor is beginning, how long each phase lasts, and what to expect from each phase. With the doll babies head going through the hip-bone multiple times in various different scenarios the class seemed very similar to the feeling of scouting a wicked rapid with an experienced guide. Among the helpful scouting tools was a big diagrams with three columns including a clock (how long the phase was), pictures of the baby going through the hole (the position the baby is in), and a mother’s general expression ranging from smiling, to neutral, to something angry (transition), and then to angry neutral.