Prophets

A handful of days after Monkey3 was born, my husband and I returned to our Bradley class. It was class eleven (of the twelve class series), and half of the class time was to be devoted to birth stories. Our instructor had gathered a variety of testimonies, home birth, birth center birth, hospital birth, some included transfers to a hospital setting, and one C-section. Many things can happen during labor and birth and afterwards. We were a late addition to the lineup, and even though our baby was not even a week old, we wanted to be able to tell our fellow Bradley couples that what we had all been preparing for was possible -- an unmedicated natural birth.

As we trod the sidewalk to our instructor's house, carrying our newborn, I felt ... well, different. I wasn't pregnant waddle walking for one thing. And we had been to the mountaintop. No matter what we would say or forget to say, the other couples would not really understand until they got there. But maybe they might see it a little through us.