The Man On the Moon

Forty years since "mankind" landed on the moon, and today also happens to be my Hebrew birthday. My English birthday occurs on Friday, July 24th, and it also happens to be the exact two month mark before my due date. While I am not one to celebrate my birthday - Hebrew, English or otherwise - in particular, this year has special meaning to me, as the end-goal of this pregnancy becomes more and more clear.

My commitment to this child has become all the more entrenched, as the recent news has been full of stories of children being abused or actually killed by their parents. "Child Left in Car, Dies of Heat Exhaustion," "Mother Starves Three of Her Children, Ultra Orthodox Community Rallies to Her Support," "Child Drowns, Unsupervised By Parents," etc. For a country in which families are actively supported, I wonder where we went wrong, when over one million and a half children live in poverty, and seem to be in constant danger from the very people meant to take care of them.

At last night's birthing class, she managed to get through the entire process of active labour to birth, without mentioning any breathing techniques. When I asked the instructor why she had skipped over the famous Lamaze system, she replied that her philosophy this entire course had not been to teach anything that would make a woman's thinking become rigid or too intellectual; she wants a woman to come into the Hadassah Hospital with her mind open to every possibility of birth, and to presumably take direction from the staff there, without having her own ideas of a birth plan or preferences. "Shut off the brain, turn on the instinct." Whatever.

What did in fact encourage me was the onslaught of questions from other women in the class, who themselves had become somewhat discouraged by the lack of useful and complete information in the five sessions we had had thus far. Every time the instructor tried to gloss over a topic, at least two people raised their hand and forced her to discuss the details; for example, how the staff communicates with the birthing mother regarding invasive procedures such as epidural or episiotomy; or the potential side-effects of a vacuum birth or a Ceasarian section.

The session ended with a free-association game, in which all the men in the room kept coming back to their child being a symbol and culmination of their manhood and the focus of their fears, and the women in the room kept trying to assure them that pregnancy is in fact about faith, and letting go of that need to control. That the whole process is a miracle happening inside the body even as we women go about our day, and while we can do our best to take care of the vessel in which this miracle takes place, it all works out the way it works out.

Big surprise, the religious woman/child who cries every time the instructor holds up a model of the pelvis, when asked how she felt about her pregnancy, said that she didn't. She didn't have any feelings associated with it, either in a positive or negative way. Let's hope she notices the baby when he/she is born.

I was exhausted by that point and put my head down to nap, and having five minutes to "shut off my brain," managed to think about all the loss I have experienced in the recent month, from my grandfather to my cat, Sarel. Which of course started me crying and of course I could easily blame on hormones, given the context of the class.