6 Labor Details You Should Keep to Yourself
You’re the senior member of your parenting tribe, and that makes you the go-to girl for pregnancy advice. Your preggo BFF is all about asking for labor and delivery details. You could sugarcoat the pressure, pain, and push experience, or you could get real. But before you gather around the campfire and tell scary stories about L&D, take a step back and think about what your friend truly needs to know. Oh, and consider not sharing some of these nail-biting, freak-out tales. Birth is an awesome experience, and there’s no reason for a mom-to-be to think otherwise.
1. The Pre-Baby Gore and Goop: One day, you were going along with your pregnancy as normal. Everything was fine. You had to pee, and then it happened. You lost your mucus plug. Yep, there’s a mucus plug in there, and it came out. Hey, that’s totally normal. It happens before labor and delivery starts, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re ready to have your baby right away. Your cervix is softening, and your body is prepping for the big day. That’s probably where the info you give your BFF should end. Going into great detail about what your mucus plug looked like isn’t exactly necessary. And please, please, please do not show her pictures.
2. Your Coworker’s Friend’s Super-Scary Story: You heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who, well, you get the picture. The horror show of a birth story you’re about to share with your pregnant (and kind of scared) BFF is like a bad game of telephone. What may have been a fairly normal birth has turned into a complication-filled blood bath, by way of several exaggerations. If the childbirth tell-all sounds more like fiction than fact, hold off on relaying it to your expectant mom friend.
3. The Pain, Oh the Pain: Your friend knows that childbirth hurts. Seriously. She hasn’t lived her entire adult life under a rock. She is aware that she will soon need to squeeze someone the size of a small watermelon out of her hoo-ha. So, going on and on and on about the crazy intense pain isn’t going to help her. What it will do is make her hyper-focused on the pain of delivery, and she doesn’t need that right now. Yeah, she’ll feel the pain, but she doesn’t need someone pounding the nitty-gritty details into her head beforehand.
4. The Complete List of Complications: Some births don’t go as planned. Complications happen. It’s a fact. Sharing your complications with your friend is kind of tricky. You want to help your BFF understand that it’s okay to have a labor and delivery that doesn’t go as planned. And you want to educate her and help her understand the facts, signs, and symptoms to look for. But you also don’t want to terrify her. There’s a difference between helping a friend and giving her a panic attack.
5. Bizarre Medical Mishaps: There’s this story going around your mommy sisterhood about how one woman got an epidural, had her baby, and never walked again. Yes, medical mishaps are real, but they’re certainly not the rule. Filling your friend in on every possible healthcare slip might just lead to some pretty unrealistic medical nightmares.
6. Amazingly Intimate Details: Some parts of your birth story are just for you and your S.O. or birth partner. It’s possible that something you found funny, sweet, or memorable in an odd sort of way is absolutely frightening to your friend, especially when it comes to the very intimate details. Unless she really wants to know, consider not sharing how you pooped when you pushed, the crazy way you stretched as your baby was crowning, or what your placenta looked like.
Do any parts of childbirth make perfect storybook moments? Tweet us @BritandCo!
(Photo via Getty)
