Prenatal Pretentiousness

Mark and I attended our first prenatal class yesterday evening. Unfortunately, we missed our first class due to our scary hospital incident.

The set up for the class wasn’t what I expected. All four walls of the room were lined with rocking chairs. At first I thought we had entered a knitting class, but quickly remembered pregnant moms (and our supportive partners) need to be extra comfortable.

The instructor arrived a few minutes early to give us a quick summary of what we had missed. I was surprised when I realized I already knew much of what she was talking about when it came to the stages of labour, and what happens to our bodies. I tried to pay attention, but it wasn’t long before the class was filling up with pregnant bellies and I became distracted. I wanted to scope out the crowd to make sure I didn’t have the biggest ass in the room. I breathed a huge sigh of relief (because I really am that vain) just as the instructor was in the middle of telling me my vagina will be 8cm dilated while in active labour. The look on her face was priceless. I’m sure she thought I was on crack, but I just pretended I didn’t notice anything.

To ease everyone into a night of talk about our vagina’s and their miraculous ability to stretch to obscene widths, the instructor decided it was best that we go around the room and describe a characteristic about our partner that we would like to see in our child. Most people wished for their child to have their parents love, understanding or patience, but I said I wanted Ava to adopt Mark’s charm and charisma. My husband has a presence about him that commands attention and can smooth talk his way through a conversation with anyone. He has a way with people (he figured out how to win me over after all), and his charisma has opened many doors of opportunity for him. Yes, Charm and Charisma are lovely qualities to have and I know our little Ava will be smooth talking me into giving her the entire cookie jar before I know it.

The class continued with discussions about various breathing techniques to cope with labour contractions. I felt retarded practicing the breathing. I know I am getting an epidural, so any sort of Lamaze breathing techniques are useless. For giggles, hubby and I practiced the breathing together anyways. One technique required a breathing pattern that was controlled by the number of fingers your labour coach holds up on one hand. Even during practice mode we started arguing about how many breaths I was taking to his fingers. He even forgot to throw me a number a few times, and I was left holding my breath turning blue waiting for him to clue in. Everyone else in the class was so attentive and serious…and here we were arguing and laughing at each other for not doing our “breathing technique” right. I’m sure it will all come back to haunt us the day this stuff really matters, but it was too funny “pretending” to be suffering through a contraction and watching everyone on the floor with their pillows “pretending” they were in labour. I guess there has to be a smart ass in every crowd.

Finally, to end the evening, we watched a video on child birth. The lady being interviewed was going to be my hero labour mom. She said her fantasy labour would have involved an epidural already in place on the car ride to the hospital. Two seconds later, the video took a complete 180 and the theme changed towards “natural” childbirth options where medication was not really encouraged. For some reason or another, once at the hospital, the woman in the movie decided she wanted to have the baby completely free of any pain medication and started preaching about how empowering the experience was and how womanly she felt. I felt like slapping the bitch! She can take her bathtub labour and shove it! Are people really THAT brave and tolerable? Obviously this video was not meant for wussies like me who have no tolerance for pain.

I hope next week we talk more about how to actually care for a newborn. That’s the stuff I really want to learn about. I just realized that I don’t even know how to change to a diaper.