Breakfast reading

For the last month I've spent my mornings sitting at the dining room table with a cup of half-caf coffee, breakfast and the Spiritual Midwifery book that my friend the Doula lent to me. The book starts out with very hippy, granola tales of mother's birthing experiences with this farm of midwives. And while the women tend to overuse words such as "physchedlic" "heavy" and "vibrations" (overuse of these words in my opinion is using them at all of course) the stories in themselves are very reassuring and I've surprised myself at how much I'm enjoying this "far out" pregnancy book. The women's stories all tend to have a moment where they were scared and thinking there was no way they could cope with the pain, then someone tells a joke, they all laugh, she makes-out with her husband and then with a lovey rush of hearts and unicorns and magic the baby is out and everyone is in love with everyone else in the world. Hippy or not, if you are pregnant - I recommend Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin.

For the past week though I have moved on from the birthing story part of the book, to the actual instructions to midwives on how to deliver a baby (nothing like pictures of placentas and drawings of how to sew up a vagina to add that extra zing to your cornflakes). One part of the book I read this morning called Encouraging the Mother made me laugh out loud:

First-time mothers may need to know that many women have the thought that they may "explode" or "break in two" during the transition or when pushing begins. This interpretation of the sensation of cervical stretching is frightening and usually increases the mother's discomfort, since it is nearly impossible to relax if you think you are exploding.

Truer words were never spoken.