Easy Decision

I met with the other doula this morning, a very nice lady who seemed to be experienced and competent. It was funny though, I almost immediately knew when I met with her that I would go with the first one. It was one of those intuitive feelings where you just know right off the bat what is right and then it's later when you start putting little things together that you realize why you knew. I don't want to say what wasn't right with the second doula because it wasn't really that she wasn't right. It was that she made me immediately see why the other one was righter. The grammar in this post is pretty atrocious but these made up words communicate things better.

Yesterday, when I saw the first doula, I felt calm. She was visibly soothing to me. Weird, huh? It's hard to explain but like I said yesterday, she had this calm, peaceful aura about her even before she spoke. She offered to buy me a beverage at Starbucks (where we met) which was nice and she complimented me on how well I looked for being almost 10 weeks along. Since right now I don't look particularly pregnant, just bulky and thick, I really appreciated that and it made me feel proud of myself. And you know, that's part of a doula's job in the thick of things - to make you have pride and feel confidence in yourself that you can do this labor thing. So it gave me a little sneak peek.

Another thing was that she only takes on one mother a month. Today's doula takes on four a month and talked about "building her business". Now I understand that this is her business and that's fine with me. But when the other one was talking, I could feel that she wasn't in it as a business (obviously not if you only take one person a month). She was it because she loved it and felt it was her life's calling/work. Her face and tone of voice radiated this and I just felt a warmth when she spoke about it.

Now, am I going to tell V. all of these warm fuzzy feelings that went into this decision? Absolutely not. Oh my gosh, he would probably go into convulsions and never recover. I mean, trust me, I've been through labor before and even with this doula, I'm not picturing that it's going to be some big long kumbaya moment. But if I was to tell V. all of this, that's what he would picture and be dreading it. For all his teasing, he is fine with it. He knows I'm not really good about asking for help and that if I think this will help, it must be worthwhile. He also knows that I don't make decisions lightly nor do I spend hundreds of dollars without a really good reason based on research, pros and cons, and my gut instinct. It's maybe once a year or every two years that I announce a big ticket purchase and believe me, I have the list of reasons why we should. Not that he requires that of me but that's how both of our minds work and it saves lots and lots of "should we? shouldn't we?" conversations that neither of us has the words left over for and energy to participate in. We both just like to cut to the chase and move on.

How this turned into a dissection of our marital decision making, I'm not sure. Before I get going on some other tangent, I'm going to stop so I can relax my brain and head to bed. After my bowl of cereal with berries of course...I'm embarrassed to tell you how much I look forward to it. When V.'s not here, it's almost the highlight of my evenings. So pathetic!