Having the right people in the delivery room can make all the difference to the entire birth experience.
It is stressful and painful and while some people want to share the joy of this moment with the whole family, others would prefer to have only a few people in the room.
For Pippa and Tim, the countdown to the birth of their first daughter is on.
With only two weeks left until the baby returns home, the couple has already begun sharing their exact birth plan with their family.
The plan was almost perfect, but something went wrong when selecting the right people for the delivery room.
The couple were at home making plans when Tim suggested that Pippa’s mother, sister and best friend Gigi be in the room.
This was the lineup of relatives that he and Pippa had originally agreed on, but which he had not completed.
“Of course my mother will be in the room, right?” he added, which “caught (Pippa) off guard.”
Pippa had not expected her mother-in-law to be in the room during the birth and was not at all keen on the idea.
So she told him exactly how she felt, but immediately offered a solution.
“Actually, I would prefer if she weren’t in the room during the birth,” she told her husband. “But I don’t mind if she comes to visit before and after the birth.”
This didn’t go down well with Tim. He immediately went on the defensive and hit back at his wife.
“So you can have family in the room, but I can’t?” he asked. “It’s my baby too.”
Pippa calmly explained to her husband that although she didn’t care who was in the hospital after the birth of her daughter, she wanted to maintain as much privacy in the delivery room as possible.
“I don’t want to stand there with my arms open in front of his family,” she said bluntly.
But there is another reason why she specifically does not want her mother-in-law in the same room.
“I feel particularly uncomfortable when his mother is even around because she shamed and judged me throughout my pregnancy,” Pippa confessed.
However, her husband still did not understand and argued that it was unfair that his family was spared from the scene.
“He was adamant that it was his baby too, which I already know,” she said. “But like I said, I just don’t want her around DURING the birth, I don’t care about before or after.”
Since she laid out her rules and expectations, he has stopped speaking to her. “I’m afraid that when I have the baby, he won’t honor my wishes and let her in the room anyway, or worse, he won’t show up at all,” she said.
It would be difficult to find someone online who doesn’t share Pippa’s situation and tells her to stick to her decision.
“I really don’t understand all these posts about people in the delivery room,” said one person.
“Childbirth is not a spectator sport. It may be his baby, but it is HER body.”
“I hate this trend of having a lot of people in the room during a birth,” agreed another.
“This is a medical procedure, not a baseball game.”
“I didn’t even want to be present at my own births,” laughed one woman.
Others believe that Tim was more focused on the outcome of the birth rather than on the steps that lay ahead.
“When my brother-in-law did this to my sister, she bluntly told him, ‘I don’t want your whole family in there looking at my VAGINA,'” one comment read.
“The word ‘vagina’ brought him back to reality. He didn’t really want his whole family there looking at her vagina, he just didn’t understand what giving birth actually meant.”
*Names have been changed
