Читать книгу You: Having a Baby: The Owner’s Manual to a Happy and Healthy Pregnancy - Michael Roizen F. - Страница 7

So let’s start by rethinking our perception about conception (and beyond). Back in sex-ed class, most of us were taught a pretty simple recipe for how pregnancy works:

Ingredients

1 egg, mature

100 million sperm, very, very excited

Instructions

Preheat oven. Mix ingredients romantically. Cook bun for forty weeks.

Sprinkle with love and serve to the world.

The bun-in-the-oven image has served us well over the years, underscoring the belief that mom is protector and baby is protected, that mom is cook and baby is concoction, that mom is in control and baby is not. But there’s a fundamental problem with this analogy when it comes to the true biology of pregnancy (besides the fact that nobody bakes buns anymore): Baby has a heck of a lot more say about the whole process than a cinnamon raisin roll does.

In fact, pregnancy is more like dancing than cooking. You and your baby have a dynamic, choreographed relationship—one in which you lead and the baby follows. Your subtle movements and directions help show your baby how to grow and develop. After all, it takes two to tango, or in pregnancy terms, it’s uter-us, not uter-I.

But your baby isn’t always the most cooperative partner. Sometimes he’ll want to take the lead, sometimes he’ll send you signals about which way he wants you to move, sometimes he’ll improvise, sometimes he’ll do flips, and sometimes he’ll step on your feet and get everything all tangled up. Part of the reason he’ll act this way is that your body has a certain amount of biological ambivalence about this little cellular critter; after all, only half his genes are yours. Your relationship with him isn’t exactly hostile, but it’s not always warm and fuzzy either. Even at this young age, he’s going to try to assert himself, and your body may try to resist. There are evolutionary reasons for this, which we’ll discuss in the pages to come, but you can also think of these initial rebellious acts as practice for the years ahead.

Pregnancy can be as elegant as a waltz, as high-energy as a salsa, and as scattered as a twist (with a whole lot of shouting). Our main goal in YOU: Having a Baby is to teach you about this ingenious biological dance—a dance in which you have the ability and the artistry to guide your baby not only to a healthy delivery, but to a lifetime of good health as well.