Birth fear

I will say this: Having a bad cold and being pregnant is no fun. However, the upside is that having a blocked nose and a terrible cough is distracting me from the general hangover feeling I have from the pregnancy. Yesterday, for a brief hour or two I felt a little better from my cold and then I started feeling the hangover feeling again. Good one.

So. It's happening. I'm getting attached. I am not sure when it happened, but in the last week I have been feeling excited. All of a sudden I am attached to the outcome of this bloated body. Who is he going to be? Who will he look like? However, with that comes more anxiety. The biggest being, how in the world am I going to give birth to him?

I have many, may friends who have had babies. All of them have a particular birth story. All of them, when asked about how their birth was? give a BIG sigh and say, well, mine was pretty tough. I have never met anyone who was like, oh, birth? It was great! That isn't entirely true as I know from my friends that the second and the third birth always seems to be a lot easier. The first, not so much.

I have actually watched a birth. A long time ago (16 or 17 years ago?) in a birthing center. The mother was a dancer and I guess was used to a certain amount of pain. The birth looked pretty good. She lay on a bean bag and her partner cradled her and all I remember is having her first child in my lap watching with her thumb in her mouth as this mother to be gave a few groans and pushes and out came the baby. I also remember, quite vividly, going to find her some dinner that night and bringing her back a huge plate of pasta which she ate with such gusto and relish that I will never forget the image. Pretty seamless.

That said, more often than not the birth stories I have heard always involve something unusual. Always there is a complication that nobody had really heard of. Always the woman describing the birth will say, well, in my case they had to....

They had to....

Cut, chop, insert, incise...

So: I am nervous. I have been told that in Israel the doctors do not attend births but the midwives handle. This is a little sad for me as I would so love my doctor to be there. I like her manner. She would be a calming influence for me and my boyfriend. I have been told that it is very business like in the hospital and that the midwives do the minimum needed.

I am already planning to have an epidural. I have no idea what kind of pain we are talking about here, but an epidural seems like the "easy" way out. It all seems so vague though. And nobody seems to remember exactly how to describe the pain. Pain is hard to describe in any event. It is existential to the core. Fleeting and deep, however wordless.

The unknown. I have to embrace it. For this is completely and utterly unknown. I know I will feel pain. I know I will feel scared. That's about it.

I wonder why other women don't seem to talk about this fear? Is it too neurotic to be pondering birth at this stage? The bigger he gets the more I think about it. How in the world will he get out?

How?