W
e went to our birth class today, hosted by our midwife, Katherine. It really was a remarkable thing. Katherine is a singular person, of supreme dedication to her vocation, and she fills her role to the fullest. She is confident, funny, knowledgeable, and a little scattered from time to time. The immense amount of experience under her belt -- having delivered as many as 700 babies, by her count -- is obvious in the way she conveys the principles and lessons she has learned in her time as a midwife.
Foremost, her intent with these classes to avoid over-intellectualizing the process of birth in the prospective parents. While foreknowledge is extremely important, she is adamant that too much detail and expectation about uncertain and powerful events like birth only serve to take us out of the important work that is being done on a physical, emotional, and hormonal level -- which can also happen in clinical and impersonal environments like hospitals, when we are surrounded by strangers. Instead, her method of pedagogy consists in alternating information about the process, and surprisingly convincing performances of the typical actions and vocalizations that women go through in each stage of labor and birth. The whole thing really gave us a wonderful vision of what to expect, and calmed Elena's nerves substantially; she's been dealing with a lot of anxiety about whether she will be able to handle giving birth, and at the end of the class, she said she's now actively excited about the prospect, and confident that her body will know what to do.
There is more than one type of knowing -- or rather, knowing and experiencing are not the same thing. Knowing is a sort of translation of experience into a different mode, and no translation is perfect. I wrote a post about this recently, about nails in the sand. I should probably revisit the topic -- I may not have given the issue its due.