Posted by Elizabeth
“I went…because I had to go. It may have been a messy and botched experience, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have gone. Sometimes life is messy and botched. We do our best. We don’t always know the right move.” ~ Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed

I nestle into my nubby cranberry sofa across from my doula, a professional labor attendant, who asks me what I want to do with my placenta. Normally the kind of question that would give me the willies, I’ve grown accustomed to answering all manner of questions about my birthing preferences – even those that involve human biohazard. Over the course of the evening, my doula and I hammer out the fine-toothed details of my “birth plan,” a reverential document outlining the minutiae of my intentions for labor, delivery and post-partum that will be ceremoniously submitted to the hospital staff. By the end of our meeting, seven months of research has been distilled into a single white sheet of paper humbly titled “Birth Preferences,” the simplicity of which belies my tangle of emotions. After two and a half hours of answering a series of questions, I emerge exhausted, feeling as if I have outlined not my desires for birth but the complicated terms of a peace treaty. And in a way I have, because I wonder if I’m not preparing for birth so much as readying myself for war.
Before I became pregnant, I had never heard of a “birth plan.” It sounded like an absurd paradox: how do you plan for something as unpredictable as a human birth? But as I dutifully plowed my way through What to Expect When You’re Expecting, talked with friends, and quizzed my midwife, I came to understand the complexity of the decisions to be made in this dizzying game called labor and delivery. Slowly I began to form opinions about “pain control” and “comfort measures,” heparin locks versus continuous intravenous drip, pushing positions, cord cutting and banking, breastfeeding, skin-to-skin contact, and supplemental bottle feedings. I even had to make decisions about how I wanted to breathe, a fundamental human skill that I’ve never given so much thought to.
I have also come to understand that, like most plans in life, a birth plan is rarely carried out to the letter. The spirit of a birth plan is to provide an opportunity to state your preferences, but when it comes to down to it, things will unfold as they will. “Be flexible” is the mantra of my perky birth instructor, Kathleen, who seems to direct these words squarely in my direction as I dramatically scrunch up my face when she announces that we will be placed on an IV upon admission to the hospital. I’m the one in my birth class who interrupts at every turn to ask how I can maneuver my way around hospital policy and procedure. I am constantly searching for chinks in Kathleen’s steely armor, and when I find them, they immediately become a part of my birth plan.
For someone like me who has a difficult time leaving things to chance, a birth plan – like any plan I make in life – is the ultimate security blanket. It helps me to battle the ambiguous vagaries of birth and provide an illusion of control, especially in a situation riddled with uncertainty. Because over the months an uneasy feeling about birthing in the hospital environment has slowly emerged, doubts which I thought I had kept safely to myself until my friend, Heidi, said I was talking like “a home-birther in disguise.” Then, a few days after the meeting with my doula, she called me out of the blue. “I can’t get you off my mind since we last met,” she said, “and I just wanted to ask why you haven’t considered a home birth?” A woman who beautifully balances intuitive empathy with level-headed reason (she could have been a fellow counselor in another life), she said she wasn’t sure that my ideal plan was one the hospital environment could wholly support. She worried that I might feel as if I was waging a personal battle during the throes of labor – one that I would likely lose.
I was afraid to admit that she might be right, that I had made the wrong decision for a hospital birth in the first place. I thought my iron-clad birth plan and my doula, a professional advocate, would be protection enough against the creeping uncertainties that I was feeling. But I wasn’t choosing my battles so much as crafting a battlefield, and it dawned on me that I was trying to harness the best of both worlds: the luxury of making all of my own decisions within the safe “just in case” cocoon of the hospital environment. I needed to give up control in one domain, either by placing myself in a position to make my own choices without the security net of the hospital, or surrendering some of my personal autonomy by submitting to the whims of the hospital.
She continued. “I’m not saying you should give up on having a hospital birth, but I think you might feel more settled if you walk down the path a little to see what the reality of the other option looks like. Often times, when I walk down the second path, the right decision just emerges.” She was right, of course, and this wasn’t just solid advice for birthing: it was perfect counsel for life. It’s also the kind of advice that is useful to dispense but hard to swallow. Once I’ve arrived at a decision, no matter how imperfect, I am terrible at changing plans midstream, which is what entertaining the possibility of something new was asking me to do. I am threatened by new information, wondering how it will shake my resolve, afraid of what adding more variables to the equation might reveal. But sometimes in life we owe it to ourselves to see what the road not taken looks like – even if we end up turning around a few steps into our journey and returning to the safety of our well-worn path.
On Friday night I had dinner with my friend, Mark, who finds himself facing similar uncertainties in his own life, wondering if a big decision he made was the right one – and if it’s too late to change course. I reminded him that sometimes our decisions don’t turn out how we’d like or hoped for, but it doesn’t mean that it was necessarily the wrong decision. One variable he never counted on, he said, is that “I’ve changed.” Isn’t it amazing how we don’t account for this most basic, fundamental truth when we lay our plans? We forget that we change in the process – that the process changes us – and none of us can be certain of where that winding path will deliver us when we set out on our journey, even with the best-laid plans clutched tightly in our fists.
In turn, Mark reminded me of an exchange between Alice and The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland. “Which road do I take?” asked Alice. “Where do you want to go?” countered The Cheshire Cat. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said The Cat, “it doesn’t matter. If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.” The lesson is clear: we must know what we’re seeking in order to make a decision. It’s too soon to say what I’ll ultimately decide, but I’ve taken the first tremulous steps in setting aside my well-developed birth plan (and life plan) to explore the other, misty path that disappears into the underbrush of my future. Today I’ll meet with a homebirth midwife to see what she has to say and feel how it “sits” with me. I have no way of predicting the future, no way of knowing what the “right” decision might be. The Buddhists say there is no right or wrong decisions, only decisions that lead us down different paths. Until I know what I’m seeking and the answers tiptoe out of the shadows, that is enough for me.
How do you handle reevaluating decisions? Do you use your reasoning, emotion, or a combination of the two? How tightly do you adhere to plans, and how easily can you give them up when reassessment is necessary? Do you agree that decisions that don’t turn out like we’d hoped weren’t necessarily the wrong decisions in the first place?