Laboring in Japan—Baby –wise

This is the final installment of what it’s like being a pregnant foreigner in Japan.   The story begins here.  

Jon and I waited for labor to start from about week 38 onward.  We both knew it could come at any time, especially since our baby was getting so big. There were tell-tale signs that things were progressing, including two trips to the hospital with us thinking that things were starting, but baby was comfortable in there and didn’t actually want to come out.  In the last week, I was getting Braxton hicks contractions every night, and during our 39 week checkup, we set an induction date for Tues, Oct. 23^rd.   This was two days before the due date.

The weekend before that, our city, Kokura had a big food festival.  Jon and I wandered about, taking photos, enjoying the warm sunny weather, seeing a robot serve ice cream, and eating.  I wanted to get lots of “last” photos of Jon and me as a family of only two before the big day.  

Monday night we went out to eat giant cheeseburgers and walked home in the rain.  One last night out, eating greasy food and taking a long walk in the cool weather before we’d have to worry about keeping a little baby warm and in bed at night.

Tuesday morning we slept in a bit and went to the hospital at 10:30.  I had an initial exam with two doctors, our personal doctor, Imai, who we had been meeting with the whole time, and one older doctor that we saw a few times in periphery and didn’t know very well.   Dr. Imai explained that the plan was for us to register, settle in our room, and she would give me three pills that would start to soften my cervix and get my body ready for labor.  We’d relax and I’d spend the night in the hospital, but labor wouldn’t actually begin until the next day when I would get an IV of pitocin to start contractions.   At this point, the older doctor joked that I’d probably just go into labor this afternoon without any help.  We asked, “really?”  Dr. Imai answered, “maybe….” doubtfully.  However, this is the same lady that told us for weeks the gender of our baby, prefaced with a “maybe.”  When Jon asked what percent she was sure of the gender, she said, “maybe 100%.”  So, maybe her “maybes” don’t mean maybe.

Jon and I had packed lots of things to do, a pack of cards, books, Japanese textbooks, and balloons to decorate the room.   I expected to be in the hospital about a week, between the extra day before labor and five days after, so Jon made the room look festive.  The nurses loved it.  I was the only lady in the maternity ward, so I had a private room, although the room farthest from the nurses station.   I don’t know if I was alone because Japan’s birth rate really is that low, or Oct. isn’t a popular time to have a baby, or because most women have their babies in specialized birthing clinics or all three, but even with so few patients, there were always about seven nurses working.

I took my three pills, beginning at about noon, and soon afterwards they hooked me up to a fetal monitor. 

They kept asking me if I felt anything and I kept saying, “No, I don’t feel anything.”  Well, apparently I was having contractions and they were getting slightly stronger and closer together.  After a while, if I concentrated, I could feel some slight pressure that I had previously thought was just the baby moving.  This labor thing was going to be easy!  The contractions got stronger and closer together and they hooked me up to the monitor about once every 90 minutes.   At first it was fine, Jon and I played some card games and started a game of scrabble, but after a while I really started dreading the monitor.  It was uncomfortable to lay flat on my back for so long, especially as the contractions had really started hurting.   As soon as they would take the moniter off, I’d get up and walk around, and though it didn’t lessen the contractions, it was much more comfortable.  Our doctor went home at around four or five and said she would come back if my labor continued.

Jon kept asking me what my pain level was out of a 10.  I had a hard time answering him because I didn’t know what a 10 was, so I kept low-balling my numbers…..”I don’t know a 3?”  45 minutes later, as I gasped and stopped talking for a particularly long contraction, I said, “4?  Maybe?”  Jon got a little frustrated with me and told me, “Now’s not the time to be tough!  You have to be honest and tell me if it hurts so we can tell the nurses!”  Little did we know my level of toughness…

 A little while later, I had an exam and I was dilated to 3 cm, so I walked from my room to the laboring room.   At this point (around 5:00) I started really feeling a lot of pain.   I had initially insisted on having an epidural, but these past few months had been reading more about them and had toyed around with the idea of going natural. 

I mean, I am a pretty tough person.  I’ve always been active and I’ve had my share of bumps and bruises and falls from horses, kicks from horses, bites from horses….a lot of horse induced pain, actually.  And what is pain, I mean, really?  It’s just in your head.  It can’t really be that bad.  My body would produce chemicals to help me deal with it.  Besides, I half-assed learning some breathing and relaxation techniques and this past month I’d been massaging and stretching out….

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Labor is gross and here is where the descriptions get pretty graphic.  Please stop reading if you’re not interested in the particulars.

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…my perineum, so I was pretty prepared to push this baby out like a champ.  Well, as it turns out I’M the baby and a chump to boot.   I don’t know what idiot impulse made me think I was so tough and impervious to pain.  I’ve never broken a major bone, I’ve barely had any stitches, I cried when I stubbed my toe just a few months ago, and I used to take medicine for MENSTRUAL pain, for God ’s sake.  I’m the epitome of a soft, sheltered, modern woman.

From 5 till 7, I kneeled or laid on the bed in the labor room.  At some point during those hours, my water broke, but I don’t have any recollection of that because I was pretty busy throwing up, crying, and asking Jon when the doctor was going to get there and give me the epidural.  During that time, I was out of my mind, and I only remember snippets here and there.   Jon rubbed my back and told me how great I was doing and that the doctors were on their way to the hospital and I’d get my epidural soon. 

At some point I moved (was moved? I don’t remember) to the actual delivery bed and the doctor tried to get me to roll up in a ball on my side so he could put the epidural in my spine.  Laying still on my side, rolled in a ball, dilated to 5 cm, I learned what a 10 feels like.   Now I know.

Jon distracted me by talking about our little T-Rex and how we were going to be a family soon.  He tried to get me talking to distract me, but I was distracted by the doctor explaining that he was going to inject a little local anesthesia before placing the epidural in my spine.  Are you kidding me?  Did he honestly think that I cared one shit about a huge needle going directly into my spine at this point?  Did he think I could even feel anything besides the contractions?  I cared more about the ten extra seconds it was taking him to fuss around with the local anesthesia, than any pain from getting that needle in.  

After the epidural was in and a few minutes passed, the pain started to subside and I immediately fell asleep.  It takes a lot out of you to be in pain and (so Jon tells me) scream and throw up for two hours.  I woke up a while later to hear Jon out in the hallway on the phone with our parents telling them that everything was going fine and that I was resting and he’d call again when the baby came.   Jon came back in and read to me from a baby book for a while and we took some photos until around 10 when it was time to push. 

Dr. Imai arrived at this point and I was dilated to 10 cm.  I thought it was pretty funny that the nurses were all wearing scrubs, masks, and hats, but both doctors had strolled in wearing their street clothes and simply put on gloves.  At this point, Jon was holding my hand by my side, there were about six nurses surrounding my bed and both doctors looking inside me. The epidural had worn off and I was feeling a lot of pain again and they told me to start pushing the baby out.  They said it might be a little harder than normal because the baby had twisted and wasn’t facing the optimal direction, but that everything would still be fine and start pushing!

I don’t think I did a very good job pushing the baby out.  I didn’t know which muscles to use to push right, I got discouraged because I didn’t think I was being effective, I didn’t push in the right intervals, and I didn’t push strong enough.   I tried, but it was really hard, the doctors kept telling me to push for longer intervals and then rest for longer intervals to be more effective, but I kept pushing for a short time and getting exhausted and resting, then trying to push again right away.  I tried to tune everyone out except Jon and only listen to what he was telling me to do, especially because the nurses were getting really annoying.  One kept shouting, “Last push!  Last push!” right in my ear, but she started shouting it after about 20 minutes and it would be 45 minutes before my actual last push, so that got old fast.

At one point I looked down and I was just struck by what an absurd spectacle this whole thing was.  The 6 nurses surrounding the bed, the two doctors in casual clothes, in fact, I could see an open pack of cigarettes in the older doctor’s front pocket right then. Imai was telling me, “As soon as possible, longer!”  Jon was translating it to mean, “Push as long as you can!!”  What was going on? I started getting confused again and I don’t remember very much more until I saw the doctor pulling out a long tube with a suction cup on one end of it.  I knew immediately what that was.  Jon noticed that I saw it and told me not to worry about anything except pushing, one last long push to get the baby out.  I focused on Jon’s face and pushed and didn’t stop until someone attacked me and knocked the wind out of me.

As I tried to get some breath back in me, I saw that Dr. Imai had jumped on a stool and was doing sharp, deep, compressions on my stomach.  They were so strong to completely make me lose my breath each time.  She was helping push the baby out from the top, two nurses were pulling on each side of my vagina to open it up wider, the other doctor was pulling on the baby’s head with the vacuum, and I was pushing as hard as I could and finally T-Rex came out, after about an hour of pushing.   I was scared at first because she didn’t cry for about a minute, but everything was fine and they plopped her on my chest after she let out a healthy scream.

I couldn’t believe it.  I just kept saying to Jon, “Jon!  Our baby.  Our baby, our baby.  Oh, she’s our baby, baby.”  I was so shocked by her.   I can see now how tiny she is, but at the time I just kept thinking how sturdy and big she was.  Had she really been inside of me just a minute ago?  Had I really pushed her outside of me? 

The doctors took her away and cleaned her up and did a few tests and Jon told me how good I did.  I had torn pretty badly, so they started stitching me up while Jon stayed with the baby.   Finally, I was sewn up and Jon and I could have some time with our baby.  At this point some nurse started explaining to Jon the schedule for the week, of baby’s shots, my checkups, classes on giving the baby a bath, etc.  If I could go back in time, this is the one thing I would change (besides pushing baby out more effectively).  I mean, our baby was an hour old and she thought the most important thing for us to do was talk about the schedule for three days later?  We should have shooed her away.

I had lost a lot of blood, and was still bleeding a lot, so I stayed in the labor room that night to be closer to the nurse’s station.  Jon stayed with me for a few more hours as we called our parents and finally it was time for him to go home around 3:00 or 4:00.  The next morning I was able to walk down to my room and it was pretty rough.  I was barely able to make it to my bed before fainting.   The night before the nurses had mentioned that it might not be healthy for me to feed our baby the next day because of the amount of blood I lost, so I was nervous that that would still be the case.  However, after breakfast and an hour more of rest, I was ready to walk down to the nursery and was able to feed our baby girl. 

Jon arrived at the hospital soon after and we spent the whole day together as a family of three.    

T-Rex's Nursery

Japanese homes are known for being tiny.  In fact, our first apartment in Japan had one room with a “kitchen” (hot plate, sink, and a mini fridge) on one side, a short skinny bed on the other side, a veranda and a bathroom.  We fancied it up with a chair and hanging rack for our clothes and still had enough room to do whatever we wanted, as long as what we wanted to do was stand up straight or leave.  Our current place is much more livable, we have a kitchen (no quotation marks needed), a bathroom, a balcony, a small living room and a bedroom.  We love our little apartment, it’s got a great location, it’s a great price, and the neighborhood is quiet—so we don’t plan to move.  But then we started thinking about where the baby will sleep.  Hmmmmm… 

We decided to get a little baby basket to put by the bed--nursery completed!  But—what about all of baby’s stuff?  What about when baby gets too big for the basket?  We still need a nursery.   We decided to take a third of the closet and make it into baby’s room.  There’s a shelf at about waist height and we’ll put the changing table and clothes storage on top of that.  Once baby outgrows the basket, baby will sleep on his/her own baby sleeping pad under the shelf.  When I first suggested this idea to Jon, he was horrified, “What?  We can’t have baby sleep in the closet!”  But, there really isn’t anywhere else, unless we’re willing to have baby sleep in the bathtub or on the balcony.  The nice thing is that the closet has a sliding door that we can use while T-Rex is sleeping, it will block any light that we use as we get ready for bed (presumably at a later time than the baby), but it’s small enough that we will be able to hear T-Rex crying or fussing through it.  

<--  Before

I spent a lot of time surfing the internet to find ideas for decorating our little closet nursery and Jon and I talked a lot about what we wanted it to look like.  In the end we were able to decorate almost the entire closet corner with things we had around the house or that we bought at the hyakuyen shop (100 Yen shop, just like our dollar stores) for less than $US40.  It was a little tricky, because we want the room to be bright and colorful, but there aren’t any outlets for lights near it and we can’t paint the walls. 

We chose an outdoor, tree theme for the nursery.  We started with blue fabric to pin on the walls for the sky and bought brown, green, and yellow felt for creating a tree.   I started by cutting out the shape of the tree and branches and about a million leaves.

Then I ironed the blue fabric and glued the branches and leaves to it.

While I was doing this, Jon was cutting up a sleeping pad we had lying around the house.  In Japan, people sleep on the floor, and we used to sleep on a foam pad before I got pregnant and we decided to upgrade to a nice mattress.  (Best choice we every made.)   We tried to give it away, but everyone has these thin sleeping pads lying around their house, so it was just taking up space in the closet.  Jon cut two squares out of it, which would lay on top of one another.  He cut the center out of the top one, making a square donut shape—this will make a raised rim around where the baby lays when we change the diaper.  Then he covered the whole thing in a waterproof picnic print tablecloth.

Here I am sewing on the trunk and leaves using embroidery thread.  It took a really long time.

Finally, we put it all together in the baby closet.  We don’t have many baby clothes or anything yet, but what we have, we put in the shelves.  We have an Easter outfit, some baby kimonos, and a T-Shirt with a T-Rex on it. 

 

You can see from this angle that it leads into Jon’s side of closet.

Finally, I found a really colorful and cute bed that we’ll put right next to our bed.  I like it because it’s so bright.  Once baby grows out of it, he/she will get her own baby sleeping mat underneath the changing corner.  We’ll wait till baby is a few months old before we even start worrying about getting that ready. 

Pregnant in Japan--Baby day care and Hospital tours

Pregnant in Japan - weeks 23 - 25

There is an adorable day care just down the block from our house that I've always assumed we'd send out little baby to.  I get two months off work after the baby is born and then we have winter vacation before I need to go back to work, so we need someone to take care of little 10 week old T-Rex from Mid January till the end of February, when Jon and I complete our contracts.  Depending on what we do for jobs next year, we could either move and have to start work in April, giving us a month off of work, or stay in Kitakyushu and find other work that starts in April, or keep our current contracts which would have us start working again in June.  So we’ll have between one and three months off to spend with our little dinosaur before I decide I can’t go back to work because leaving him/her with someone else was too traumatizing for me or before we, you know, go back to work.   

However, when we stopped in the day care to talk about their services, they told us that they won't accept babies till they are six months old.  Hmmm... The next day we went down to the city office to figure this day care thing out.

I figured they would give us a list of day cares that accepted young babies and we'd call and visit them to find out about availability and then get on the waiting lists. 

Day cares are both public and private, but both (I believe) are subsidized by the government.  Going to the city office should have been our first step anyhow, as we need to get on the official waiting list of the day cares we want to join and then wait till one accepts us.  Apparently there is a high demand and limited supply, so, going 7 months before we would even need one is actually not jumping the gun at all.    

We arrived at the city office and started talking with the lady who signs people up for the day cares, called Hoikuens for babies and Kindergartens for ages 2 through 5.  (Can I say one more time that I am so glad my husband can speak Japanese like nobody's business?  He did all the speaking and I wrote my name down and tried to follow.  Usually just when I thought I understood, "Ahh!  She's saying that they won't take kids over 4 or 5 years old!"  Jon would ask me, "Do you understand?  They won't take more than 4 or 5 kids total.")

We told the lady we wanted someone to take our baby and she pulled out a list of Hoikuens in our area and started outlining the rules for signing up.  So, if baby is born around Oct. 25th, then the baby can be accepted on Feb 1st...wait, wait, wait.  Jon explained that we both needed to be back to work by Jan. 15th.  She explained that they won't accept babies under three months old.  Jon explained that I only got 8 weeks of maternity leave and then we would use up all our vacations days to get two more weeks of winter break, but after that I had to go back to work (Jan. 15th). 

The three of us sat in silence and stared at each other for a while.  

Jon started explaining again about the maternity leave and how I had to go back and complete my contract till Feb 28th....and then we didn't need the hoikuen any more.  Ahh!  The lady’s face lit up! Success!  She pulled out a secret list of "Hoikuen Mammas," ladies who accept babies as young as 48 days old.  I don't know why she was holding out on us, but as she only pulled it out when Jon mentioned that we only needed one for 6 weeks, it must have been related.   There is only one in our nearby area, though there were about 18 listed on the sheet, some as close as a 30 minute bus ride away, others hours away.  We started looking through the complicated map system and trying to find out if these Hoikuens were near our home or at least our jobs, which would make drop-off and pick-up easier.  I won't go into detail about how complicated and different the Japanese address system is, suffice to say for now that it is nearly impossible to figure out without just typing the address in Google maps and following the arrow to the  location.  Then the lady stepped away to make some phone calls.  She came back a while later with a big smile!  Success!  The Hoikuen closest to our house was full, but the one that was close to Jon's school had one opening! I saw that she had crossed out about 10 other Hoikuens on the list.  Had she called them all and they were full?  Were they too far away and that's why she crossed them off?  I don't know.  I didn’t care, we were in!

So, she helped us fill out a few forms to officially get on the waiting list at this Hoikuen, and she even wrote the time we applied on the form.  These things fill up so fast that us filling out the form at 4:00 rather than 6:30 might mean the difference between getting in or not.  Then she gave us a list of forms and things to do after T-Rex arrives, but before we can be accepted to the Hoikuen.

This is what we've got to do after T-Rex is born, but before we leave on Dec 20th to visit America till Jan 13th. 

Get the baby a Japanese ID card.

Register the baby on National Insurance.

Register the birth and birth certificate at the City Office. 

Have a one month check-up 

Visit the day care with the baby to introduce ourselves to the Hoikuen Mamma.

Get a copy of our taxes and salary from our company to bring to the City Office (This will determine how much we pay for the Hoikuen.  It can range from $250 to $350 US per month.  That sounds like a steal to me, but I don't know how much day care is in the states.)

During this busy time we've also got to...

Get the baby a passport.

Get the baby a social security number.

Get an English version of the Birth Certificate (must be notarized by a registered bilingual notary).

Register the birth with the American Embassy 

It appears that every single one of these documents will be a nightmare of filling out dozens of forms, paying bills for forms or notarization, and/or traveling 2 hours on the bus to the nearby city, where the American Embassy is located.  I'm already stressing out about it!  But, I need to remember that I will have 7 weeks of no work to get all these things done, so between Jon and me, I'm sure it's possible.  It has to be.

We also went in for another check-up at the hospital this past Saturday.  (T-Rex is doing great, and weighs ~650 grams.)  After we finished, I asked about where I’ll actually have the baby and so we took a tour of the maternity ward.   I can see now why people would spring for the Lady's Clinics.  The hospital rooms where you stay with your baby are pretty standard hospital fare—white, empty, clinical.   I thought they might spruce the rooms up a little bit on the maternity floor, but they are as depressing and empty as in any other section.  

I don't regret our plan to go the hospital route so that I can have the option of an epidural and for us to save about $1,000 or more, but I'm glad that we took a tour so I can prepare myself.  For example, I've always heard that you don't want to go to the hospital as soon as contractions start, because your own home is more comfortable for the first several hours.  I can see that's true now and I'll be staying home much more comfortably than I might otherwise have. After the baby arrives, Jon can't stay the night, he has to go home at 9:00 PM.  That's fine, I'm sure I'll want to go to sleep early since I'll be waking up every few hours to feed T-Rex.  The rooms are empty and bleak, so I'll add framed photos, knickknacks, and other decorations to the hospital bag to make it homier.  The nursery is the only place with baby beds, so mother and baby can’t sleep in the same room.  I was disappointed about that, but I'll keep the baby with me while I'm awake and let him/her sleep in the nursery and enjoy that the nurses will change those first few days of dirty diapers.  They say most women stay for 5 days, sometimes 4, so I hope that everything goes well and I can leave ASAP. 

Baby Names and Secret Sex....(of the baby)

We've decided to keep the gender of the baby a secret....not from ourselves, but from everyone else!  (At our last checkup, the doctor wasn't even 100% sure about the sex, so we technically don't know yet either)  Hopefully we'll be able to nail it down at the next checkup at 24 weeks.  I've just started telling a little white lie to acquaintances that we're not finding out the gender, because it feels so weird to say, "Yes, I know the gender, but I'm not going to tell you!"   Initially, I wanted it to be a surprise for us too, but it's so hard to pick out a name, that we wanted to know the gender to cut out half of the name disagreements. We've started narrowing the choices down....here's a sampling.

Coralyn/Coraline (I'm for line, Jon's for lyn)

Corrine

Fiona 

Clark 

Grant 

Graham

Picking names is hard!  

I had no idea picking a name would be this hard, I always wondered why there were so many baby name books and website.  It's not just about making a list of names that sound pretty.  We've got to contend with the fact that 

1-Jon has an ex with the same name I like....goodbye name!   (I don't want to think about him ever having dated anyone before me....much less naming our baby after an ex!)

2-I had a childhood enemy with the same name that Jon likes...another name down.  

3-Jon likes the name Rose, but I hate girl names that endow the named with gender specific traits, like Lily (delicate and beautiful) or Charity (charity). 

4- We're both atheists, so we don't want to name our child something from religion or the Bible, so names like  Christian, Mathew, Michael, Mary, Ruth, Jesus, and so forth are off the list.   

5-We don't want too common of names, which pulls Sophia from the list, although I love the sound of it and the meaning (wisdom).  

6- This baby will spend some formative years living in Japan.  Japanese people have a hard time saying the "L" and "R" sounds.  Well, many of the names we like have those sounds, and some of them have both!  (Clark and Coraline/Coralyn)  We decided that in the end, we had to just ignore that aspect of choosing names, because we just couldn't bear knocking any more possible names off the list!   Although, if we pick Coraline/Coralyn, it'd be pretty funny because I would call her Cora for short, and that's how Japanese people say Cola.  It's even spelled the same in the Japanese alphabet. 

So the plan now, is to keep our minds open, and keep thinking of possible names.  We;ll go to the hospital with a short list of possible names and once we have the baby we'll have 5 to 7 days in the hospital to try them out and see which one fits before we have to sign the birth certificate and head home. 

Weeks 15-22: Telling Work about T-Rex, Free Pregnancy Advice, and Baby's First Kick!

We went in and told work about the pregnancy at week 19.  Because I had started working at my school, it’s illegal to fire me for being pregnant; although I was still nervous they might be angry.  However, everything went very well.  Everyone was very happy for us and congratulated us, although there were some funny looks when we mentioned the due date, October 25th.  My work asked me not to tell my schools yet because they will call the Board of Education first and let them know what’s going on and explain that they will organize a substitute for my three months of maternity leave.  So I haven’t told anyone at my school yet, though I have stopped dressing in ways that will hide my growing belly.  My first two days of work, I wore all black, vertical stripes, bright necklaces, anything to draw attention to my face, and keep attention from my belly.  I don’t think I needed to worry so much.  I haven’t hidden my fat tummy for days and no one has looked at me funny or asked me about it.  I guess if I look at it objectively, I can see how it just looks like I had a big lunch...sort of. 

 

I recently told a Japanese friend about my pregnancy and when I noticed her surprise, I asked her, “But, didn’t you notice my growing stomach?”  Her response was, “Well, no!  If I thought a fat tummy meant someone was pregnant, then I would just have to assume all foreigners are pregnant!”  She was joking (mostly), but I thought it was really funny and I’m pretty sure that’s what is going on at my school.  So far I’ve only gained about 2 pounds, but I don’t know how that happened because I feel like I have quite a bump.  I can’t button my normal pants anymore, so I either leave them unzipped with a belly band over them or wear the maternity pants my mom sent me from the states.  Maternity shopping in Japan is ridiculous.  As a general rule, I hate shopping.  Add to the mix that clothes are three times what they would cost in the states, that I don’t speak the language very well, the XL sizes are usually too small (I'm a M in the states) and it makes for a miserable shopping experience.  The maternity clothes I've found at the various malls are usually these filmy, boxy, tops and then short shorts.  My mother-law said she’ll send me some clothes and my mom, dad, and sister-in-law have already sent a box of all types of summer maternity clothes that I've been loving.

How are Japanese people reacting to my pregnancy?  Well, as I just wrote, it’s not yet obvious whether I’m pregnant or chubby, so I can’t say how strangers or neighbors will react just yet.  As far as people who do know, it’s a little frustrating.  I’m a very independent person.  I don’t like being told what to do.  My husband and I both joke sometimes that we both have oppositional defiance disorder.  Being told that we absolutely must do something a certain way is the best way to get us to do it differently.  On top of that, Jon and I have both been very careful about this pregnancy.  We planned to get pregnant, so I haven’t drunk any alcohol from the very start; I take my vitamins and eat healthy fresh veggies, fruits, and whole grains.  I stopped rock climbing at 10 weeks, and we never miss a doctor appointment.  We researched all the fish that are high in mercury and I even stopped drinking coffee.   So, when someone tries to boss me around and tell me how to act as a pregnant lady, I get really peeved. 

The first time this happened was when I was playing around with some little three year old boys that I teach English to.  I picked one of them up and immediately got attacked by six parents shouting that I shouldn’t pick up anything heavy...ever.  For nine months I’m supposed to just let my muscles atrophy, I guess.  This has happened many times since then, moving tables that hardly weigh more than 8 pounds, carrying groceries from the store, etc. etc. etc.  I’m sick to death of assuring people that I can still ride my bike safely.  I don’t need people telling me I need to hold the hand rail when I go up and down stairs.  If there happens to be someone smoking within a 15 foot radius, I don’t need anyone going over there and telling them they need to put it out because I’m pregnant and I don’t need to leave and go home lest I breathe a whiff of diluted smoke.  And I especially don’t need the comments asking why I'm coming back to work after my maternity leave is up. Don't I want to be a good mother and stay home with the baby?

It’s hard in a different way for Jon too.  Jon loves helping me.  He would carry all the heavy things all the time if I let him.  However, I’ve always insisted on carrying my fair share, whether we’re camping and hiking across the Great Wall of China, or carrying food home from the grocery store.  Especially now that I’m pregnant, I want to stay strong.  I know that exercise is good for me and the baby and I know that labor takes a lot of muscle power, so I am trying to stay as active as I can.  However, people tend to look askance at Jon when they see me with a heavy backpack, and I imagine it will only get worse once I obviously have a baby inside me.  So, Jon gets hit on two sides.  He wants to help me, but I won’t let him, and then he gets looks and comments from strangers insinuating that he isn’t a very good husband, when in fact he's the best husband.

Our friends and acquaintances have started to realize how Jon and I do things and I’ve let them all know that I plan to ride my bike to the hospital when it’s time to have T-Rex, so they have relaxed a little bit about it—or at least stopped making comments about it.  (I don’t actually plan to ride my bike to the hospital in the midst of contractions.  We live close enough that we’ll either walk or take a taxi.)  However, I imagine that as it gets more obvious that I’m pregnant, we’ll start getting more comments from strangers or nosy neighbors.  I don’t know how pervasive these sorts of things would be in the states, as I’ve never been pregnant there.  

The other day Jon got to feel T-Rex kicking through my belly muscles and it was a really special experience. I'm glad that he is now able to feel the baby move, although now he has the same worries I have been having every day, "Wait, it's been almost five hours since we felt him/her move...is he/she ok?"  The very next day I was looking at my stomach and T-Rex gave a mighty kick, making my belly bulge out about an inch.  It was not special or sweet and I didn’t rub my tummy or smile about our future soccer player.  Instead, I sat down quickly because I almost fainted.  My first thought was not of the precious bundle of life inside me, it was of the X-Files episode we had recently watched where the alien rips its way out of the man’s torso. And then goes on a killing spree.  Having a growing baby inside you with weird. 

Two Foreigners Having a Foreigner Baby in Japan

March 15^th 2012

These next few entries will focus on what it’s like being pregnant and giving birth in Japan. My husband and I met, fell in love, and got married in America, but moved immediately after the wedding to be English teachers in Japan. It’s a good place to have a baby, with one of the highest records of mother and infant health in the world.  The health insurance system is set up to provide affordable (almost free) prenatal, labor, and infant care.  There are numerous hospitals and since it is a national health care system, you can choose from any number of hospitals for your care and delivery, although some are cheaper than others.  The government pays for maternity leave at 60% of your normal wage for three months, one month before the birth and two months after the birth.

So, it sounds like a cakewalk, right?  I imagine it probably is for a Japanese person.  However, let me set the stage for who my husband and I are.    We’re Americans in our late 20s who want to give birth in the Western Style, as much as possible.  This causes problems.

 First--The Language
 Though my husband is very good at conversational Japanese, he hasn’t had a lot of time to study up on the specific vocabulary that we’ll need at the hospital.  (C-Sections and fetal heart rates don’t come up so often in casual conversation) I have only been studying for over a year, and so my abilities stop at making the appointment and writing my address in kanji on the registration form.  So, we’d like to find an English speaking doctor.  If we can’t, the city can provide interpreters that will help us at the appointments, but I don’t really want a stranger in the room with Jon and I as we find out the baby’s birth or as I take my clothes off for a physical, or as I’m in labor.  Although, I guess, the doctor and the nurses will all be just as much of strangers, so maybe that won’t be a big deal.  I can’t imagine many interpreters would want to volunteer to be a part of that though….

 Second-Teamwork
 Jon and I are a team, through and through.  That means we want to be together at all times.  Some Japanese hospitals don’t allow men (i.e. husbands) in the labor rooms because there may be a bunch of women all naked from the waist down in the same room.  Some aren’t supportive of men coming along to appointments.  This is changing, but (from asking Japanese people) I hear that only 50 percent of fathers are present at the birth.  Don’t even get me started on the reaction I got when I asked my pregnant friend’s husband if he’d ever changed a diaper before.  Well, I started, I’ll finish.  He looked at me like I had asked him if he had ever eaten dirt.  Then he responded.  “No, and I never will.  It’s her duty.”  And this was a nice guy!  He seemed to always fuss over his wife and was always rubbing her belly, but he had no plans to ever, not in two years, change a diaper.

 Third-Pain Medication
 I want an epidural.  They are safe and easy. I see no reason to put myself through hours of intense and exhausting pain when there is no need to.  The Japanese idea is that the pain of childbirth is a woman’s burden to bear and she isn’t a real mother without that pain. I think that’s stupid, and I want an epidural. About ten percent of women get epidurals in Japan (hearsay from friends), so we need to make sure the hospital has that.

 Fourth- Work Situation
 We work for a dispatch company that requires us to re-sign contracts every year.  This means that after a year, they can fire us by not renewing our contracts for no reason at all and we have no recourse. This is a problem because I will be about 16 weeks along when we sign the contracts, although I will have been working for the company consistently for over a year.  After the contract is signed, they can’t fire me for being pregnant, but I’m 100% sure they wouldn’t renew my contract if they found out.  That would leave Jon and I in dire financial straights, me unable to find a different job in the middle of the school year, and super unhappy and bored for the months where I wouldn’t have a job. (I’m writing this in the present tense, but will wait to publish it until later, so there is nothing on the internet that my company can find.)  I went to the city office and spent quite a while talking to all the different insurance and pregnancy registration offices with an interpreter finding out that there is no law saying when I have to tell my employer I’m pregnant, that they can’t fire me after I’ve signed the contract.  When I register the birth, that is kept secret and won’t be leaked to my company, etc.   Whew. Now, just to keep it off of Facebook.

 If I can take a little tangent here…  I imagine some people are thinking, “Don’t you think it’s wrong to force the company to re-hire you just so you can take three months off work to have a baby?
 Shouldn’t you support yourself for that? It’s your choice to have a baby.”  My answer is this, first of all, ***** you.  Secondly, I will have worked for this company consistently for over 18 months by the time I want to take the 3 months maternity leave.  It’s not like I just barely got the job.  Also, the government pays my maternity leave, not the company. Next, if you want smart, motivated, professional women to have babies (thus making MORE smart, motivated, professional people—something I think is good for the world), then we all need to chip in to help them.  Questions like the one above are one of the reasons Japan has such a low birthrate. Women have to choose between babies or their job and they are starting to choose their job. 

 OK, back on track.  So, the above four things are not impossible to find, but finding them all in one hospital might be tricky.  The first hospital we went to had an English speaking doctor and was very nice.
 We had our first ultrasound with him.  However, it was a very small clinic, with only the one doctor.  These small, one doctor women’s clinics are pretty common in Japan, and many normal sized hospitals don’t have a maternity ward. Because he was the only doctor, he couldn’t offer epidurals. In the case of a complication, I’d have to be transferred to a larger hospital. Also, his average price was about US$1,000 over what the government subsidized for birth.  Most hospitals are right around the same price or a little lower. So, we decided to find a different hospital.  Our doctor cautioned us that we wouldn’t be able to find a hospital that would give me any pain killers for the labor because it just wasn’t done….

…A mere week later, with some help from a wonderful friend, we have found our hospital.  We chose it because it's very close to our house, the price is very close to what the government provides for labor, and it offers epidurals, although we have to pay the extra US$300.  Anyhow, it's got almost everything we want.....but what doesn't it have?  Yep, an English speaking doctor.  We'll head in to our first appointment there on March 28th.