Natural or Not?

The childbirth dilemma:

Do I want to shoot for a natural birth this time? And if I do, how exactly do I plan to do it?

You'd think these questions wouldn't come up when it's time to deliver your fifth child. After all, shouldn't I have it figured out by now? Well, I've been kicking around these questions for a little while. My standard answer has been that of course I want to try to do it natural and go to an epidural as a last resort. But I wasn't all that happy with myself last time, being for some reason sure that I could have done it the Amazon way if I just hadn't been such a wimp. And unmet expectations about what a birth should have been like are way worse than just accepting reality. (Kind of like when I finally gave up feeling guilty about not being a breastfeeder and just accepted that for our family, formula was the best option and I wasn't going to listen to all the naysayers suggesting otherwise.)

Anyway, while thinking this over, I paid a visit to whattoexpect.com and out of curiosity visited a thread where moms were talking about how much (or how little) childbirth actually hurts. There were quite a few moms on there insisting that childbirth pain was nowhere near as bad as their infected teeth pain or pancreatitis. Several were describing their natural births as no big deal at all.

Well, shoot, if your natural birth was far less painful than your first tattoo, then you really would be a wimp if you opted for the epidural! No wonder these women were skeptical of the women posting that labor was excruciating.

I don't really know what to think. I'm experienced on this end, but all my experiences have been very different. My one natural birth was far less painful than any of the others, even though it was the longest. (Probably why I was able to do it naturally.) By far the most physically excruciating pain I've ever experienced (yes, worse than the kidney stone) was my first delivery. I literally thought I was going to die trying to push M out. And I didn't think it was ever going to end. (Though I had an epidural for the labor part, they let it run out so "I would be able to feel when I pushed". I'm firmly against that now. I kept the epidural in full force for pushing out both J & K, and it didn't impede my pushing at all. )

Terence thinks that I should just accept right from the beginning that I am going to have an epidural with this one and make my peace with it. He knows as well as I do that I don't have a high tolerance for pain. (I don't even have a medium tolerance for pain.) But what if this labor is different? What if it's more like it was with B? Granted, my labor with B was drastically different for many reasons. It's the only labor where I was allowed to walk all over the hospital (being the only one where I didn't have to have the IV antibiotics four hours before delivery). It's also the only one where I was allowed to eat or drink whenever I felt like it. Of course it was going to be different. Plus with both J & K I was given Pitocin. Nothing like a shot of Pitocin to jack up the pain scale.

But what if. . .what if. . . . It really was easier to recover from my natural birth than the others. I still had to have an episiotomy, like all the others, so that was kind of painful, but it was nice being able to get up and walk almost right away. I liked not feeling numb for hours. But I don't know what to do to manage pain in a natural birth. With B I read books while pacing the floor for hours, and that worked pretty well. I was able to sleep through a little bit. At the end when the pain was too intense for anything else, I laid in bed squeezing Terence's hand while he shouted at me to breathe and I sobbed in between contractions. That doesn't exactly sound heroic, but it worked. But would it work again? I had books to read for K but reading in bed when I couldn't pace around (because of the antibiotics & the pitocin) didn't work at all. And lying in bed while Terence (again) shouted at me to breathe didn't work either. I demanded the epidural that time, even though I was dilated to 8 cm. With M I had practiced all kinds of things-- breathing techniques, imagery, soothing music, reading, you name it. I had Kathy Hofer come as a doula with all her homeopathic treatments, and still, I needed the epidural and it was my most painful labor.

Well, I'm just rambling here. In the end, I will have to make my own decision, probably not until I am actually going through labor and delivery. I just want to be satisfied this time with a healthy baby, rather than feeling guilty if I don't turn out to have the heroic, "successful" natural delivery.