posted November 10, 2003 09:51 PM         

But my thoughts are with you and I know there are lots of great moms on this board who can share stories with you!
lioneye and pixelpixie come to mind...

posted November 10, 2003 10:53 PM         

i haven't been pregnant yet. care to guess when you'll think that may be for me, oh wise fish?

posted November 10, 2003 11:28 PM         

I don't know if this will help, but I have been pregnant twice and know what you're going through, so here's my two cents:

Try to keep your mind occupied. Read a good book, listen to music, write a poem, do some paperwork, get "lost" in an interesting movie...and if you feel down enough to cry, let the tears flow. KNOW that this will pass because it definitely will. If you're feeling energetic, take advantage of it and do some light housework.

I did all these things at various times, especially during my first pregnancy, along with making things for the baby, like a hooked rug for the nursery and crocheting blankets, etc. During my second pregnancy I was busy taking care of a 2-year old so I had to fit things in around my child.

Most important: take care of yourself. Eat healthy foods, get plenty of rest, listen to your body and your heart. Pamper yourself. This is a very special time in your life; you are creating a miracle!

All the best,

posted November 11, 2003 01:17 AM         

I had a wonderful book, call "What to Expect When You're Expecting", and a few others, but that one was my fave. It also goes into what to expect immediately after having baby, both with your body, and with the baby...including the psychological adjustment phase.

Oh yes, indeed my bun-in-the-oven freind, forewarned is forearmed. How are you preparing for childbirth? Taking Lamaze classes or anything like that? You can get books all about that too, how to make it easier, tips and tricks to make it go faster, etc.

Nature makes us carry our babies for 9 months because it takes that long to construct the little ankle biters, but it also takes time to prepare MOM for it as well.
If you can't just go around buying books to suit your fancy, you can probably get some at the library. The net is nice too, but you can't really curl up in bed or on the couch with it, with a nice cup of Oregan Chai or something like that.

I wish I hadn't given mine away, Prox...I woulda mailed them to you. Bummed about that.

Maybe someone else has some ????

posted November 11, 2003 07:11 PM           

Aph - Who you callin' a wise fish?

Twin Lady - Thank you for your advice!
I've been trying to stay occupied, but - gah - my mind won't seem to cooperate. It keeps drifting...although I do have _The Life of David Gale_ here to help me out

D - Thank you That means a lot.

lioneye - Oh, wow, I've poured over _What to Expect When You're Expecting_.
Yep...the chapter on the first week post-partum got me good and scared this morning.
Yep.
I also photocopied the "Dad" chapter and sent it off to Jase.
I haven't bought a single pregnancy book, but people've bought me the above and a few others, and my laptop makes surfing the web in bed or curled up on the couch much easier.
I'm going to go into both a childbirth and a breastfeeding class over at Ft. Belvior...they'll just kinda suck a bit w/ Jase still gone.

posted November 12, 2003 01:45 AM         

Harpyr, I gave birth without drugs too!! It was so great for my daughter too, cuz she was born bright eyed and bushy tailed, not whacked and drowsy. She sucked back 5 oz of water in her first 10 minutes! Not to mention how well she took to breast feeding...ouch. There was a gal in the bed next to me who also had her baby that afternoon, and he was too drowsy and drugged up to pick up on the sucking reflex. When I was leaving the hospital 2 days later, she was still having trouble with breastfeeding her boy, and you could tell how distressed she was about it too, especially in comparison to me and my daughter. We bonded right away, but they were having some trouble, I'm sure because of the strong drugs she had during labor.

posted November 12, 2003 09:54 PM         

Worry is the Work of Pregnancy

Our study group in Albuquerque resisted when Dr. Lewis Mehl, a psychologist who specializes in childbirth-related issues, said, “Worry is the work of pregnancy.” We were all holding on to the notion that women who appear relaxed, confident and together, birth normally.

We were intrigued by his story about a childbirth class in Georgia. There were six couples I that class. One of the couples was particularly concerned about how to avoid a Cesarean birth. Every week, they stretched the patience of their childbirth teacher with questions. Later, at the group’s postpartum reunion, everyone was amazed that the couple who had worried so much about a Cesarean birthed normally, while the five couples who had sat quietly all had Cesareans!

In the years to follow, my midwifery practice taught me that for some women, worry is the work of pregnancy. In fact, an over confident first-time mom who thinks she has it all figured out, worries me. I worry she will not be truly prepared for what awaits her.

Women all over the world worry about pain, the health of their baby, and of dying in labor. Western mothers have additional worries: whether their own doctor or midwife will be on call when they’re in labor, avoiding unnecessary interventions, separation from their newborn and the cost of medical care.

WORRYING EFFECTIVELY

Hannah, a second-time mom, wanted to have a simple, natural birth experience after having had a highly medicalized birth. Her worry that this birth would be another painful disappointment clouded her pregnancy. She remained immobilized and ambivalent into her eighth month.

She longed to hear me say that everything would be all right. Even though her problems were not likely to recur, I resisted the socially expected, “Don’t worry” response. Empty reassurance might have supported her avoidance of the hard, painful work she still needed to do.

Hannah wanted to believe that positive thinking would make this birth work out, yet intuitively, we both knew that more was needed. Instead, I encouraged her to face what she feared. In trying to control her fears, Hannah hadn’t been worrying enough!

The first task I gave her was to write down all her secret worries. “Some of your worries may be genuinely trivial,” I suggested, “but look closely at the ones you are trying to minimize or ignore. Pay particular attention to worries that create a physical tension in your body.”

When Hannah brought her worry-list to our next session, we explored each worry using the following questions:

• What would you do if this worry/fear actually happened?

• What would you imagine your partner (or birth attendant) would do/say?

• What would it mean about you (as a mother) if this happened?

• How have you faced crises in the past?

• What, if anything, can you do to prepare for, or even prevent, what you are worrying about? What’s keeping you from doing it?

• If there’s nothing you can do to prevent it, how would you like to handle the situation?

Some people believe that exploring fears or worries make them more likely to happen. In fact, worrying effectively helped Hannah shift from frozen, fearful images ofnot being able to cope, to more fluid images containing a variety of coping responses. Weeks later, Hannah gave birth simply and normally to her daughter, Laura, in a hospital birthing room.

Ten common worries-

• Not being able to stand the pain
  
• Not being able to relax
  
• Feeling rushed, or fear of taking too long
  
• My pelvis not big enough
  
• My cervix won’t open
  
• Lack of privacy
  
• Being judged for making noise
  
• Being separated from the baby
  
• Having to fight for my wishes to be respected
  
• Having intervention and not knowing if it is necessary or what else to do.

posted November 14, 2003 11:56 AM         

try reading an Erma Bombeck book.

It will make you laugh so hard that you will forget alll...

They are about being pregnant,a mother, a girl friend, a maid, a teacher...
Basicly everything that the word MOTHER/WOMAN stands for... And thay are really great for getting you spirits up.

posted November 14, 2003 02:01 PM         

Your successful evolution to parenthood depends largely on your accommodation to the vast changes which are unfolding beyond your control. Learning to accept loss of control is an integral part of both birth and motherhood/fatherhood.

For example, beginning in pregnancy, you gradually will have less an less control over your emotions, bodily function or sleep. In labor (especially without drugs) you will be forced to surrender the masks of your ego. All of these changes remind you that your life style and self are being irrevocably transformed.

Accompanying the birth of your new life is the “death” of your old one. A healthy gestation includes acknowledging what you are giving up (at least for awhile): sleep, spontaneously going to a movie, party, or away for the weekend, income, plans for career or education, and the marital relationship as you’ve known it.

Most new parents are caught off guard by the unexpected, almost painful, intensity of love and attachment to their newborn baby. This intensity introduces a new vulnerability to life which upsets your emotional equilibrium. The other side of loving your wonderful, yet helpless, infant is the overwhelming fear of losing your baby. This terror dwells in the depths of your new-parent consciousness. This dynamic balance of love an fear, and the protective and nurturant behaviors it generates, is the essence of parenthood.
”I feel like I’m being held in the womb of the Great Mother. My baby isn’t the only one gestating, if feels like I’m gestating too, for motherhood...” -Vanessa

WHO WILL ASSIST YOUR “BIRTH” AS PARENTS?
The great life passages from maidenhood to motherhood, from being a couple to being parents, are virtually overlooked by health professionals. (As you’ve already noticed, prenatal care and childbirth classes emphasize physical and medical considerations.) Yet the outcome of this less visible gestational process will determine the health of your family for years to come.

Because modern obstetric training and responsibility focuses on body care, it’s unrealistic, if not unfair, to expect medical people to guide you through this emotional-psychological transition. Accept that it is your responsibility to search out and connect with helpful people and experiences. Guidance and support through the transition of parenthood falls more naturally to family, friendship, spirituality and, at times, therapy.

WHAT DOES A HEALTHY “NEWBORN” MOTHER AND FATHER LOOK LIKE?”
A pediatrician knows what a healthy newborn baby looks like. But what does a healthy newborn parent look like?

Although values differ across cultures and time, we’ve identified some qualities that may be indicators of a healthy new parent in our culture:

• Deeply rooted sense of protectiveness
  
• Acceptance of the loss of control (over one’s life, time, and emotions) while developing a deeper sense of humor and absurdity
  
• Acceptance of responsibility for the parts of your child’s development which you control (e.g., discipline)
  
• Willingness to be self-sacrificing
  
• Understanding interdependence (People sometimes think of immaturity as bing too dependent. Another kind of immaturity is not being able to ask for help.)
  
• Patience, flexibility and creativity
  
• Awareness of how your own childhood affects your parenting
  
• Acceptance of your changed physical-social identities

What to do:

1. On your own or in a group...Draw/Write/Discuss what your transition to parenthood looks like.
   
2. Discuss with friends or a childbirth class your reactions to this chapter and the following questions:
   

• How did you see yourself as an individual/couple before your pregnancy?
  
• How do you envision yourself as a new parent with your baby?
  
• How do you imagine your partner as a parent?
  
• What image of yourself as a parent makes you most anxious?
  
• How do you want your baby to see you? What would you want your baby to say about you if he/she could chat with other babies at his/her first birthday party?
  

PREMATURE PARENTHOOD
Premature: (pre*ma*ture)[L.prematurus; prae, before, and maturus, ripe] happening, arriving, coming to pass unexpectedly early, too early.

While a baby can survive its mis-timed arrival through the intensive, miraculous support of medical technology, mothers and fathers suffering from premature parenthood are often misunderstood and left to fend for themselves.

Premature parents are those who conceive before they or their relationship are psychologically, socially, or financially ready. The baby is not necessarily unwanted or even unplanned.

FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH PREMATURE PARENTHOOD:

• Unfinished education
  
• Unresolved issues with parents
  
• Inadequate financial resources
  
• Unfulfilled wanderlust
  
• A partnership still in it’s early, non-solidified stages (or no partner at all)
  
• Unreadiness of the extended family to help (e.g., premature grandparenthood)

COMPLICATIONS OF PREMATURE PARENTHOOD
For some, premature parenthood may wind up bing a temporary period of frustration. But for others, it is potentially serious, and may have long-term, damaging effect of their family’s well-being.

Premature parents are at risk to develop any of the following:

• Resentment
  
• Depression
  
• Anger
  
• Guilt
  
• Over-protectiveness
  
• Negligence
  
• Free-floating anxiety
  
• Lack of confidence
  
• Damaged self-esteem
  
• Isolation
  
• Shame
  
• Marital discord or separation
  
• Child neglect or abuse

Sometimes when expectant parents are detoured from their personal aspirations, there is an over-eagerness to get their lives back on track. This ay result in high expectations of their baby, their partner and themselves, thereby creating and undercurrent of tension, resentment and blame in the family.

Caring for a new baby in the absence of adequate personal/marital resources can harm a family by draining physical and emotional energy away from the marriage. The couple may experience isolation, stagnation, or even the withering of what previously had been a satisfying relationship.

When a baby arrives before the parents are ready, the ability to parent skillfully, with patience and understanding, is also undermined. When premature parents are not comfortable with their own emotions (especially neediness, anger and sadness) they communicate judgement, resentment and rejection of their infant/child’s normal emotions and behavior. This leads to negative mother-child or father-child interactions, erosion of self-esteem, and increasingly painful, conflicted family relationships.

WHAT’S A PREMATURE PARENT TO DO?
These complex issues can’t be resolved without effort, and frequently professional guidance is necessary. The following may be helpful:
[list]

posted November 28, 2003 02:10 PM         

K, prox..here's the final installment in this little sneakpeek/preview of _Birthing From Within_.
I hope you find it useful...Enjoy.

Baby-Proofing Your Marriage

Successful postpartum adjustment comes from awareness, and realistic preparation, not blissful fantasizing. Our Babyproofing and Postpartum Connections classes warn couples that beautiful images of bonded, loving, joyful new families can distract them from learning the skills they need to navigate the rough waters of new parenthood. This chapter contains a sampling of what we talk about with couples in our postpartum groups.

In their excellent book, The Transition to Parenthood: How a First Child Changes a Marriage(1994), researchers Jay Belsky and John Kelly reported that previous research indicated “there was only one major form of marital change among new parents-decline.” But what they found in their own research surprised them: “our data [on 250 couples] indicated that a marriage can change in one of four ways, and in each case the direction of change is determined by the couple’s ability to overcome the polarizing effects of the transition.”

In order to study the impact of the transition from couplehood to parenthood, couples were followed from the third trimester of pregnancy to the child’s third birthday. Belsky and Kelly found couples fell into one of four categories: Severe Decliners (12%); Moderate Decliners (39%); No Change (30%); and Improvers (19%).

WHAT WERE THE “IMPROVERS” DOING?

Improvers were described as those whom “the process of overcoming transition-time, marital gaps and divisions brought....closer together.”

Only 19 percent of the couples studied actually achieved what all of us hope our baby’s arrival will bring. Some of the characteristics that Belsky and Kelly proposed as “most important in facilitating a husband’s and wife’s smooth passage through the transition included the ability to surrender individual goals and needs and work together as a team,.. To merge their individual selves into a larger Us, and resolve differences about division of household chores and work-in a mutually satisfactory manner.”

The husbands and wives in the study agreed that “this is the major stress of the transition...and while they expected the baby to create a lot more work, that expectation did not prepare them for what they actually encountered. One of the [study] mothers compared the difference to ‘watching a tornado on TV and having one actually blow the roof off your house.’”

survival hints:

• Lower your housekeeping standards (throw away your white gloves!)
  
• Recognize that baby care and household chores can’t be divided 50-50; at any given moment one parent inevitably will be doing more in one area while the other does more in another. Try not to keep score.
  
• Consider hiring a housekeeper (if you can afford it) until you adjust to the chaos.
  
• Fight constructively. In our classes and counseling, time is spent discussing the differences between constructive versus destructive conflict. Couples learn ground rules for fighting, how to follow up on issues raised during a fight (once tempers have cooled), and how to finish a fight so bad feelings don’t go on endlessly.
  
• Realize that however good a marriage becomes postbaby, it will not be good in the same way in was prebaby.
  
• Keep in mind whether your communication is nurturing or harming the marriage.

WHAT DIVIDES NEW PARENTS

Even Improvers said they were surprised by how many more disagreements they had after the baby arrived. (Before reading on, imagine five things you and your partner are most likely to argue about postbaby.)

According to Belsky and Kelly’s research, “new parents disagree about many things, but when they fight they usually fight about one of five things:

• Division of labor
  
• Money
  
• Work
  
• Their relationship (which one of them is to blame for the postpartum disconnection, loneliness, and stress)
  
• Social life (are we getting out enough?)

“These five issues are so big, important, and all pervasive they might be said to constitute the raw material of marital change during the transition. Quite simply, couples who manage to resolve these issues in a mutually satisfactory way become happier with their marriage, whereas those who do not become unhappier.”

Issue number Six: In-Laws

Our clinical experience makes it impossible not to include a huge issue couples struggle with postpartum: in-laws. The addition of a baby to a couples’s relationship puts new urgency into the question of family boundaries. In-laws now may feel a heightened sense of involvement in what is going on over at “the kids’ house” This shared area of interest (the baby) can enrich, reconnect, and heal the relationships between parents and their adult children. But it also can exacerbate ongoing tensions around respect, autonomy, and loyalty.

For many young adults marriage initiates a process of differentiation and boundary-setting vis-a-vis their family of origin. But the new family created by the arrival of the baby makes these issues even more salient. Redefining relationships (especially with a loving parent) can be a poignant, even scary rite of passage.

New parents benefit from well timed advice and assistance. Unfortunately some in-laws go overboard; overwhelmed and exhausted moms and dads can easily wind up feeling irritated, criticized, or under-mined.

Negotiating this awkward transition is accomplished most effectively when the spouse whose family-of-origin is over-involved and/or intrusive takes the leadership role. When the other spouse tries to confront this in-law issue without support from his/her partner, the situation often becomes worse: the original circumstances remain unchanged (or even inflamed), and the spouse who raised the issue now feels betrayed. His/her fear feels confirmed: the primary place in the partners’s heart is reserved for the family-of-origin. In counseling, many serious marital problems can be traced back to this heated issue being unresolved, an left to smolder.

A key transition task then is learning to clearly, but graciously, set limits if you feel disrespected or over-whelmed by in-laws. How you resolve this challenge will influence whether you eventually find yourself in a supportive extended family, or embroiled in chronic, bitter arguments.

Are you as new parents prepared to make a commitment to your new family?
Or will painful love and loyalty conflicts involving your families of origin compromise the integrity of your new family?

What You Can Do:
WRITE A POSTPARTUM ADJUSTMENT PLAN

1. Without consulting with your partner, each of you write down five issues you anticipate could be a problem in your relationship after your baby is born.
   
2. Share your lists with one another. Listen without interrupting while our partner talks about his or her concerns. Try not to be defensive.
   
3. Brainstorm together; consider (and write down) all possible solutions, including far-fetched ones.
   
4. From your lists, choose one or two solutions that seem most likely to ease each problem.
   
5. If you were to implement a solution, what would be you first SMALL step? Write it down. When the time comes, Do It!
   
6. Think of this list as a Postpartum Life Preserver, and keep it visible. Hang it on you bedroom mirror or refrigerator.

This chapter is intended to be a preview of postpartum issues, not a complete Baby-Proofing guide. In Albuquerque, parents can take our Baby-Proofing workshop or Postpartum Connections classes.

If these specific resources are not available in your area, you can begin your baby-proofing by sitting down and talking with other new parents about their transition. Another possibility, and usually a wise financial investment, is to schedule a few pre-baby planning/counseling sessions with someone familiar with post-partum adjustment issues.