My birth story was featured in the September issue of Mother & Baby magazine. I was so excited to be included, I’m always keen to bore anyone who’ll listen with the details of Ebony’s birth. When I was pregnant, I found that all I was hearing was absolute horror stories about childbirth (it made me so furious that I actually ranted about it in one of my first ever blogs here). Some of the stories I was told still haunt me to this day, and when I think about it now, I can’t quite believe that people thought it was ok to share them with a heavily pregnant woman.
I met up with a friend the other day, and she said the same thing has been happening to her now that’s pregnant. I think people see a pregnant woman and, in a freakshow style manner, feel the need to talk about childbirth, and, for some reason, all we ever hear about is horror stories. Throughout the whole of my pregnancy, I only heard one good birth story and because it was such an anomaly, I assumed she was just super human.
So, having been through childbirth, I now feel the need to tell everyone that it’s really not that bad. Well, mine wasn’t anyway. I used to read pregnancy magazines a lot when I was expecting, and I was always thankful for positive birth stories, so I was really pleased that my story was picked to feature in the magazine.
For the article, I was asked to give three tips I would give my pregnant friends. One of the tips I always give my pregnant friends, is to read Grantly Dick-Read’s Childbirth Without Fear. I read it when I was three months pregnant, in Italy with my family, and I found it life-changing. Until that point, I’d been unable to really think about the birth because I was worried about how I would cope, but Dick-Read (*snigger*) made me feel confident and calm about giving birth. I focused on what I’d learnt from his book for the rest of the pregnancy, and it helped to block out all the childbirth horror stories I was hearing. If you’re pregnant, I very strongly recommend reading his book.
If you want to read my full birth story, you can find it here (please ignore the typos and grammatical errors, I was a very new mother at the time, and it seems wrong to correct it now).
