What No One Tells You - Sacks and Birndorf

Although I can’t seem to find it anywhere now to reference it, I think I remember reading a review of this book before checking it out at the library that said something along the lines of “this book is like speed reading the advice you wanted for all stages of pregnancy and the first few months after giving birth.” The book also outright claims that it’s more geared towards women who are already pregnant. I found both of these things to be true reading it.

It felt like a lot of this was just cyclical reassurance that you and your baby will be okay, and not to take it all too seriously. There were a lot of anecdotes from various patients, and if I were pregnant at the moment I would probably be as anxious as these authors seem to assume you are, but because I’m not pregnant and anxious at the moment there were times it felt like I was rereading the same affirmations over and over again. 

Something I did find useful was the resources that were mentioned throughout the book for your reference at the end. However, when I went to access some of these resources, I found that the links were out of date. This wasn’t entirely surprising as the copyright was from 2019, but I was a bit disappointed. 

Still, I did find something to come back to when reading about the IPT and I do think that this may be something to come back to in the event our house ever does decide on having kids. Right now, I don’t think it was exactly what I was looking for though. 

Overall, this is somewhere around 2.5/5 stars for me. 

Things from the book I do want to think about if kids are in the cards: 

• Going from two incomes to one 
• How does the person who gives up a paycheck how access to funds?
• How will you monitor budget together? 
• If one person is the primary caregiver, does the less hands-on person get a lesser say in baby-related spending? 
• How do you decide if you need to hire extra help to address domestic work or self-care? Can that be vetoed by the person who is not staying with the child full time? 
• Who would be on-call for when the birth occurs? 
• What in the event of episiotomy? 
• Circumcision??????? It felt to me like this book really pushed for and somewhat assumed you would come to the conclusion that circumcision is the way to go, even gong as far as saying that if you are worried about the child having discomfort, to remind yourself that the child would also be hurt when receiving shots / vaccines. I cannot see how that is a 1:1 comparison and I will definitely be doing some outside research if it comes to that. I really didn’t appreciate the tone of the book around that point.
• Concept of Zuo Yue Zi: Sitting the month - focus is on the mother’s healing; relatives cook nurturing food and help manage domestic responsibilities