The Biggest Myth of Pregnancy

Welcome to the Pulling Curls podcast! In this episode, Hilary Eickson, RN, dives into one of the most prevalent myths in pregnancy: the illusion of control. Hilary breaks down the aspects of pregnancy that parents often feel they can manage but ultimately cannot, such as the baby’s position and gestational diabetes. She emphasizes the importance of focusing on what can be controlled – our attitudes and reactions. Tune in to gain a fresh perspective on preparing for childbirth with an open mind and less stress.

Find it here on Apple or Spotify Podcasts

Big thanks to our sponsor The Online Prenatal Class for Couples — getting prepared is one of the biggest things you CAN control.

Links for you:

My episode with my friend Onjali

My episode with my friend Rachel

Timestamps:

00:00 Simplify pregnancy and parenting, debunking myths.
05:10 Embrace control over our thoughts and actions.
07:15 Prepare for any birth scenario, stay calm.

Keypoints:

Sure! Here are 10 bullet points summarizing episode 236 of The Pulling Curls Podcast:

1. Episode Introduction:
   • “The biggest myth of pregnancy” is the focus of episode 236.
   • Hilary Eickson, RN, introduces herself and her goals for the podcast.
2. Control in Pregnancy:
   • The primary myth discussed is the belief that one has control over pregnancy and childbirth.
3. Lack of Control:
   • Specific examples of things that cannot be controlled: baby’s position, onset of gestational diabetes, timing of delivery.
4. Personal Anecdotes:
   • Hilary shares her personal experience of going 12 days overdue with her last baby, challenging her own desire for control.
5. Birth Plans:
   • Importance of birth plans emphasized, but not as a means of control.
   • Hilary shares her love for detailed and creative birth plans but advises against creating them with the intention to control the birth process.
6. Attitude and Response:
   • You can control your attitude, feelings, and actions in response to events during pregnancy and childbirth.
7. Adjusting Expectations:
   • A positive attitude towards unexpected outcomes, e.g., being open to a c-section if needed.
   • Encourages flexibility in birth plan expectations.
8. Parenthood Control:
   • The lack of control extends beyond pregnancy into parenting; highlighting that controlling children is often impossible.
9. Therapy and Preparedness:
   • Advocates for therapy to help manage control issues and recommends being prepared for various birth outcomes.
   • Importance of taking general birth classes to prepare for all possible scenarios.
10. Season 6 Preview:
    • Brief overview of upcoming episodes on weight loss journey and aspirin use in pregnancy.
    • Encouragement to stay tuned and support the podcast through reviews and sharing.
      These bullet points capture the essence and key messages of the episode.

Producer: Drew Erickson

Transcript

[00:00:00.000] – Hilary Erickson

Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Pulling Curls Podcast. Today on episode 236, we are starting season 6 out with a banger. This is the biggest myth of pregnancy. Let’s untangle it.

[00:00:13.040] – Hilary Erickson

Hi, I’m Hilary, a serial overcomplicator. I’m also a nurse, mom to three, and the curly head behind Pulling Curls and The Pregnancy Nurse. This podcast aims to help us stop overcomplicating things and remember how much easier it is to keep things simple. Let’s smooth out those snarls with Pregnancy and Parenting Untangled, The Pulling Curls Podcast.

[00:00:41.100] – Hilary Erickson

This episode is sponsored by the Online Prenatal Class for Couples. If you are looking to understand all of your different options in pregnancy and birth, come join me because it’s going to help you realize that this is a myth, but there are things you can do to help it out.

[00:00:55.300] – Hilary Erickson

Okay, I would love to know what you guys think is the biggest myth in pregnancy. So come tell me over in Instagram before you get started in this episode. I think that would be fun. But for me, as someone who’s watched thousands of people go through birth and pregnancy and talks to pregnant people all the time on social media, it is that you have some control.

[00:01:15.100] – Hilary Erickson

Guys, I love control so much. Maybe you love control, but I feel like I love control more than the average person. I like to feel like I have direct… I have hands-on direct action in whatever the results are, right? And I think a lot of people love control. But the reality is during pregnancy, there really are a lot of things that you have no control over. And I came up with just a few things to talk about that I see people feeling like they should be able to control, but they can’t always control.

[00:01:44.530] – Hilary Erickson

You can’t control if the baby flips head down, and you can’t control if they flip up at any point. A lot of times people are like, Oh, good. My baby’s head down. I’m going to be 100 % fine. And then they go to delivery and find out that baby has not head down anymore. And they’re like, Oh, my gosh, what happened? I thought we in a good spot, right?

[00:02:01.100] – Hilary Erickson

At any point in time, your baby could do something that was super annoying and would change your birth plan, and you have absolutely no control over that. And I’m not giving this episode to just make you guys stress out about it, because, again, the stress isn’t helping any of this at all. It’s just helping you realize that you don’t have control.

[00:02:19.560] – Hilary Erickson

Actually, as I’m doing this, my friend Anjali came on the podcast a few years ago. She had terminal cancer and was just talking about the hospital stay that she was at, where she realized she really just didn’t have control. And by letting go of things, she ended up having a better life, ultimately. Again, you can’t control if you get gestational diabetes.

[00:02:39.090] – Hilary Erickson

Of course, there are things and lifestyle changes that you can make that would decrease your risk of getting it, but you ultimately can’t control it. There are plenty of people who have no risk factors for diabetes who end up having diabetes.

[00:02:52.060] – Hilary Erickson

Side note, I see people all the time on social media saying, Well, they’re testing me for diabetes, and I clearly don’t have it. There is no way to tell if you have it. That’s how annoying it is. So it’s not something that you have control over.

[00:03:04.980] – Hilary Erickson

And you can’t control when your provider is going to deliver you. A lot of people want to ask their provider to deliver them in 39 weeks, or their provider says, We can’t deliver you until 41 weeks.

[00:03:15.460] – Hilary Erickson

You can’t control your provider at all, right? You can ask. I think asking is a great plan, but there’s nothing you can do to control. And honestly, I went 12 days overdue with my last baby, and I felt some guilt or shame with going that far over, which again makes absolutely no sense. I just felt like I should be able to do it. I was a labor nurse. I felt guilt over the fact that I couldn’t control this, when in reality, I had no control over it at all.

[00:03:47.000] – Hilary Erickson

I don’t know if this rings true for you guys or if you’re thinking, Okay, there’s areas in my life where I’m experiencing this as well, but I just wanted to give you guys some examples.

[00:03:57.110] – Hilary Erickson

We create birth plans sometimes to ourselves a false sense of like, that’s what’s going to happen at birth. And I think that that is actually the worst way to create a birth plan. Now, I love birth plans, guys. Huge fan of birth plans, huge fan of the fact that you’ve even thought at all about what you want your birth to look That just like, I’m just giving you all the high fives at this point. Extra points if you use stickers and different colored pens, because that is my favorite. But when you are creating your birth plan to control, I’m using air quotes, control your birth, that ultimately is not a birth plan that is going to serve you because you don’t have any control over this. And I’ve honestly seen the birth plans that go the worst awry with people who are wanting to control their birth. I will not have a C-section. Well, guess what? You don’t have any control over that.

[00:04:45.530] – Hilary Erickson

I will not need Pitosin. Again, you don’t have control over that. And that’s not… A lot of times people come in saying, It’s the labor nurse’s fault. We’re making them do these different things. But I really am like, Okay, we’re not going to have Pitosin. This is awesome. And then suddenly, contractions just entirely go away. And sometimes I feel like that is Mother Nature just being like, Hey, I’m in control, not you. And I personally don’t want to give Mother Nature any more vendetta against me to tell me that she is in control because she is obviously in control in my life.

[00:05:20.440] – Hilary Erickson

So then we have to talk about the things that we can control. The main thing that we can control is our attitude, feelings, actions in response to what’s going on. Right? We can either be mad, like going back to the birth plan, we can be mad that we had to have Pitosin, or we can be like, Okay, well, we just need to have a little Pitosin to add to this, and then we can be excited about our birth. So the only thing that we can control is our feelings, thoughts, emotions, actions towards what’s going on.

[00:05:49.490] – Hilary Erickson

And that’s the good news, right? No matter what’s going on, we can control how we’re feeling about it. I remember talking with my friend Rachel, who was previously on the podcast, about how she needed to have a C-section because her baby was breached.

[00:06:02.220] – Hilary Erickson

And I initially was like, Oh, she’s going to be so upset. And she was like, No, it’s great. I’m so excited that I get to schedule it. I’m so excited that my lady bits aren’t going to stretch out. She had all of these reasons that she was excited she was going to end up having a C-section instead of being scared about it. And I was like, That is the best way to look at it.

[00:06:21.880] – Hilary Erickson

She controlled what she could control. She didn’t try to control what she couldn’t control because baby’s position in your womb is not something that you ultimately have roll over. And honestly, good thing, because I think a lot of people, if you were able to control where baby was in the womb, we might end up hurting our babies because who knows why they’re in a certain position? It could be because of the cord or the placenta or something else.

[00:06:43.320] – Hilary Erickson

So just a reminder, and honestly, just a reminder for all of us, this is a great reminder in parents, I don’t control my kids at all. You aren’t going to be able to control your toddler. You’re not going to be able to control your baby. There’s so many things that we can’t control. We can only control our actions, behaviors, thoughts, feelings towards it, right? And when we make a huge deal out of something, that is our action controls behavior over something. It’s not the thing that’s making us maybe blow it out of proportion. And again, I’m talking to myself just as much as I’m talking to you guys. This is a hard thing for me, too.

[00:07:17.170] – Hilary Erickson

So that’s it. The biggest myth of pregnancy is that you have control over it. And once you learn to let go of that by getting prepared for no matter what type of birth you have, I see some birth classes that are like, just for C-sections, just for epidurals, just for natural birth. And I’m like, you don’t know what birth you’re going to have. Honestly, even if you think you’re going to have a C-section because baby’s breached, you might go in, baby’s flipped, and then you’re going to have a vaginal delivery.

[00:07:41.430] – Hilary Erickson

And I don’t want you freaking out about that either, right? I want you prepared for no matter what type of birth you have, that you’re prepared for it. So that’s one of the best things you can do to help yourself is being prepared for whatever situation happens. And maybe a little bit of therapy. I went to therapy for some of the things I couldn’t control. If you listened to the episode on how I hated flying, that was one of the things I couldn’t control. And going to therapy really helped me out. So if you find that you’re having a hard time with those thoughts, emotions, feelings, go to therapy. Just a couple of sessions. I think I attended eight sessions and felt so much better over a variety of things. I think they can help you out.

[00:08:20.740] – Hilary Erickson

All right. Welcome to Season 6. We are starting off hard. Stay tuned. We have some great episodes coming up. Next week, I’m talking about my weight loss journey. And then the week after that, we are talking about aspirin use in pregnancy. So stay tuned.

[00:08:33.780] – Hilary Erickson

Thanks for joining us on the Pulling Curls podcast today. If you like today’s episode, please consider reviewing, sharing, subscribing. It really helps our podcast grow. Thank you!

Keywords:

Pulling Curls podcast, pregnancy myths, biggest myth of pregnancy, Hilary Eickson, online prenatal class, gestational diabetes, baby position, birth plans, labor nurse, Pitocin, c section, birth preparation, pregnancy control, parenting advice, prenatal classes, attitude in pregnancy, birth plan creation, controlling pregnancy, birth plan tips, labor contractions, pregnancy stress, prenatal education, maternal health, pregnancy complications, due date control, pregnancy feelings, therapeutic pregnancy support, birth experience, expecting parents, pregnancy journey.