As the due date for our unborn child draws nearer, I’ve been seeing more and more of my obstetrician. You’re supposed to do that. But I also think he just likes seeing people. He’s buddy-buddy, this guy. He makes a lot of jokes. Offers snacks. He’s chatty, beyond relaying the results of blood tests and reminding me to get my Tdap vaccination.
One of the ways I’ve noticed our conversations tend to veer is in the direction of doulas. It keeps slipping his mind, I guess, that I’m not hiring one, so he keeps referencing her like a foregone conclusion.
The primary reason I’m not hiring a doula is because the one he suggested costs $1,500. That’s after insurance, which covers $0 in doula-related fees. The secondary reason is I had my first two kids doula-less and it went pretty well, because they’re standing here looking at me and I’m looking at them, thinking, the $3,000 I saved birthing you on my own is enough to fly us all to Paris this summer. Or just me, three times, in whatever seasons of my choosing.
To clarify, I in no way had either of those children truly on my own. There were armies of medical professionals buzzing around me, both times, with a lot of high-tech equipment and only semi-decipherable medicalese, and I liked that part of it so much: the experience of being the focus of a squad so expert that I can’t even fully make out what’s going on. I’m on Team Epidural, though I don’t know what an epidural looks like. Nor do I ever wish to know. My dream birth experience centers around some hazy, delirious cocktail of drugs, and though knocking the mom out is usually a last resort, I figure it can’t ever hurt to ask.
Do doulas go in for blackout births? It’s not the impression I’m getting. Still, I didn’t make my decision to forego one rashly. While it had never occurred to me to hire a doula, my doctor asked me to go to this one’s info session, and I don’t claim to know everything, so I went. I sat there with all the fresh-faced, first-time mommies taking notes on their iPads and swapping recipes for the chai teas they let themselves indulge in once a month. The doula talked to us about bouncy balls and the importance, in labor, of remembering to go pee. She showed us a little delivery room she had set up with essential oils and twee banners saying things like, “Girl Power” and “Status: Queen.” The idea was that this was what our own delivery rooms could look like, assuming we hired her and didn’t give birth in the car. It was supposed to feel like we weren’t even inside a hospital room, only here’s the thing: I love hospital rooms. Obviously, not on a day-to-day basis. I don’t actively seek to occupy them. But when I’m sick or giving birth, there is nowhere else I’d rather be. Call me crazy, but I’m soothed by their sterility and all the lifesaving modern medicine at hand.
FYI, hospitals are where doctors work.
Now plainly, doctors and doulas are not mutually exclusive. But it does seem as though doulas are meant, in part, to distract you from the medical nature of giving birth. Like, if you’re curious and you look doulas up on the internet, synonyms you might come across are “labor coach” and “sister-friend.” Maybe it’s the frozen, sterile core of me recoiling from the term “sister-friend,” but I don’t refer to my own sister as my “sister-friend.”
In fairness to the doula, I thought some of the things she said made a lot of sense. Like when she suggested limiting the number of people in the delivery room. Then I imagined my delivery room and did a quick mental scan of the faces. The first one getting the axe, I thought, is the one costing me an out-of-pocket $1,500.
I don’t want to feel like a number. Other expectant moms tell me that a lot. They mean in the hospital, and I get where they’re coming from. They don’t want to feel like the staff’s there to catch their baby, stick it with a Social Security number, swaddle swaddle swaddle and send them on their way. There are a lot of more-refined points in between, but the points aren’t the point. The feeling is the point. And the doula is all about the feeling.
Me, I love being a number! A really high one, if you please, indicating how many people came before me. I love experience in a doctor. I’d go so far as to put it up there in my top three doctor qualities, tied with steady hands and has an anesthesiologist on speed dial. I don’t need to feel special! In fact, best-case scenario, I don’t feel a thing.
“Okie doke,” I said at my next OB appointment. “I’m not hiring the doula. What next?”
No problem, my doctor assured me. No doula, no problem. Then he said we could start thinking about my birth plan, though usually his patients went through the doula for that.
Right.
I don’t blame my doctor. He’s not the first person to have suggested a doula to me. Join any social media mommy group and you’ll start getting invited to events with names like “Meet the Doula” and “There’s a Bun in the Oven! Doula Bake Sale” and “Match the Doula with Her Spirit Animal: A Game Night.” But then—in the same threads—there are events inviting me to consider training as a doula. Is there a doula pyramid scheme out there I need to be made aware of? Because I won’t be just anyone’s bottom-feeder doula. Only ladies who can correctly guess my spirit animal. (It’s a koala bear. He has an epidural.)
But back to the birth plan. Do I really need a birth plan? Can’t I communicate things the old-fashioned way, in real time, with English words from my mouth? English words have always served me well in the past. Let’s give them a spin, with these prompts excerpted from an actual birth-plan template:
The name I want to be called is: Koala Doula.
My preferred birth partner would be: My doctor. My husband. The school of koi fish out in the hospital lobby.
I would like to use the following during labor (check all that apply):
- A birthing stool
- A birthing pool
- Beanbags
- Music
Having given birth twice now, I can’t even hazard a guess as to what possible use the beanbags could have. But I’m not ruling them out. My last labor was 18 hours, and you know? I’ve never said no to a game of cornhole in the past.
I would like to: Push when I’m told to or push when it feels right.
Would you push, now, in a box? Would you push, now, with a fox? I would not, could not, in a box. I would not, could not, with a fox! I’ll push when it feels right, you see! I’ll push this baby in a tree! Now fetch my cornhole game to me.
My thoughts on being given an injection to contract my womb before the delivery of the placenta: Don’t pretend like you know what this is. I don’t know what it is. Neither of us is prepared to make a medically sound decision on it. The best we could do is Google it, and in 2018, that counts for less than nothing.
My special requests: Just throwing it out there, one last time, that I wouldn’t hate being unconscious. No? Not an option? Just the usual, then: a daiquiri epidural, and make it a double.
Cheers to you, doulas. I drink to our mutual health.