Mom’s stress guide: pregnancy and birth

  Stress starts early for moms-to-be

You planned your pregnancy carefully, upping your intake of folic acid, kicking your nicotine habit, and abstaining from alcohol the moment you started trying to conceive. So now that the pregnancy test has come back positive, you can just relax and enjoy the journey to motherhood, right?

Well, not exactly. If you thought there were a lot of rules associated with planning the perfect preconception, wait ’till you see the rulebook that’s waiting for you, if you want to be the perfect mom-to-be.

"Mothers feel so much pressure to have the perfect pregnancy, the perfect labour, and the perfect birth, as if these things can ever be ’perfect,’" says Miriam Peskowitz, author of The Truth Behind the Mommy Wars: Who Decides What Makes a Good Mother? (Seal Press, 2005).

The comments start early and can be quite unrelenting, adds Mélanie Amyotte, a Wakefield, Quebec, mother of two who is currently pregnant with her third child.

"What has surprised me the most about pregnancy is how strong you have to be to endure the barrage of ’well-meaning’ advice about the ’right’ and ’wrong’ way of doing things," she says. "I’ve had to deal with comments from strangers about my size (too big or too small, take your pick!), my eating habits, and my choice of a place to give birth. And I know some otherwise very self-assured women who have been reduced to tears by some stranger’s comment about the width of their pelvis and their certain need for a c-section."

So what are the best ways to deal with the pressure to measure up to other people’s ideas of what it means to be the ’perfect’ mom-to-be?

Remind yourself that there’s no such thing as "one size fits all" when it comes to any aspect of having a baby.
No one-size-fits-all maternity pantyhose. No one-size-fits-all birth plans. And certainly no one-size-fits-all pregnancy advice. "Mothers can resist the pressure to be perfect by realizing that pregnancy, labor, and birth can take many different paths," says Peskowitz.

Sign up for prenatal classes.
Once you’ve swapped morning sickness war stories, played "stretch mark show and tell," and confessed your biggest labour-related fears, you’ll have living proof that pregnancy and birth play out in all kinds of different ways in the real world. Prenatal classes may not be as popular as they were a generation ago -- only 25 to 30% of Canadian moms attend prenatal classes these days, according to University of British Columbia associate professor of nursing Wendy Hall -- but they still have plenty to offer the modern mom when it comes to providing comfort and comraderie. Make sure you’re one of the lucky moms who takes advantage of the belly-to-belly bonding opportunities!

Realize that some events in the ‘Mommy-to-be Olympics’ simply aren’t worth entering.
"Some moms feel pressured to keep their weight down and to wear increasingly body-hugging maternity clothes," says Peskowitz. "Others feel that spending more money on the best baby products means being the best mother-something that can leave less affluent mothers feeling like they can’t be ’good mothers.’" Peskowitz’s bottom-line advice? "Do pregnancy and motherhood on your terms."

About the author:
By Ann Douglas

http://www.canadianliving.com

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