Your Birth, My Day
So I began to envision my upcoming birth. I wrote a detailed birth plan – things to resolve, changes to make and an experience to embrace. Even without taking one test or sonogram during pregnancy, I remained positive about my body’s natural ability to birth my baby. I began a process of undoing some of the fearful thinking that had prevented me from experiencing motherhood on a more blissful level. I also began internalizing the belief that birth – as with other aspects of life – is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy. My state of mind will determine its outcome.
Friday night the week spring arrived, I lit Shabbat candles and began feeling signs of labor. I sat on the couch reading a newspaper as my almost-five-year-old daughter played in the empty birthing pool my husband had pumped up earlier. We wouldn’t fill it with water until I was ready to get inside so that the water would be warm.
