u s e y o u r h a n d s

While there are many fun things about my alternative, hypnosis-based childbirth class, the most productive has been the assignment to craft a theme for birth and contrast it with one’s perceived life theme. If they match up, yay! If they don’t, you need to alter, tweak or flip your life theme.

Let’s take the life theme, “Nothing ever works out for me.” Lots of people have this theme, and lots of people have challenging experiences. But this theme almost ensures that you’ll never have anything work out — including your labor. A subtle change to that theme, for instance, “I rise to my life’s challenges,” is way more empowering. It’s easy to have a negative life theme. But in looking for small, positive things, I’m finding it’s easier to bounce back from negative ones.

A nice example came courtesy of the University of Illinois Extension. I need to expand my garden and would like to remediate or enrich the existing soil, but since we live in the city on an older plot, I’m worried about lead. It’s been a pain to figure out where to test, so I turned to the Extension. I found the Chicago Urban Gardening blog managed by Ron Wolford. An email to Mr. Wolford was soon answered. He told me where to get my soil tested and to call his assistant for a kit. His assistant was totally helpful and now I’m waiting for the kit to show up.

Now, that’s a positive experience that I can use to shape my life theme! And I don’t care what goofball, hippie-sounding thing I have to do in order to gain a more positive outlook and have a pleasant birth.

Wouldn’t you?

While this adventure in pregnancy has been mostly filled with library books and doubt, it’s also notable for the fun re-emergence of myriad body issues. I lost a lot of weight several years ago and have been successful in keeping all of it off. Until now.

I have been very, very concerned about gaining weight while pregnant. Of course, I’ll need to gain some. A few pounds. But not, like, 40. Or 50. So far, I’ve gained 10. And I’m seven months pregnant. You can’t even tell that I’m pregnant at all. Not having a small (or even medium-sized frame) to begin with, I wear pregnancy like some women wear a holiday meal or a post-breakup donut binge. But I eat! I eat what I need for me plus a few hundred extra calories for Gus, which is all you really need anyway. There’s no McDonald’s in my life, although there is often an extra bit of seitan or a half-dozen clementines.

I’ve also been frequenting the gym. Not only does this outing propel me out of the house during these most inclement days, the gym also has things to watch, like Oprah, old Korean ladies stretching, and Orthodox Jewish women sporting dresses over workout pants in aerobics class. I’ve been putting in almost an hour of effort three to four times a week, just me and my podcasts. Occasionally, I will see other pregnant people there. Heavily pregnant women, using a stair climber, with looks of despair and exhaustion on their faces. I power-walk around the track and hoof it up the stair climber with aplomb.

The other day, I was having a fun gym day, feeling good and mildly superior. Look at me, pregnant person, chugging on! Look at me, pregnant person, climbing a staircase in a theoretical building! And just when I started to feel peppy, I look up and see the turquoise. It takes a second for my eyes to focus and identify the speedy turquoise blur as a matching tube top, velour pant and velour sweatshirt ensemble.

Worn by the world’s most attractive eight-months-pregnant lady.

Swinging weights in her dainty hands.

In just a few seconds, she’d rounded the corner and sped-walked out of my sight. And there I was, left with a few minutes on my stair climber, feeling grubby in an old Quiksilver t-shirt and ratty pony tail.

I did finish my whole 50 minutes, though. And at least I didn’t do it in matching velour.

Pre-pregnancy, I’d read blogs or listen to friends talk about their plans for parenthood. Most of these people cited how they were planning on following their instincts. And I’d laugh and chime in about how if you didn’t have good role models, you should not, at all, ever, for a second, follow your own instincts.

I mean, why would you, if you were raised by “All My Children”, crinkle-cut fries from a bag and screaming. I always thought that it would behoove one (raised in such environs) to, say, do some reading on the topic of child development and see what educated opinions resonated. And so, as I’ve been pregnant, I’ve raided the shelves of several public libraries for books where some sense can be had.

I’ve also been interested to see how my instincts and intuition has started to come out. I guess the years of therapy and reflection have been beneficial, because none of my instincts show up as do-not-dos in any books. But I’m surprised. Maybe i shouldn’t be. I’ve picked a good partner. We’re comfortable. And I’ve done a lot of personal work for the past decade.

Hopefully, it will be enough.