The Breeder's Book Club

Learning how not to be a parent, one book at a time

Being a parent can be scary, difficult, and confusing. Luckily, there are thousands and thousands of awful books written by stupid people that will tell you exactly what you're doing wrong. But who has time to read them all?

We do. Every two weeks, our elite team of comedy moms and dads reads a different parenting book. Then, heroically, we mine nuggets of wisdom from the steaming piles of guidance. In podcast form.

We get judged so you don't have to. We are

The Breeder's Book Club

The Bradley Method aka "An epidural is like giving crack to your baby"

May 15, 2006  /  John

I am, by anyone's standards, a sarcastic little fuck of a man. When I heard that Dick Cheney had shot his friend in the face I laughed, out loud, for 2 minutes straight. When I was 11, my favorite game was to wait until my nanny was screaming at me, and then to laugh in her face as loudly as I could, until I ran out of air, at which point I would fall to the floor, clutching my gut, and croaking "kill me! please, kill me!" (This is how JFK handled most political crises.)

But I was resolved to take our baby's arrival seriously. When we went to baby classes, I was the first to wear the fake pregnant tits-and-tummy-filled-with-lead-shot vest. I leapt to the center of the floor when the instructor asked us to practice our pelvic thrust exercise, and I retreated with dignity when I realized, several minutes later, that only women were supposed to practice this particular activity.

"Whatev'!" I said, saving the spare letters for an emergency. "It's all good!" (I learned to talk all hip like that from American Idol interviews.)

Despite this commitment to an earnest process and utter lack of shame, I have begun to feel like our birthing class may not be totally valuable. I first got this feeling when we began doing vocabulary exercises. The teacher says "Open your workbooks to page 23", so we do, and there's a page full of vocabulary terms and their definitions. The teacher then proceeds to go down the list of words and say, "Okay, does anyone know the definition of anus?"

And nobody answers, because 1) of course we know the definition of anus (although I guess you could argue that if we had a little more hands-on familiarity, we might not have ended up in this mess), but mainly 2) because the definition is written on the page right the fuck in front of us. So nobody answers, and after a few minutes the teacher says "Come on guys, someone must know this one!" until someone reads, out loud, the definition that we've all been reading silently for the last 8 minutes.

This week, we did a "fill-in-the-blanks" exercise where the blanks were so open ended there was no way to correctly answer most of them. Almost everyone gave perfectly reasonable answers, but they didn't match the ones in the book, so we each got to play fun one-on-one mind-reading games with the instructor while 10 other pregnant women pretended to be paying attention, but were actually desperately concentrating on timing their next inevitable fart to coincide with a loud door-slam or scraping chair noise.

I grew restive. Here are some of my real answers to the real questions on the "What Birth Coaches Should Say" worksheet:

First Stage Labor

3. "The stronger the contraction, the more you __complain__".

4. "You're doing a __hand__  job!"

7. "Isn't my wife doing a __Puerto Rican behind my back__ !"

8. "Picture your cervix __gaping like a barn__."

9. "The discomfort in your back means that the baby is __moving 28 million dollars worth of smuggled hashish through your birth canal every 36 hours - that's why we need to build a wall across the Mexican border.__"

13. "I love __Nascar__".

Second Stage Labor

17. "Push to the point of __embolism__."

20. "I can see the __hypocrisy of our medical establishment__!"

22. "Completely squeeze your __head between dem nurse titties__  and recoup your energy."

25. "I __own__  you... and our baby!"

So my point is, it was edifying. We also spent an hour talking about how the use of analgesics or epidurals during a birth is morally equivalent to strapping your newborn to the hood of your car while forcing him to do a beerbong full of warm Keystone and meth. The cool thing about that is everyone in the class wants to have a drug-free, natural birth; hence our enrollment in this natural childbirth class (see how that works?). But after the scare-tactics and misinformation, I kinda feel like having a drugged delivery out of spite. We decided to compromise: Heather will smoke a joint during the birth, but it'll be one of those fake chocolate joints, so it's okay.

The worst part is that while this was dragging on, I missed the faaabuloooous television debut of the very Christian Soldier I referenced above in a homosexual context. This was a shame, because I really wanted to see his show, AND because he gave out fake dolphin nostrums at his party. I was really looking forward to pretending to forget the real name of the nostrum and mistakenly calling it a priapism all night long.

But, instead, nothing! Foiled again! Damn you Doctor Bradley!

Comment