At 11 am on a Saturday, 31-year-old Meenakshi gripped her pregnant belly in pain. The resident of Austin, Texas, wasn’t due for delivery, but her water broke. Her husband was in Washington, a two-hour flight away. Meenakshi called the local emergency number. Before help arrived, she opened the notes and scribbled with advice from her childbirth educator from India, Anupama Kumar Vijayanand. Meenakshi sat on her porch waiting for the ambulance to arrive, practising the breathing and visualisation techniques she had learned in Anupama’s online class. That same evening she delivered a healthy baby girl.
Anupama, who lives in Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, believes that such cases, where the techniques she has imparted are used successfully, prove how effective the classes she imparts to women across the world are.
The educator, through her organisation Vriksham, has so far trained over 10,000 expectant mothers in person in Tirupur, Coimbatore and Salem since 2012, along with countless NRIs and others online. Anupama helps women experience pregnancy and childbirth ‘scientifically, positively and joyfully’. This August 15, she will begin free pregnancy and childbirth education classes in primary health centres in a few villages in Tirupur. With over 800K followers on Instagram, Anupama is considered one of India’s top childbirth and lactation educators.
Anupama was barely 25 when she became pregnant with her first son Ahan in 2009. “I was a confident computer engineer, but I was diffident as an expectant mother. I could not separate the myths from the truth. There were too many old wives’ tales floating around. That’s when I started researching scientific journals about pregnancy. For instance, I never knew the importance of breathing to handle pain during pregnancy. I learned about it through my research. I was keen to pass on this information to mothers like me. I started sharing it first in my neighbourhood, then to my extended family and then, through word of mouth, many expectant mothers started seeking my guidance,” says the 38-year-old mother of two boys.
In 2012, the techie upskilled herself by pursuing a range of certifications, both international and national, such as childbirth educator, pregnancy fitness educator, lactation educator and birth doula that helped her start Vriksham. “The feedback that I received from expectant mothers and their endorsement of my classes made women reach out to me,” Anupama informs. As their number grew, she started offering online classes in 2017, through video-calling and social media platforms. Her labour management classes involve stages of birthing, breathing, coping techniques, partners support, medication and C-section.
Her work includes handholding women, both through their pregnancy and the first six months of being a new mother. Anupama recalls that at first, male partners were not ready to discuss sex, contraception and breastfeeding in the classes, but it changed. “After two months, I could see the difference in the dynamics between partners and how they handled topics like infertility, high-risk pregnancies and labour,” she says. We are in this together, she assures the women, their partners and the babies in their wombs. No more baby blues for them.