May Blossom re-enacts what will happen if you don’t shut about about your birth plan while having coffee with friends.
My friends Lou and Sophie visited me yesterday, with their delightful children. While the three bigger kids all rabbited about leaving dangerously small items where Lou’s baby could ingest them, we chatted about birth. Sophie and I are both nearly due for the second time and Lou has Been There And Done That and is now the proud and exceedingly competent mother of two small humans. As I launched into my usual diatribe about how I’d like to have a VBAC but who knows what will happen and I’ll probably end up with another caeasarean which will be fine but also not fine because I won’t be able to pick up May Blossom but at least I won’t end up with such bad tearing that I have a vaganus and so on and so forth, Lou made the polite suggestion that perhaps I might benefit from listening to the meditation tracks from a Calmbirth course.
She was right, of course. I already had those tracks on my laptop: another friend gave the CD to me during my first pregnancy and I must say, all I had to do was listen to them once and I had a completely pain-free and very calm birth. Sure, it was a highly anaesthetised scheduled caeasarean, but did I so much as yelp once during it? I did not. So clearly Calmbirth works.
Not wanting to leave it to the last minute – I still had three days until I was technically at my due date – as soon as my friends left I put May Blossom down for her nap and started to download the tracks to my phone. An hour and a half later I had backed up, synced, wiped, blown its nose, restored and de-fuckified my phone twice and I now have NO music tracks of any kind on it, Calmbirth meditations included.
I didn’t feel very bloody calm either. I gather from this that the point of Calmbirth is to make any kind of birth feel like a walk in the park compared to actually figuring out how to listen to the damn tracks. Eventually I gave up and listened to them through the laptop, which was a perfectly fine solution. I got about two minutes in and there was something about remembering a great holiday I’d been on and something else about a flower opening up and then May Blossom woke up so that was that. I’m sure it will stand me in good stead once again, when and however this baby is born.