Cindy, age 6 or 7: Mom, is giving birth like pooping?
Cindy’s mom: What do you think?

I never got an answer from her. She proceeded to ignore me and my further inquiries, so I filed the question away in my “Things you’ll find out when you’re a grownup” mental drawer. (There was a lot of stuff in that drawer.) And now, the answer will come any day.

I did get two interesting birth perspectives from women who had given birth both with and without epidurals, though. My cousin Olivia had her first one naturally, and her second with an epidural. She was adamant in talking with me that I should hold off on the epidural. She said the first birth, albeit painful, wasn’t beyond unendurable. She was expecting the worst given what everyone told her about childbirth, but everything went fine and it wasn’t that bad. Her second birth, she felt pressured by the doctor or staff present to get the epidural, so before she knew it, she was getting it. It prolonged her labor so much compared to the first birth, and she had such difficulty feeling anything to push, and it so slowed her recovery time, that she’s now convinced that the epidural is a big medical scam exploiting the fear of women so that insurance companies can collect money for the use of extra meds and an anesthesiologist, when it’s completely unbeneficial to the labor process.

The second story came from Mr. W’s coworker. She had her first with an epidural, had always planned on getting another epidural for the second child’s birth but missed the window. She went into labor on New Year’s Eve, there were people over at her house so there was a delay in getting ready to leave for the hospital. Also, her husband was out in a loooong In-N-Out Burger drive-thru line when she finally called him to ask him to come back as she thinks the contractions were such that she ought to go into the hospital. But he was stuck with cars all around him, he couldn’t back out and couldn’t pull forward, so he waited thru the line. By the time he got home, the contractions were so close together that they decided they didn’t have time to get to the hospital they’d planned to birth at, they would go to a closer hospital. But they got lost going to the closer hospital, fought in the car the entire way arguing over where to exit on the freeway and where to turn, and by the time she was admitted, she had the baby half an hour later. She was stunned at how smooth the second childbirth was, how much shorter the recovery time was (days compared to weeks), she loved that she was able to get up and walk around shortly after giving birth, and was happy to not have the week-long back pain at the epidural site that she had with the first birth.

It’s gonna be interesting.