the big book of birth blog

The big day has arrived!

The Big Book Of Birth is finally on sale! You can order a copy of it online from Amazon here, at Barnes & Noble here, or go into your local bookstore - big or small - and either pick it up there, or order a copy to pick up later!

Realbirth: the future

Realbirth continues to grow, you'll be pleased to know. We are opening a second location in April, at 49th St and 9th Avenue. We will contine to expand our great programs, and we are adding a “green” parenting and baby store called “Bump to Baby”.

We'll still be functioning as normal at 22nd St, so make sure you pop in to see us very soon.

Life as a mom

When I go places with my kids, they assume I know every pregnant woman they see or just about any one with a baby. I taught in my neighborhood hospital for years, and they grew up with me answering breastfeeding questions in the frozen food aisle of the grocery store, or sleep questions on the way to the park.

My daughter is already phenomenal with kids and is going to be the most in demand babysitter ever. My son just rolls his eyes at our high estrogen household and finds refuge in his pet turtles, frogs and computer.

And 2007 brings tremendous personal change as well as professional. I am getting married in October and while I’ve been a single mom for seven years, this woman has got to say that she’s a fish who likes to ride her bicycle…

Illustrating the book

One thing I always knew about the book was that it needed illustrations. About the time I was looking for an illustrator, a student called Matt Wimsatt said during introductions in class that he was a medical illustrator and that he had seen a lot of pictures of births. He was talking about the shift in his intellectual process of needing to draw something using his skill and experience, as opposed to now needing to understand what might actually happen in labor, and the physical and emotional reality for him and his wife.

I tucked that information into the back of my mind, and after class I asked him about his illustration work. It turned out that Matt had the perfect blend of art and experience for the book. He had the technical skill to do anatomical drawing, but he had also done a lot of illustrative work as well. So using him for both types of drawing was possible. I had been worried about providing a visual consistency for the book, but here was the perfect solution.

I asked him if he could make the figures look a little bit like the “For Better Or For Worse” cartoon, in that I wanted soft figures that women could really relate to. Pictures become so dated so fast and illustrations can sometimes show us a bit of our humanness, without being as confrontational as a photograph. And Matt did an amazing job, and was great to work with – so much so that he also designed the new Realbirth logo with me. I'm really pleased with the results.

For more details on Matt Wimsatt and his work, click here.

The first review

The first review of a book is a terrifying thing, but thankfully the Library Journal Review have been incredibly supportive and positive in their look at The Big Book Of Birth. Take a look at the review below.

Library Journal Review

Lyon, Erica. The Big Book of Birth. Plume: Penguin Group (USA).

There are a plethora of books available on the topics of pregnancy and childbirth; however, few are devoted entirely to the stages of delivery from the end of the third trimester through postpartum. Here, Lyon (childbirth educator; founder & director, Realbirth Ctr., New York) addresses this critical time. She states in the first chapter, "This book will help you to understand how to trust your body, protect your baby, and navigate your journey to motherhood." Her book is not only thorough but written in a warm, coaching style, which makes for easy reading. She takes women through the stages of labor, providing information on everything from pain medications to relaxation techniques to choosing your midwife or doctor. Line drawings and clear illustrations augment the text; personal anecdotes are well used throughout. Lyon's straightforward style makes this book a welcome addition to consumer health collections; highly recommended for public libraries.

-Mary Grace Flaherty, Sidney Memorial P.L., NY

Sadly the Library Journal website is subscription only, but you can get more information on the publication from their homepage here.

The cover

So, whats the most frequently asked question so far? That's easy - who is the baby on the cover?!

Well, the adorably cute, slightly pensive baby is not one of mine, or one of my students (as far as I'm aware at least - there have been thousands so far, to be fair!). But I am on the case to discover the mystery baby's identity...and I will let you know as soon as I find out.

I do love the fact that on the cover of a birth book is a baby rather than a pregnant woman. That's not to dismiss how important the mother is in the process - it is her doing most of the work after all. But I do believe that it is important to keep our focus on the baby as we cope with labor - it is often a primary coping tool in labor focusing on our soon to be seen baby. Keeping our "eyes on the prize" gives us strength we did not know we had that we will need in the raw early weeks of being a new mother.

Choosing A Childbirth Education Class

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Not strictly anything to do with The Big Book Of Birth, but I guess it's always good to put a face to the name! This is a segment from Alpha Mom TV, with me explaining a little bit about why it is important to take a childbirth education class and how to choose a good one. Alpha Mom TV is the nation's first network dedicated exclusively to the interests, needs and passions of today’s Mother. What's great about them is that they believe that information breeds confidence and empowered choice-making and that moms are smart enough to make that final choice as to what works best for them and their families. Instinct is good, but when it’s shaped by knowledge, it’s even better. They address a wide range of universal issues that are important to moms—from childbirth education, nutrition, safety, and health, to emotional issues. For more information on Alpha Mom, take a look at them on the web at www.alphamom.com here.

Penguin & Plume

The publishers of The Big Book Of Birth are Plume, a division of The Penguin Group. Other writers on Plume include Pat Barker ('Regeneration'), Tracy Chevalier ('Girl With A Pearl Earring') and Dave Pelzer ('A Man Named Dave'), so it's nice to be in such illustrious company.

You can find out more about Plume here, and you can buy The Big Book Of Birth direct from Penguin by clicking here.

The Making Of The Big Book Of Birth: Part 3

Eighteen months after Realbirth opened, I called my agent who had been sitting on the proposal all this time. “We’re going to make it,” I said. “It’s going to work out, and I have my platform again.” He sold the proposal within two weeks.

My editor was a lovely vibrant young women, who it just so happened was beginning her second trimester. It was early summer as we strategised about the writing of the book, and she asked when I thought a good deadline would be. I asked her when she was due. She was due mid-October, so I told her the deadline would be October 1st. it seemed important that she read it while pregnant – after all, it was women like her who would be reading it.

She looked at me dubiously. I had never written a book, and yet I was giving myself a very short window. After reassuring her that I knew what I was doing, I began writing furiously. Well, truth be told, I told everyone that I was writing for the first four weeks, and then I actually got down to the sweat of doing it. And that was what it was - 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. I would sit down after breakfast and getting the kids off to school, and would write for 6-8 hours straight until I was so bone tired I would want to cry. I would zip off chapters to my editor as I finished them. And on October 1st at 9:45pm, I sent her the last chapter.

And then there was silence. She was reading it and getting ready to go on maternity leave. I waited. One day I called to follow up and heard she had left to have her baby. And still I wondered. A few weeks later I received a work email from her, following up on the editing and giving me some updates. Shortly afterwards, a separate email followed. In it she thanked me personally for the book, and said that her birth had been profound and that she had been able to use so many of the things I had written about. She had come out of it strong, confident, hopeful, and happy. And in that moment I knew the book was right. I felt I could let it go now because it had done what it was meant to do - it had supported a women in her finding her way. It didn’t matter anymore what happened. The book had done what it was supposed to do.

And now, after all that time, it’s available and in the shops. I can hardly believe it.

The Making Of The Big Book Of Birth: Part 2

To cut a long story short, I wrote a business plan. I took it to the SBA, and I took it tons of banks, but no one would touch it with a ten-foot pole. I was an unemployed single mom with no capital or assets and I wanted to start a business doing something that no one else was doing. It turns out that running an education center, in the eyes of the banking and business world, is a lot like running a restaurant - you have to come up with the money yourself since there is no way to project revenues.

It’s not like I had products to sell, after all. I had a classroom and breastfeeding clinics and postpartum depression support. And I had an idea. These were foreign concepts to banks - and even though on more than one occasion I was told that it was a great business plan that was more thorough and thought out than they’d seen in ages, they all told me that I should come back in three years. Let’s face it, they were probably just being nice because they felt bad turning down a single mom who had two kids to support.

So I turned to family and friends, and basically hocked myself into oblivion. It was tiny bits of money that got my new center up and running. Word went out, and students and educators one by one loaned me a thousand dollars here and thousand dollars there, and with some bat spit and a prayer I leapt off the cliff and opened the doors to Realbirth.

The day we opened, a loyal steady stream of mothers came form the Seton center to see us. We didn’t even have a phone yet! I remember one horrible moment of realization when the bathroom was out of toilet paper and I was changing the roll. The single mother in me realized that I had just created yet another place in my life where I was going to be the only person who changed the roll of toilet paper!

It was a year of feeling euphoric and sick to my stomach in equal measure every day. I didn’t put myself on the payroll until four months in, and even then only in gradually increasing amounts. making sure I paid my staff and teacher and the rent living off the small severance I’d received when I’d lost my job. And all the while I was telling everyone it was wonderful that we were growing, and that it was all great. And, truth be told, it was. We’ve experienced 30% growth every year for the last three years, which is pretty phenomenal. There was, however, one thing left to do.