Books for the Childbearing Year
Part I: Getting Pregnant, the first step toward homebirth! By your Midwife in Lisbon, Maine.
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You've made the decision to have a baby! Or another baby! Hooray! Congratulations. Many folks start to try by ditching the contraceptives, and having sex. A lot. That's one way! If it doesn't lead to a pregnancy within a couple of months, many times people jump to the idea that there's something wrong, and go into a medical model of reproductive assistance which has miracles for sale - at a steep price - and without much information about what's actually going on in their own bodies.
Fertility awareness is a wonderful place to start at this point, before seeking advanced help, in order to know what the hormonal landscape is in YOUR particular body, when ovulation is happening (ovulation + sperm = better chances than random sperm encounters!), and any interesting components of your own cycle. With a helpful book in hand, a basal body temp thermometer, and an alarm clock, you can be on your way to knowing about your body's rhythms at low cost. This can make you the expert on what's going on in your body, and if you need assistance from your friendly local Reproductive Endocrinology (RE) specialist, you will be going in with the most helpful diagnostic tool available - the NFP chart.
There are some important things to know about charting, one is that the basal body temperature (BBT) alone is not a complete picture. Combining basal temperatures, cervical mucus, and cervical texture, along with secondary signs of ovulation and information about your menses, as well as a few inexpensive simple labs such as TSH and hemoglobin A1c, you can get a very good idea of whether you are ovulating, when in your cycle you are ovulating, and whether your cycles are conducive to a pregnancy starting.
In my experience, charting cycles for about 3-4 months is a very helpful self-knowledge tool, and decreases the costs associated with getting pregnant, including starting RE care with more information and requiring fewer diagnostics for imaging and labs.
Books for knowing your body and preparing for pregnancy:
Demystify your cycles. Learn to read the signs your body shares about each stage of your cycle. Notice signs of pregnancy very early on. Knowledge is power!
Eating in preparation for pregnancy
The field of nutrition is a fraught online space. Influencers market supplements which may or may not do what they claim, research is constantly uncovering new information, and few are following the data about how to eat in pregnancy. Enter Lily Nichols, who has been working at finding RDAs for pregnancy, lactation, and, yes, preconception. Finally! Her books have revolutionized what we know and what we thought we knew about what to eat in pregnancy, how much, and what the big picture is. She's written this book about eating in preparation of pregnancy:
More than a cookbook: "Helpful for women at every stage of the preconception process, this book offers wisdom and guidance to support your body, mind, and spirit—including nearly fifty delicious recipes to nourish yourself deeply and treat yourself like the queen you are."
Next up, preparation for parenthood!
Preparing for pregnancy can be a surprisingly fast journey, or a surprisingly slow journey. The daydreaming in between can be threaded with a playful and important ongoing discussion about healthy living, planning for birth, how you'll connect with your baby, your older children, and importantly with each other through the childbearing years. My philosophy is that birth preparation needs to be parenting preparation. In this space / in this case, more information is not necessarily more power. Your beliefs, family system, and dreams of how you view a happy life all factor into this time! We'll discuss some books for this period next time.