While pregnant for the first time, a woman is diagnosed with breast cancer. While told that it is completely treatable and that now women battle and win against this fight, she is overcome by grief. Her pregnancy preconception of having a healthy, enjoyable pregnancy and subsequent birth is destroyed. For the moment, she wonders if she should even go through with the pregnancy…maybe she will die at a young age, leaving her child all alone without a mother. Will the cancer be transferred to the baby? There are so many questions!
Another woman who is having her third pregnancy hopes for a boy as she continually checks her figure in the mirror. She’s been told that boys ride high and out in front. She is staring at her “basketball” type belly and smiling as she picks out the perfect boy’s name. In the delivery room, the doctor announces, “It’s a girl!” and the pregnancy preconception is busted! She’d always heard that girls hide in the womb and cause major back pain. She never had one minute of back pain!
The ideas that have been shared with us for generations are done so to shape our thinking and to encourage us that others who have traveled this road survived and you will too. The pregnancy preconception that everything is rosy, beautiful and happy is not healthy. These are thoughts such as “My grandmother said that she hardly knew she was in labor, all of the sudden, out popped uncle Johnny! So it can’t be that bad!” What grandma didn’t tell you was that she had an epidural and pain killers to boot!
While remembering how huge she felt, another woman tells of how it took her seven years to get her figure back, only to be told during a routine doctor’s visit that she was pregnant. She was told that after she had her tubes tied that “it is very unlikely” to become pregnant again. For pregnancy preconceptions that are false…this is the biggest one!
Pregnancy preconceptions can be good, too. If you think that you’ll never live through the birth of your child because your threshold for pain is so low a splinter hospitalizes you for a week, then this pregnancy preconception is wrong, too. Women have been giving birth since the beginning of time and, without any complications, can expect to have a smooth, safe, happy delivery. Although, may I recommend you taking your grandmother’s route and securing an epidural BEFORE you get to the hospital…this allows you to take the focus off yourself and put it on birthing your baby; something else that no one told you, the pain is so bad you’ll not even be aware of what’s going on around you until it’s too late! So don’t miss out, especially if you’re only planning on doing this once…you’ll still feel pressure and the normal “pains” of birth, but they’ll be at a manageable level so you can actually participate in watching your new little one enter the world we live in!