When you’re staring at those two pink lines and your mind starts racing, it may feel like 9 months is a lifetime to wait to meet your new baby. While at the same time it feels like there’s a whole lot of things you need to do, and you need to do it yesterday! In the very beginning decisions seem to already be a bit daunting. As pregnancy progresses, those decisions you’re making on a daily basis begin to wear on you. You’ll likely start to suffer from decision fatigue right around the time you hit your third trimester.
When you hire your care team early on in your pregnancy, you’ll have a lot more time to prepare for what pregnancy brings and be informed on what you may have never known or heard before. Midwives get booked quickly, some doulas can fill their schedules as soon as 8 months in advance, and you’ll find yourself making dead-end phone calls before you’re able to interview potential care team members. If you find yourself looking at a due date of a month or less out, it doesn’t mean you can’t/won’t find someone to support you, but it does mean you’ll probably have to do more research than if you were planning much earlier. This can be exhausting (but worth it, if you wish to have that added preparation and support).
Equally as important as having a great care team that believes in your ability to birth is having a body prepared for this birth. That means exercise, nutrition and hydration are so very important to the success of your labor and birth process. Getting 80-100g of protein a day isn’t easy in the first or third trimester when you’re dealing with pregnancy woes. Your body is working overtime to accommodate this baby and your extra weight from the placenta, fluids, chest tissue, and blood volume, as well as trying to keep your baby safe from your own immune system. Add to these things, in the third trimester, you have much less room to do this in! As everything normally in your abdomen moves upward, your breathing becomes tiring to regulate, your ability to hold more than a few sips of water becomes a struggle of heartburn vs hunger, and your tolerance level of it all shortens the more you grow in this pregnancy.
While dealing with all this physical stuff, you’re still dealing with the emotional side of things. You have more hormones raging in your body than you did when you were a teen hitting puberty. You’ve not slept well since conception. You’re suddenly faced with the safety and mortality of yourself AND another human that cannot advocate for themselves. Consider a childbirth education course (talk to your doula about their ability to do this, or recommendations on one) and a birth preferences session (provided by many doulas), where you can talk about your personal preferences, find out what the many options and alternatives are, in case something should come up, and how to prepare for things that you may find crops up in your birth scenario. This will help you prepare for the if’s, but’s, and’s, and what-about’s in birth, as well as help you do the inner work on figuring out what is important to you and why.
Your birth matters. It matters to you, and it matters to your baby. (The old saying is, “You birth as you were birthed.”) Trust in your intuition. Listen to your body and your abilities over both your fears and ego. Know that things aren’t always going to turn out the way we plan, but things can still be our decision when it comes to how things play out when they don’t go as we thought they would.
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