[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Someone recently pointed out that I have a lot of “don’ts” in my life. I don’t have a cell phone. I don’t eat processed food. I don’t shop at Wal-Mart or Target. I don’t fly Delta (or any American airline company, for that matter). I don’t have full coverage health insurance. I don’t save for my child’s college education. I don’t like the President, the police department or my neighbors. The list, apparently, goes on and on.
I was sitting down ready to write another “don’t” column (oh, about doctors and hospitals, but I can save that one for later) – but I decided to write something positive instead. Despite my pessimism, occasionally, good things and people sneak into my life.
In November of last year, I was searching for a childbirth education class. I wasn’t interested in a hospital “class,” which seemed like no more than a marketing gimmick. You come to us, they all seemed to preach. Just lie back and we’ll take care of it all for you – at a sky high cost, of course. I asked a couple of friends who’d recently given birth, and they didn’t have much advice. One friend’s obstetrician even refused to treat patients who’d take a natural childbirth class, deeming them too crazy for her practice. Fortunately, my midwives didn’t feel the same way – so when they suggested that I attend a class at the home of a doula and friend they knew, I tempered my reservations and took their advice.
The Best Education Possible
That’s how I met Julie Freitas. It was a cold, dark November night, when my husband and I, pillows in hand (Julie told us to bring three), drove to Valley Village and pulled up to her bungalow in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. Already six months pregnant, I felt like I’d walked onto the set of a sit-com – with an assortment of other pregnant couples filling out the ensemble cast, each with three of their own pillows and the additional props of padded floor mats standing by on Julie’s porch. She gave us nametags hand-drawn in calligraphy, a binder of information and articles she’d gathered over the years, and we joined the other expectant couples for a living room lecture, breathing exercises (on the floor mats and pillows), and the start of the best education I could have ever received.
At each of the eight weeks we spent at Julie’s home, she taught us how to plan for a wonderful, natural, home birth, to prepare for a birth that might not go as planned, a bit about how midwives and doulas would help us make the transition to first-time parents, and how to care for our soon-to-come newborn, gently encouraging breast-feeding, the use of cloth diapers, co-sleeping, rejecting circumcision, and other aspects of “attachment” parenting.
After months of dealing with the medical industrial complex (and that’s what it is – health care is too kind a term), and the consumer industrial complex ready to market to and sell me all the plastic pregnancy and baby goods made in Chinese sweatshops that I could imagine, it was a relief to meet someone who embodied my values and respected my choices, without trying to undermine them or make me feel crazy. And the beauty of it is that every nugget of information was delivered with a smile, herbal tea and the best banana chocolate cake you can imagine.
She Was the Reason for a Successful Birth
Week after week. I got on all fours and breathed, and panted like my dog. No matter how many times Julie assured us, I wasn’t quite sure I could make it all the way through childbirth without drugs. She coached us with the wisdom that time and experience visits upon some women. Your water breaks, no problem. Umbilical cord around your baby’s neck after traveling down the vaginal canal – all will be well. Humans (and their progenitors) have done this birth thing for millions of years quite successfully, she assured us. So my husband and I did everything that Julie recommended and my son’s birth was all I could have hoped for.
Last weekend, we hosted a reunion of our childbirth class (this time with the babies on the outside), some seven months after that first meeting, and Julie was back with more kernels of advice on marriage, birth control, crying babies and infant care. As when she had hosted the meetings, Julie had a box chock full of props and information I hadn’t previously considered. I learned more than I could from days of reading self-help books or perusing the Internet.
Julie is the same age as my mother, and like her, she’s considering retirement. The current class of men and women (soon to be first-time parents) whom she is ushering into the world may be her last. I hope that she continues on as long as she is able, but understand that she can’t work forever. All good things, I know, must come to an end.
But in a world besieged by war, poverty, fear, prejudice and environmental degradation spurred by runaway capitalism, it’s good to know that people like Julie exist – doing their part to make us better people, and the world a better place.
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
