(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
Welcome to the birth prep podcast. I'm Taylor, your birth bestie, who's here to support you as you plan and prepare for the unmedicated birth of your dreams. If you're ready to ditch the fear, conquer the hospital hustle, support that bump and bod, and walk into the delivery room like the HGIC you were born to be, then buckle up, babe.
This is where it all goes down. Hello, hello, and welcome back to the birth prep podcast. I'm going to talk to the newly pregnant mamas for a minute, okay? Did you just get a positive pregnancy test and suddenly you feel like the whole world expects you to just have it all figured out? Like you're supposed to know what OB to call and what vitamins to take and what your birth plan is and why your apps are already telling you about placenta development at five weeks and you're just over here trying to wrap your head around the fact that you're growing a human being inside of your body? Yeah, I've been there and I know a lot of you are there right now.
I know a lot of you have been there too and this episode is the pep talk and the roadmap that I wish that I had when I first found out that I was pregnant. So whether you're five weeks in, 15 weeks in, or honestly still trying to make sense of it all, let this be your starting line today, okay? We are going to walk through the first five things that you actually need to know. First, I'm going to kick things off with the most important reminder that I need you to hear me on today.
You are not behind. You're not unprepared. You're not too late.
You are just early in the process and that's a beautiful thing. Guess what? Everybody starts there. Maybe if you had like a midwife as a mom who was, you know, taking you to births all the time and like you were around that all the time, maybe you have a ton of little siblings, but like even then, like I am the oldest of six kids and I still felt the way that I know a lot of you feel like kind of clueless and like, oh my gosh, where do I begin and what do I do and how do I do it right and there's so many things and there's so much information and what's the correct stuff and this contradicts this and it's a lot.
It's overwhelming and we've all been there, okay? You're in the perfect spot. So many women panic in those early weeks because they feel like they're already supposed to know what they're doing. I know I did.
I was like panic googling every second of every day. Like that was like I treated it like my full-time job, right? I needed my hands on as much information as I possibly could. When you start diving into all the information, maybe you're joining like a due date group and you're seeing all these other women diving into the information too and everyone's talking about all the things and you start to kind of think like, is there this secret pregnancy club everyone else was invited to and I totally missed the memo? But my friend, I need you to hear me.
No one starts out knowing how to do this. It makes sense that your brain has a ton of questions like what do I even ask at my first appointment and do I need a doula? Do I need a birth plan? What car seat do I get? How do I know what's normal? How do I know what to worry about? How do I know what not to worry about? And the answer is you don't. Yet.
This is a season of learning, not performance, and nobody is expecting you to know all of the things just because you peed on a stick, okay? I want you to give yourself permission today to start slow. You are building the foundation of your experience and I promise with the right support, it will come together beautifully. Okay, now that we got that out of the way, do you feel a little lighter now? That feels good, doesn't it? Like oh just take all that pressure off.
You do not need it. You do not have to subscribe to all of that. You get to take this slow.
I know we're on a time crunch. Baby is eventually coming. Like I get that.
I know it's like important for you to do these things, but I promise if you let that pressure and that panic go, you're actually going to be able to move so much better and so much more efficiently and all the things. And that, my dear, is how you make progress. Next, I want to touch on the fact that information is everywhere, but strategy is not, okay? I, if you're anything like me, I literally as soon as I found out that I was pregnant, I started getting all the things that I could, right? I downloaded all the pregnancy apps that I could find in the app store and I joined all the groups that I could find on the Facebook and I, you know, started saving all the videos and looking for all the things and searching for podcasts and all that, reading blog posts.
You are probably already drowning in content. We've got Instagram reels and TikToks and Facebook mom groups and blogs and podcasts and everybody has an opinion and so many of them conflict and it's no wonder you feel more confused the more you try to get informed because here's what's happening. Random information isn't helping because it's not strategic.
It's like trying to build a puzzle with pieces from five different boxes. You need someone to hand you the box top, the full picture, the right pieces in the right order. And that is the difference between consuming and preparing.
And honestly, that's why I created the birth prep course, because I was sick of watching women try to cobble together a plan from Instagram tips and then end up completely blindsided in the hospital. So what you need more than following 10 more birth accounts is an actual strategy. One that walks you through how birth actually works, what decisions are coming, what like what you really need to get informed on, how to handle pain without drugs, even if you're opting for the drugs.
I know most of you aren't here, but even if you are, there is the opportunity that they can fail. So we are looking into that. How to advocate for yourself or how to prepare your team to do that for you and with you.
And then what to do when plans change. That's what prep looks like. That's prep in a nutshell.
You need to learn how to do all of those things. And when you're getting little pieces over here and little pieces over there and not knowing how they mesh into each other, you're not actually making any progress on this stuff. Information is so important.
Informing yourself is such a vital part of the process. But if you are just informing yourself on random bits and pieces from 12 different people, you're not going to feel prepared towards the end of your pregnancy. I see it all the time.
I've been doing this, that, and the other. And I've been listening to these podcasts. And I've been watching all these videos.
And I've been saving all this content on my Instagram. And I go back through it and it's like, okay, and you still feel unprepared. Why is that? It's because there's zero strategy.
Okay, the next thing that I need you to know is that the most important decision you will make is not your stroller or insert exciting thing here that you can't wait to put on your registry. Let's talk about the thing that actually impacts your birth, your provider, not your due date, not your vitamins, not whether you're doing cloth diapers or disposables. The most influential decision you'll make in pregnancy is who you hire to walk with you through your birth experience.
And yes, I said hire because they work for you. So many women just pick the first OB their friend used or whoever their insurance covers without realizing that your provider can quite literally make or break your birth experience. At any point during your pregnancy experience, if you see some red flags, like if you mentioned wanting a natural birth and they start laughing because yeah, that happens.
Or if they start pushing interventions before labor has even started, like, hey, you're only 32 weeks, but let's start talking about that induction or that C-section that you're just going to absolutely have to need. Or if they say we don't allow as if you need permission to use your own body, run, fire them, find somebody else. Okay.
You need what I call a perfect for you provider, not perfect, but someone who listens supports, believes in physiological birth and is open to your questions and your desires for your birth experience. Switching providers is not only allowed. It's wise.
If something feels off, you deserve somebody that actually supports you, not just pretends like they do. With that being said, that brings me to my next point, which is so important because this is something that I wish somebody would have told me. You are not a passenger in this process.
Let me speak directly to your spirit for a second. You are not here to coast through pregnancy, cross your fingers and hope the hospital staff takes care of everything. You are not a passive participant.
You are the head girly in charge, even if you don't feel like it yet. God did not design you to be clueless. He didn't put this baby in your womb so you could feel powerless and afraid.
He gave you a body that was built to give birth a mind that can be trained and a voice to speak up in a spirit that can lean on him through every single contraction. Here's a quick little verse for you that I was reading this morning. One of my favorites, Proverbs three, five through six, trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding in all your ways, submit to him and he will make your path straight.
That includes your pregnancy. Okay. That includes your birth.
You do not have to know everything, but you do need to trust him, do the work and prepare the path and he'll make it straight, but you still have to walk it. Okay. I love talking about surrendering during your birth experience and surrendering it to the Lord, but I'm not saying sit on your hands and do nothing.
I'm saying do everything in your power and then release the rest into his hands. The results are his business, not yours. Steward your birth prep experience well, and he will do the rest.
And my fifth point today is what to focus on first. So you're maybe nodding your head and thinking, Taylor, I'm in, I want to prep, but where do I actually start? Here's your little shortlist. Okay.
Here's where to get started. Forget the baby clothes for a second. Forget the registry for a second.
This is what actually matters really early on. Okay. Your mindset first and foremost, start asking yourself, what do I believe about birth? What fears are lingering under the surface? Where do those fears come from? And are they even true? Like I, um, I do this thing with myself.
I'd say, can I take that to the court of law? Like if I had to present that in front of a jury, could I prove that? Do I have evidence for that belief or am I making this up and letting it control my entire mindset about things? Um, so try that out, try that on for size. Birth begins in your mind. Okay.
You've got to clean up the mental clutter now. So you're not bringing it into your labor experience with you. And I'm not saying you need to do it all today.
Okay. Please don't hear that you've got time, but this is something that you need to start like really getting curious about so that you're able to start shifting things in time for that experience. Number two, birth education.
Okay. Not just random grabs of information. Like we just talked about, you are going to learn how your body works, understand the hormones at play, the stages of labor, the mechanics of things.
This not only gives you the confidence and helps you make smarter decisions instead of panicked ones, but it also helps you manage things that day. If you understand what your body needs in the moment, you're able to give your body what it needs. When you are not able, that usually creates more fear, which creates more attention in your body, which creates more pain.
And it goes around and around until you can't even see straight. Ask me how I know you could very, very easily be the most informed one in the room about physiological birth, because your doctors aren't really taught how to support physiological birth. They're taught how to manage birth medically.
And that makes a lot of sense, right? That's why we have the statistics that we do. You were trying to go in and pull off an unmedicated birth experience in a system that is set up to do anything but. Unmedicated physiological intervention-free births are really bad for the hospital's bottom line.
And I'm not saying that your provider isn't this loving, amazing person that wants to help women, but I'm also saying they've had very curated education and it wouldn't take you much to be the smartest one in the room about physiological birth. I am very confident that I know more about physiological birth than my OBs that I had with my first three kids. And guess what? I don't know everything, and I'm never going to claim to.
I'm always learning. I'm always learning more about this stuff. And a lot of doctors are taught like, hey, this is all you need to know.
And nobody furthers their education past graduation day. Statistically, most practices are about 17 years behind the current evidence. So let's get some confidence going, okay? A little birth education can go a long way.
Okay. Number three, strategic birth planning. We are taught that a birth plan is a list of preferences.
But if you Google the word plan, you will find that it means a detailed proposal for doing or achieving something. No epidural is not a plan. That is a preference.
You need more than preferences. You need a strategy that includes pain management tools and support team roles and self-advocacy plans and backup options. That's the kind of plan that doesn't fall apart when things get real in that room.
With my first pregnancy, I truly thought that I was prepared. I had a hospital bag checklist. I had my class at 36 weeks.
I had a strong will to avoid the epidural. But the truth is that I didn't know what to say no to. I didn't even realize I had a choice for most of the things.
They said, we need to get you started on pitocin. I said, okay. They said, we need to break your waters next.
I said, okay. I didn't know that I could decline. They pushed IV pain medication when I kept refusing the epidural and I made an uninformed choice.
They said it was totally safe that they use them all the time. They pulled my placenta out. I didn't even know that wasn't normal until my second birth when they had me push it out.
The man stitching me up gave me a husband stitch, looks over my body to my husband and says, hey, I gave you an extra one with a wink. And the worst part after all of that, everybody told me that I did amazing, but I felt crushed. Like I truly felt powerless sitting in that hospital bed.
I was so glad that my baby was here, but it felt like something had been taken from me. And that's why this matters so much because nobody told me how to prepare. And I want you to be the one who knows better and does better and births differently without having to have nearly half a dozen kids before you decide to do so.
This stuff is so important to me. And I know how much of an impact that it can have on your experience. And not just for that day, but everything leading after that, I walked into motherhood, extremely traumatized.
That absolutely impacted my postpartum experience. And I wish that I could go back and give myself all of these things, but I cannot. So I'm here giving them to you.
So let's talk about a couple action steps. If you're new here, I'm really big on action steps. I don't want you guys just collecting information because that doesn't really get you very far back it with action.
And you are going to actually make progress and actually feel prepared more than you were at the beginning of listening to this episode. First, I have a freebie for you. It's my unmedicated birth map.
It is quite literally everything that you're going to need to do to prepare for birth all in one little guide. And you can start thinking about what that looks like. This is basically the strategy that you need in order to feel prepared walking into your birth experience.
So get your hands on that and then don't just let it rot in your inbox. If you're not going to be able to get into it this week, no problem. Put it on your calendar to revisit it.
Okay. Secondly, I want you to journal or pray through this question. How do I want to feel when I give birth? I want you to start crafting a vision for yourself and for your birth.
Let God speak into your vision, let your fears surface, and then start to prepare accordingly. And the third thing that I want you to do is to ask your provider, this very telling, very important question. How do you support a woman who wants an unmedicated birth? Basically you're essentially asking them to paint a picture, not just answering a yes or no question.
We typically, we ask, do you support unmedicated births? Why would they not say yes? They're going to say no and lose you as a customer? No, absolutely not. But when you're asking, Hey, what does this look like? There's so much less room for them to fool you. I hate to word it that way, but truly you want to make sure that you are getting very specific with them.
So download the map, journal, or pray on that question. And then ask that question at your next prenatal appointment. Okay.
If you are ready to take your prep to the next level and you're done winging it, you want an actual plan and actual strategy to back it up, then join me inside the birth prep course. This course is where strategy meets surrender. We cover everything from how birth works, how to manage pain naturally, to what to say when someone tries to steamroll your plan that day, you will literally go from what the heck am I doing to, Oh, I've got this.
And for my podcast listeners, I have a bonus for you. The show notes has like the full sales page with all the information on it. If you have questions about it or whatever, you can obviously reach out to me on Instagram or via email, and I will answer those questions, see if it's the right fit for you.
But if you are ready to purchase, do not purchase on the sales page, use the special link that's in the show notes for my podcast listeners. And I am going to give you my new mama bundle for free. I normally charge $97 for that.
It is a full set of bonus resources for pregnancy, birth and motherhood, your baby, all the things. So I want to give that to you guys as a thank you for being here and listening to this podcast. And of course, for being one of my students and doing this work, I'm so proud of you guys for doing this stuff.
If you already purchased or use the wrong link and you want the bonus, just email me and I will add it to your course portal. So you can have that. Okay.
And I think that that's it for today. Okay. Remember you're not behind.
You're not broken. You're not clueless. You are just getting started and you are exactly where you need to be.
And I'm so glad that it's here. So let's walk this journey together. I will catch you next week.
I've got an exciting episode coming. You're not going to want to miss it until then, as always, happy prepping.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
