Celebrate your child's love of learning

© Wondertime

As one couple learns, there's a deep divide between labor and management.

Tatiana lay on our bed with her eyes tightly closed. It was a burning sensation, she said, extending all the way around her giant belly, like a scalding belt. "It's like a fire inside me."

"Maybe we should try Rainbow Relaxation," I said helpfully. "Or Opening Blossom—"

"GET AWAY FROM ME!"

This was not how the birth of our child was supposed to begin. Tatiana and I had spent months preparing for this moment. Now we were about to discover whether it's possible to ever really be ready.

Practically as soon as the blue cross appeared on that plastic stick, like a message from the gods, friends had begun regaling us with their stories about episiotomies, breech births, labor marathons. Living in New York City in 2006, we had access to the kind of medical technology that Tatiana's mother could never have dreamed about when she gave birth to Tatiana in the Soviet Union in 1970. Still, we both felt unsettled, anxious. Tatiana could barely sleep. When she finally drifted off, she would awake in a panic, heart pounding.

We hungered for some kind of philosophy that would guide us through this crucible. We could take birthing classes, but most of them sounded perfunctory. Several friends told me the drill: You go to a couple of sessions, learn some breathing exercises, and forget it all when your wife starts screaming for an epidural.

Next: Self-hypnosis. . . in theory

What is HypnoBirthing, Anyway?

Then we remembered a pregnant friend who'd told us she was planning an all-natural, pain-free birth through self-hypnosis. At first, this seemed ridiculous—impossible!—but the miracle of Tatiana's swelling belly had diminished our skepticism about many things.

So we got in touch with our friend's sister, a certified HypnoBirthing practitioner. "There is no biological reason why giving birth has to be painful," she told us. "The uterus is a muscle like any other, and contracting a muscle doesn't cause pain. The pain comes from fear."

That sounded like New Age nonsense. But the more we looked into it, the more substantive HypnoBirthing seemed. Created by hypnotherapist Marie Mongan, who founded the HypnoBirthing Institute in 1989, the method is based on the philosophy of obstetrician Grantly Dick-Read, famed advocate of natural childbirth.

Here's the idea: When an expectant mother is afraid of the pain and suffering that await her, her body unleashes its powerful "fight or flight" response. Blood and oxygen drain away from the uterus, causing the thick muscles just above the cervix to tighten. That can delay labor or shut it down completely.

Women hear the horror stories and start their pregnancies gripped by fear, as Tatiana did, which starts the cycle all over again. But Mongan contends 95 percent of women can have a comfortable birth if they use visualization and hypnosis to achieve deep relaxation.

The Reaction of Friends and Family

Our friends were skeptical. A mother of two nearly jumped through the telephone to protest our idiocy: "Tell Tatiana to get the epidural!" she cried. "There is no reason NOT to do it!"

Our mothers told a different story. Liudmilla Rybushkina said anesthetics weren't even an option for Soviet women in the 1970s. "So nobody complained about the pain," she said. Tatiana's birth had been long and excruciating, she told us, but her younger brother Viktor popped out relatively quickly and painlessly.

I am the seventh of 10 children, and my mother, Vivian Keegan, delivered all of us naturally, except the oldest, Mary. Give it to us straight, Mom, we said: How painful was it? "It depends on what you mean by pain," she said. She was glad to feel everything, especially as the baby was actually coming into the world, she told us. "It was like touching the heart of God."

When Tatiana's nausea subsided, she found she loved being pregnant. She talked often to the baby, sang to it, even danced with it. A professional ballroom dancer, she kept performing into her 35th week, through the cha-cha, the rumba, and the waltz. Before Tatiana was a dancer, she was a gymnast, and she had achieved great things as an athlete through discipline and practice. Why shouldn't she train for this? And if neuroses can interfere with other natural processes—like sex, eating, and sleep—why not childbirth? After all, if the mind didn't have a powerful effect on the body, there would be no such thing as porn, advertising, or scary movies.

We were sold.

Channeling Our Inner Peace

I am filled with a large, inverted thermometer. A clear fluid of numbing relaxation flows down into my body. I enter the control room of my subconscious, where I flip a switch that will shut off all feeling. Numbness sweeps through my legs, my ankles, the soles of my ...

That's when I fall asleep. We are listening to Kathryn, our HypnoBirthing practitioner. Tatiana is next to me, 27 weeks pregnant. "I want you to try to lift your right foot," Kathryn said. "You cannot. It has become too heavy."

"I can't move my foot!" Tatiana cries, waking me up. "It works! I can't believe it!"

Hypnosis can work, though it requires a certain suggestibility. Fortunately, Tatiana, though she's certainly not naive, has a powerful ability to believe. If she leaves the house and forgets something, she believes it's bad luck to go back for it unless she looks in the mirror. She believes a blind date on Valentine's Day might actually lead somewhere—so when I called to cancel, she hung up and furiously threw herself into her paso doble routine (thank God she gave me another chance). She believes spending $3,000 on a dress to enter a competition with a first prize of $500 is a great career choice—and when you see her dazzling performance, you feel cynical for ever wondering why.

I tried to hypnotize Tatiana at home, but it didn't work at first because we kept laughing. After a few weeks, though, the practice paid off. Miraculously, Tatiana's hand went numb when I read her a script that said it was so. Her arm rose into the air when I pretended to tie balloons to her wrist. Her mind was creating a reality that her body believed.

We taped to our bathroom wall a picture of a fetus in the womb, so Tatiana could visualize the proper positioning of our baby. We adopted HypnoBirthing jargon: Instead of "contractions," we learned to say "surges." We didn't call it "labor" or worry about "complications." Instead we looked forward to "the birthing process" and decided we'd stay positive even if "special circumstances" arose.

We gave the hospital nurses a typed list of instructions: Tatiana would not have to wear the blood-pressure cuff and fetal heart-rate monitor between readings. She would be free to walk around and choose her own positions, including sitting on an exercise ball. The nurses and midwife would speak in calm, low tones without exhortations like "Push!"

As the due date approached, we were calm and confident. We had trained nearly every day for three months. Tatiana put positive affirmations on her iPod, while I assembled a binder full of scripts. When the moment came, Tatiana's cervix would open like the petals of a rose, just as she imagined. She would give birth like those women in the HypnoBirthing videos: eyes closed, drawing slow, deep breaths, like someone in the middle of a beautiful dream.

Are We in Labor?

She awoke with a start. It was 7 a.m., and Tatiana had an uncomfortable feeling, like menstrual cramps. She figured it was false labor. Or maybe Braxton Hicks.

At 8, she shook me awake. It was a week before her due date. "Something's happening."

"Are you sure?"

"No. Yes. It hurts."

"How bad is it, on a scale of one to 10?" I asked, as our midwife Maureen had taught us.

"Five," she said. "I think it's happening!"

"But it's not supposed to hurt."

"Well, it does!"

We got up. Tatiana's parents, visiting from Russia, were sleeping in the living room. Her mother scampered around, fussing over her.

Some surges were 10 minutes apart, others 30 minutes. Kathryn had told us one way to stay relaxed during this early phase was to go about our normal routine. So I helped Tatiana's mom make breakfast, and Tatiana drank raspberry leaf tea. The hours passed, and the pain got worse.

"How bad is it now?" I asked her at 2.

"Ten!"

She could not walk. Could not sit. Even the moments between contractions hurt. These weren't "surges" anymore.

I called Maureen, who told me the baby was probably facing Tatiana's stomach rather than her spine. The only way babies can fit through the narrow birth canal is to rotate like a corkscrew, but our baby wasn't rotating.

Tell Tatiana to get in the Polar Bear position, Maureen said. So she got down on her knees, forearms on the floor. That relieved some of the pressure on her back, but as the day wore on, the pain of "back labor" only got worse.

"Maybe we could try the Fawn in the Forest," I said. Tatiana had always liked this visualization. You imagine walking into a magical forest and coming upon a beautiful fawn—a metaphor for your baby. The fawn leads you into the woods, romping and cavorting until it finally allows you to pet it and cradle it in your arms ...

"F--- the Fawn in the f---ing Forest!"

Finally, at 7:45, the contractions were coming at five-minute intervals, which meant the hospital would admit Tatiana at last. I ran to the corner and hailed a cab.

Next: The Arrival of Anastasia

Sometimes Breathing Alone Isn't Enough

I'd called ahead, so I imagined that when we reached the hospital, an army of nurses would be waiting to sweep Tatiana in and shoot her up with painkillers. But the halls were empty, and we waited at the desk until we were brought into our room—and told to wait some more. Finally, the nurses got Tatiana into her gown and hooked her up to an IV and fetal monitor.

There would be no sitting on the exercise ball, no strolling around the corridors. Tatiana just wanted the pain to stop. If we try Demerol first, Maureen said, she might feel more of the actual birth, and if that wasn't strong enough, we could try the epidural.

Watching the Demerol drip from the plastic bag into her IV tube, one tiny drop, then another, was like water torture. Every three minutes, another contraction would send Tatiana into convulsions. "This is the last one—just get through this," I said before each contraction. But 10 minutes went by, then 20.

When Tatiana was a child, Soviet dentists performed a root canal on her without anesthetic. A gymnastics coach once stretched her legs so far that she ruptured her hamstrings. This pain was beyond any of that. "I want to die," she whispered. "Please, just let me die."

The Demerol was declared a failure, and a team of doctors and nurses came in to prop Tatiana up and insert the epidural needle. The first dose wasn't enough, so they gave her more.

Finally, 16 hours after her labor began, Tatiana was free of pain. She lay there for nearly two hours, drifting between sleep and wakefulness. At 1:10 a.m., our nurse Jen came in and checked the baby's heart rate. She ran to get Maureen, who examined Tatiana. "Fully dilated!" she cried. Somehow, our child had twisted its head into the correct position. "Let's have a baby!"

Let's Have a Baby

Tatiana looked shocked, as if she had forgotten why she was here. Her water hadn't broken, so Maureen punctured the membrane. She told Tatiana to bend her knees. "The moment you feel a contraction coming on," she said, "start pushing as hard as you can."

I held one of Tatiana's thighs, and Jen held the other. "Push!" we all yelled. Tatiana pushed. Nothing. I wondered why Maureen was putting us through this charade. Nothing bigger than a nickel could possibly fit through that opening.

"PUSH!" we yelled. I saw a tiny patch of black hair. A few pushes later, I started to believe. By now, Tatiana was high. Later she told me she'd been thinking about those grueling dance competitions. The hardest part was always near the end of the fifth and final round: the jive, with its endless high kicks. If she got through 25 dances in a night, she could get through this.

When it finally happened, it was like the earth opening up. But the head that popped out wasn't a baby's head. It was a plastic doll, eyes shut, face scrunched, dull, lifeless. In the next instant, though, the doll's mouth opened, its head turned pink.

Maureen placed the baby on Tatiana's chest. She looked down at the baby, up at me, then back to the baby. I could see it in her eyes: Even after nine months of pregnancy and 19 hours of labor, she'd never truly believed it would end like this.

Anastasia Concordia Keegan was born at 2:08 a.m. on Saturday, June 23, 2007. She weighed 6 pounds 4 ounces, and was 19 1/2 inches long. Somehow, Tatiana felt great after sleeping only a few hours. She said she forgot about the pain immediately.

At first, we thought HypnoBirthing had failed us, and felt naive. But Kathryn said there was nothing we could have done. We just happened to have a "special circumstance."

We kept coming back to that HypnoBirthing theory: that 95 percent of birthing women can avoid labor pains by circumventing fear and tension. Maureen had told us that 30 percent of her clients suffer back labor, as Tatiana did, which nearly mirrors national figures. And of course, that's only one of many possible complications. We know eight couples who had major issues—inductions, caesareans, premature births—which we'd explained away by accepting the HypnoBirthing line that they were probably caused by stress or doctors trying to push things along too fast. Now we know that the truth is not nearly so simple.

Later, though, we realized HypnoBirthing had done something for us. We were relaxed and happy during the final trimester. Besides the occasional fawn epithet hurled in my direction, Tatiana was calm through most of her painful labor. If we have another child, we'll use HypnoBirthing again—partly because we're curious, but mostly because we have nothing to lose. "But as soon as it really starts to hurt," Tatiana says, "I'm getting an epidural."

In retrospect, our daily hypnosis training seems closer to superstition than science, as if we thought strong belief alone would save us. But if we were naive, maybe there was a certain wisdom in our innocence. We handled the grim realities of birth no differently than most of us treat death—as something we'd rather not think too much about.

Now we're ready to do it all over again. Maybe we're crazy. Or maybe that tiny miracle who flaps her arms like a bird each morning makes us still believe in impossible things.