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Your guide to childbirthAre you interested in having a satisfying childbirth experience and receiving honest answers to your questions and professional solutions to your problems? Are you feeling lost among all the choices and medical jargon? Not sure what you want, or how to achieve it? You've come to the right place! What is it that every woman wants out of childbirth? A healthy baby, a healthy mama, and a satisfying experience for both! Right? Right! I'm a doula and the mother of two lovely little girls. I was once where you are now - pregnant and wondering what the best course was to take for my childbirth. I wondered whether I should have an elective C-section to avoid the pain of labor. I wondered whether to induce labor when I passed my due date. I meticulously researched all my pain relief options - and I used them all! ... and I ended up having an awful first birth experience. You bet I tried to do something different for my second birth! For one, I hired a doula. But the main thing I did was to change my own thinking about birth. I did a lot of soul-searching to figure out what was important to me, why my first birth was such an awful experience for me despite the fact that nothing happened that I didn't ask for. With my experience in hand, I had to figure out what I really wanted out of childbirth to be happy with the experience (other than a healthy baby and a healthy mama, of course). And all that work paid off - I had a satisfying second birth experience. A friend of mine had the exact opposite story. She hired a doula for her planned hospital birth, she ended up consenting to an induction, went through natural labor and still had an awful first birth experience! For her second birth, she ditched the doula, switched hospitals, stood up for what she wanted and had a wonderful birth! Yet another friend ended up with an emergency c-section the first time, and went for a VBAC (vaginal birth after cesarean) the second time. She actually felt okay about her cesarean birth experience and was completely traumatized, not by the VBAC itself, but her doctor's reaction to it afterward. One mother whose home birth I was hired to attend ended up having an unassisted birth because her labor progressed so quickly that both the midwife and I missed it. She was ecstatic! She felt this was the way it was meant to be. Another mother had a similarly precipitous labor, gave birth on the way to the hospital, but she was completely shellshocked. What is the take-home message here? It's not WHAT happens, but HOW you live through it that makes a difference for your birth experience. In all these cases, babies and mothers came out physically healthy, so the outcome was good. But even though the same thing may have happened, two different women had the opposite emotional experience! This is important. In order to have a good birth experience, you need to understand not just what you are signing up for (hospital birth, home birth, unassisted birth, vbac, c-section, epidural, etc), you also need to understand yourself. And this second bit may be even more important than understanding what exactly is involved with the type of childbirth you choose to aim for. About me and my services I am a psychologist, doula, childbirth educator and lactation consultant. I offer Skype consultations for one-on-one childbirth preparation, birth trauma counseling, breastfeeding questions and postpartum depression. Click here for my rates and policies. I am physically located in Budapest, Hungary, so if you happen to be here, check out the list of Budapest-based counseling, birth doula, and breastfeeding services I offer. Hope you find what you're looking for on these pages! And drop me a line if you don't, so I can add it!
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