We met the person who will be our doula on Sunday afternoon. While I had read about halfway through the book "The Expectant Father" earlier in the pregnancy I had never skipped forwards to the section on the actual birthing day. Sarah had read me some things about the phases of delivery using key descriptions like cervix dilating to 8 centimeters.

Sarah has been much more involved with trying to understand what it will be like to deliver a baby since she is now less than three months away from doing so. Meeting with the doula for me was a crash course in the realities of some of the details that I remembered being taught distantly in sex-ed that I used to snooze through in high school since I wanted to get to the mildly pornographic parts that were more interesting like putting a condom on a banana. As we met with the doula I probably looked like a squirrel caught in the headlights of a redneck on a back country road.

First of all I learned that a doula is a birth coach advocate. They provide a basic service of being around throughout the birth experience. Apparently nurses and doctors don't really do this. The nurses scurry from one room to the next taking vital signs readings and checking progress and the doctors only arrive when the nurses alert them that there is something to pay attention to like a newborn head crowning or a baby dropping out in the next five minutes. The doula stays with the mother and offers helpful advice about how to get through the birthing experience like how to crouch, when to walk around, and how to distract themselves from the pain.

Among the things I have learned is that there is such a thing as a birthing experience. Women spend a lot of time, since they have 10 months to kill anyways, trying to optimize their birthing experience. There are choices including where you want to birth, how you want to be distracted or made to feel less pain, and what you do or don't want to happen within those choices.

For example there are pros and cons to whether you want to wear the hospital gown. Among the cons are that your baby won't be something you can feel in the front of your naked body when it is born because a hospital gown is closed in the front and open in the back. You also have to worry about vaccuum extractions and internal fetal monitors where they screw probes into the babies head or attach suction cups to them. Do you want 'em or not? The timing itself is something to think about - when in the process do you go to the hospital. Should you watch the Lord of the Rings six hour directors cut of Return of the King for the first few phases of labor or just head over to the hospital with the latest People magazine?

The process of selecting the optimized birthing experience is similar to wedding planning although the party includes fewer people and more pain and blood loss.

Apparently Sarah can look forward to a large amount of labor pain involved in delivering our baby. In thinking about this I realized why men are more interested in dangerous and painful daredevil activities like sailing on the open ocean in storms for a month or climbing at high altitudes on Kilimanjaro. Us men have to create life threatening saga experiences to keep ourselves occupied while women can always look forward to the challenge of their lives getting a little baby out of their body. Since they know they have plenty of excitement in this form it isn't too appealing to jump out of an airplane or try to swim in a volcano in an asbestos suit.

The meeting with the doula also made me aware that people have a perenium, formerly called the nacho (not you butt, etc.), an area of the body I hadn't put much thought into until we discussed how much it can take a beating while pushing a baby out. I think men have a perenium as well so I could relate personally to this conversation better than other labor topics. I am performing the role of coach more than having to know how to actually do the task of laboring to deliver a baby for 24 to 50 hours. So it's hard to learn to do something you aren't going to actually do. That's why I wasn't paying much attention in the pregnancy and delivery portion of sex-ed class in the first place.

I am quite proud of Sarah having taken on this big challenge and will be working hard with the doula when the time comes to make Sarah's birthing experience as positive and memorable, or in certain areas quickly forgettable, as possible.