Here is a joke I heard from a friend who heard it from her 4-year-old daughter... Question: "What was Tigger doing in the toilet?" I'll give you the answer at the end of the blog, but if you don't want to read about giving birth, you can just skip to that part. I just didn't want to ruin the joke by having the answer to the riddle on the next line.

I think the tough thing about childbirth is that you don't have that much control over it. It's actually pretty decent preparation for parenting.

I mean, you do have control over a number of things--you can choose what sort of practitioner you want to see, you can choose what sort of environment you want to give birth in, and you can choose who you want to be with you. But everything else is pretty much based on your responses to things. For example, if your contractions begin, you can choose to go to the hospital right away or to stay home for as long as possible. Or you can choose to fight the pain of contractions or pushing or to give in to them and go along for the ride.

Obviously, I believe that knowledge is power, and when it comes to giving birth this seems to be even more true than in most other situations. The more classes you can attend (without dying of boredom or annoyance), the more books you can read, and the more you can educate yourself on the main options you have and on the ways to have the best outcomes possible, the better. But you really can't force a baby out. Well... you can, but doing so usually results in some unwanted outcomes, like unwanted interventions or forceps or C-section or worse. And certain other things are out of your control. For example, you can try to turn a breech baby around in a number of ways, but ultimately, you can't just pick it up and put its head down in your pelvis where it belongs. And you can't get an umbilical cord unwound from a baby's neck. These are the sorts of issues that throw a wrench in your plans.

So, what can you control? You can choose to be relaxed and peaceful and calm or you can choose to stress out about all the things you can't control. Anxiety has a huge role in not just bringing about birth, but during birth as well. Women actually have "pain-free" deliveries sometimes. Women's bodies are built to be able to push out babies. They are capable of doing it, and the only thing they really need is an uninterrupted flow of a complex mix of hormones that gets things started and keeps things going, and ultimately, allows the mother and child to have an exhilarating bonding experience (better than any natural or concocted high that exists out there). They say that animals can actually reverse labor when they become stressed out--a baby deer can be half out of it's mother, and the mother gets shocked by something and just sucks the baby back inside of her to be born at a safer time.

Here's a long quotation about this from this great book I read a couple of months ago, Ina May's Guide to Childbirth: "When Jessica Mitford, author of The American Way of Birth, sought to describe the essence of birth, she reverted to her mother's description (as women often do): 'It's like trying to push an orange out through your nostril.' I liked everything in her book but this statement. Birth is nothing at all like pushing an orange out of a nostril. Nostrils weren't created to do anything of the kind. Nothing larger thana little mucus comes out of them. A vagina is able to accommodate the size and shape of what it contains, wheter we are are talking about a penis or a baby. The big 'secret' is that it is better able to accomplish this task when we can imagine or 'picture this happening.

"We need to always remember that mothers who are afraid tend to secrete the hormones that delay or inhibit birth. This is true of all mammals and is part of nature's design. Those who are not terrified are more likely to secret in abundance the hormones that make labor and birth easier and less painful--sometimes even pleasurable." And she is not just talking about the final, exhilarating, "I did it!" type of pleasurable. Sometimes the labor and pushing itself can be pleasurable.

But having peace proves to be a lot more difficult than it seems, especially when you begin losing what control you feel like you have. Every morning I wake up and this baby hasn't been born yet, I become ridiculously frustrated. When I wake up in the night and realize that the contractions I had been having before going to bed have faded away, I count down the hours until morning and hope they will come back. This morning I actually just started crying into my pillow, though I must admit I didn't try to stop the crying immediately since I had read something about a "good cry" inducing labor. So dumb. Jordan didn't seem that upset by it, which was good. I think the truth is that this is making me realize all the things I don't have control over or don't know about the future. Mainly, now that I am pretty much done with grad school, I have no clue what I am going to do next, and it makes me feel really scared. I just want to be living in another country, as always. I don't want to be wearing annoying old sweaters and coats and stuck inside for a couple more winters. I want to be helping people and seeing crazy things and teaching Sophia about people who are different than her and changing the bad things about the world. I know I COULD do those things here in Oak Park, but I don't really know how. And I hate winter. And I just want to know what to do next. I mean, after pool season, during which I will just sit in the sun watching Sophia and hopefully holding my cute baby.

So here are some of the things I keep realizing I don't know about the future:

1. Whether I will be voting for Barack or Hillary come fall.
2. When this baby will come.
3. If and when we will ever go visit Thailand.
4. What this baby will be like.
5. What I'll be doing a year from now.
6. If and when we'll live in another country.

Answer to the joke: "Looking for Pooh!"