A Dooce of a birth story

I am probably the only person not to have heard of the blogger Dooce (aka Heather Armstrong, author of It Sucked and Then I Cried and Things I Learned About My Dad in Therapy). Until this morning, when I saw that she had written a glowing review of Your Best Birth. I was curious to find out who this famous blogger was, and so I read her Labor Story, Part One. I laughed, I nearly cried (from laughing), and I left wanting more. After all, she didn't even get around to the being-in-labor-part by the end of Part One.

Here's some of what she had to say about Your Best Birth:

Up until about the 30th week of my pregnancy I hadn't given labor much thought, only that I was going to ask for the epidural two days before contractions started. I'm not kidding, that was the extent of my birth plan. There was no need to experience any of the pain, I thought, especially since I had been through this before and I remember thinking that the pain was so awful that it was going to kill me. Give me the epidural and any other pain relief, maybe throw in a couple dozen shots of bourbon, oh and how about you just put me under general anesthesia and wake me up two days later. I'm not good with pain. I tend to complain and holler and call people regrettable things. It's like the Hulk, only he's on his period....

But then out of no where the publishers of Ricki Lake and Abby Epstein's book Your Best Birth sent me a copy, just like the publishers of many books send me copies of other books all the time. Internet, I have rooms full of books that publishers have sent me. ROOMS FULL. And I was just about to toss this onto the mountainous pile of ones I'd eventually drop off at Goodwill when, I don't know, I flipped through a few pages and gave a full minute to one or two paragraphs. And those two paragraphs happened to be ones that really pissed me off. So much so that I read them aloud to Jon and said something like GOD, THOSE HIPPIES! or I BET THEY SMELL LIKE PATCHOULI!

You know, something totally open-minded.

Those paragraphs pissed me off so badly, in fact, that the one part of me that resembles my father the most — no, not the pointy chin or the metabolism or the absolute inability to watch a movie where everything goes wrong and the protagonist just keeps getting pummeled by life and I'm all MAKE IT STOP and then I have get up and actually leave the theater, no, none of those things — my righteous indignation, it flared up so magnificently that I sat down to read the whole book, just so that I could be angry at it. WHO DOES SHIT LIKE THIS? Me and Michael Hamilton, that's who. Both he and I will go to our graves filled with an inordinate amount of unproductive anger, but a smile will mark our faces because we will feel so justified. So RIGHT.

And then, oh God, the worst thing happened. And I didn't even see it coming, but I'm sitting there reading that book, gritting my teeth, shaking my head when all of a sudden it started to make sense. I started to see just how medicalized labor and birth have become in America AND THERE GOES MY WORLD VIEW.

There goes her world view, and then comes her first unmedicated birth this July, which she describes as "sacred and spiritual." I can't wait to read more about it. If she can ever actually makes it to the labor and birth parts!

H/t to Unnecesarean's post Did Heather Armstrong make Ricki Lake pee her pants today?