I am going to take a moment out of my busy Betty Lunchbucket schedule to tell you how much I hate TV birth shows. Not to mention average Amerikan expectations of birth in general. That should be enough to ensure that most of you stop reading right there. Meow meow meow meow….pushing the limits of Vomitola. First mormon slander, now afterbirth!

As I was busily folding laundry, I flipped to TLC hoping to find someone with bad hair to mock. Instead, a hapless woman was wincing and grunting flat on her back in a hospital bed, pumped up with labor-causing drugs. The doctor came in, inserted an entire arm, and tut-tutted because the woman’s failsafe valve hadn’t managed to open up any further since the last time she was checked, a whole hour before. They’d been at this entire process for about eight hours, since they started the labor induction that morning. So off she went for a c-section! I guess if your child doesn’t fly out of you like a hot buttered football in the first hour, you are just shit out of luck. There was no apparent distress for the baby; it seemed like the doctor just wanted to get the show on the road.

I find my latent hippy dippy side coming out like nobody’s business as I contemplate the terrifying abyss of future parenthood. I’m still not totally sure what I want to do, or when, but I am pretty sure I don’t want “it” as seen on TV. Until recently I always thought I’d want to be drugged out of my gourd if I had the misfortune to whelp anything. That philosophy (of staying drugged out of my gourd) has served me well up until now, so why mess with it? But I remember seeing my mother have my sister, so I know a natural childbirth is possible, with no screaming or flailing even. Of course I flip hurriedly past those photos in the ol’ family album. The first time Mr. H met the parents, we both stared at the first page, puzzled, until I realized what we were observing.

Basically I just don’t like being told what to do. Damn it.

-xxoo