Graduated

Mrs. Rodius and I officially received our Birthin' Class Diploma last night. Last week, the teacher hung a poster just inside the classroom door. It asked: "What one thing can reduce the likelihood of c-section, decrease the need for pain medication, reduce the use of forceps, vacuums, and other interventions, improve latching on for breastfeeding, and increase a mother's satisfaction with the entire birth experience?" We were encouraged to write our guess on the poster. Some of the guesses were yoga, or emotional support, and one brown-noser wrote, "this class!" They were all good guesses, but not what she was looking for. If I tell you that the teacher is a doula, it's easy to see the answer coming, though: a doula of course!

This week, we entered the classroom to a dry-erase board full of "Resources for More Information on Doulas," so after we spent the first half of our last class discussing c-sections, I was afraid the second half of the evening, after the obligatory pregnant chick pee break, was going to be entirely a hard-sell session. Thankfully, though, she kept the doula marketing to a minimum.

Dutch at sweet juniper! called birthing classes "Fifteen hours of your life you'll never get back." I didn't feel that way about it. I consider myself an educated guy, fairly well-read, and the subject does interest me, so I know a little about it. Even if there wasn't a lot of information in the class that I didn't already know, though, it felt good to talk through it all with someone who was experienced and with a roomful of other people who were just as nervous or more so as we were. I'm usually not a group activity kind of guy, but I enjoyed the feeling of being in it with other people this time.

I did try to get Mrs. Rodius to skip the last half of the last class with me, though. The dry-erase board said we would be doing a "birthing rehearsal." Like I said, I'm not a group activity kind of guy, and the thought of a birthing rehearsal really kind of turned me off, I think for a couple of reasons.

One, performance anxiety. The doula had led the women through breathing and relaxation exercises each week, with a clothespin to pinch the ear to simulate a contraction. Some of the partners really got into their supporting role during these fake contractions, stroking the mother's hair, whispering encouragement to her. I kind of tried to, but I felt self-conscious, and I didn't want to compete for the position of Best Supporting Actor.

Two, how useful an exercise could it really be? Mrs. Rodius and I are both very familiar with the standard relaxation exercises. They're the same body awareness and focused relaxation techniques used in hypnosis and meditation, and we'd both used them throughout our lives. I had first encountered the techniques in the fourth through sixth grades, in a gifted-and-talented program called REACH ("Realizing Excellence in Academic Cognition Heuristically." What does Heuristically mean? Hell if I know...) Once a week, we spent half an hour in a guided breathing and relaxation session. When I think about it now, I can't imagine a public school committing resources to a similar program in elementary education, though it was the one thing about that program that has stuck with me the longest and proven the most useful in my life. In high school, I also played around with self-hypnosis and successfully blew my own mind by actually changing the temperature of my skin, verified by thermometer, by visualizing a heat source near it. So I just didn't think one more session of breathing through fake contractions with a clothespin on her ear would really change things much for Mrs. Rodius.

So I tried to get her to cut class. But she wouldn't do it.

"What about the diploma?" she said.

"What do I need with a birthing class diploma?" I asked. But I should've already known the correct answer:

"Put it in the scrapbook!" she said.

I should've known. She's been planning baby scrapbooks longer than she's been planning for a baby. I think she got her first Little Suzy's Zoo stickers three years ago. So we stuck around, and we graduated. And we've got the document to prove it. Come by our place some time next year, and I'll show you the scrapbook.