I steadily researched and prepared for a natural birth. I could imagine the mountaintop feeling of pushing my baby out with more strength than I had ever found in life before. That sense of accomplishment would crest into the euphoric moment when the doctor would wriggle that slippery bundle onto my chest. I would meet my firstborn for the first time in a moment of soaring emotion and triumph.
I thought I would come out of labor strong. I would be a force of nature. Hear me roar!
Instead I came out not being able to bend over to put on my own underwear. Not being able to hold my baby in many positions without wincing. Not able to get out of the bed on my own or shave my legs or feel my lower belly when I touched it. I came out with a five-inch incision and two kinds of pain pills.
It’s a strange thing going from being prepared one hour to push a human out of your vagina–swaying, squatting, moaning–to lying still on a table while a doctor makes a clean cut and pulls your baby out of you. Going from intense sensations taking over your whole body to barely feeling tingling in your toes. Moving from a room ripe and slippery with birth smells to a cold and chemical-scented sterile field. Low lights to fluorescents. Birth balls and rebozos to needles and surgical drapes. The known hands of your familiar birth team to a room full of strangers in masks.
It’s confounding to change course so drastically. Even when you know it is right and necessary. Even when the result is the most perfect, healthy being you’ve ever seen.
No one could say the right thing
After we got home and people started settling into conversation with me, I both felt a need to explain my c-section and felt like just letting it lie. When my friends from the natural birth community asked me with concern, “How are you feeling?” (which sounded more like, “How are you feeling about the c-section?”) or said, “It’s ok to mourn”, I felt a little flustered. I wanted to say, “I’m great. You know, a c-section isn’t the worse thing that can happen to you.” I could feel this stigma of the c-section, and I didn’t want it touching me. I often said, “I feel at peace.” I knew I felt less at peace, though, when people asked me about it. I learned to shape my narrative to one of trust, grace, and my own kind of empowerment.
I thought I was at peace, and peace had to be the place to which I returned often to center myself in order to be a functioning, loving mother to my new son. I desperately wanted peace to be the final word.
Then when others sweetly said, “You have a healthy baby, and that’s the most important thing,” all of a sudden I wasn’t at peace. I felt defensive. I felt like saying, “Of course that’s the most important thing. Do you think I don’t know that? Actually I have a lot of different feelings I’m trying to process, and I’m trying to assure myself that they’re important and real, too.”
Your words can cause damage
I say this in kindness and love. When you tell a mama, “Well, the most important thing is that you have a healthy baby,” she can feel less deserving of the difficult mix of feelings she’s experiencing. We feel like, “What’s wrong with me? I have this wonderful baby in my arms. I’ve been hoping and praying for the safe delivery of this child for months, years! Now he’s here, and apparently I want more? If I’m not happy with this blessed new life that’s been entrusted to me, I must be a horrible person. I will never be happy. I’m doomed to a life of disappointment, ingratitude, and misguided expectations.”
I know you’re searching for the right words about a difficult situation. They come like the same words we offer people in grief, always seeming to fall short of honoring the complexity of a life and a soul. But the thing is, everyone here appears to be just fine, so I don’t even know if you think this deserves to be a difficult situation.
I worry you think I am selfish and unappreciative of this wondrous and heavy gift that was given to me. The lingering feeling of loss in this moment that we expect to hold the greatest joy of our life lathers me in guilt and confusion. I’m trying to simultaneously understand and overcome this sense of loss so that I can focus on the treasure that was entrusted to me.
Relief, wonder, fear, doubt, insecurity, longing, hope, and numbness. They shoot at my heart like a quiver of arrows, and as soon as one flies in, the others quickly follow. I am left stunned. It is a simultaneous wounding and healing, a heart split open in pain and joy.
I am left wondering whose hands held the bow and released the bowstring that shot these arrows into my heart. Is this person judging me or am I just judging myself? Am I under attack? Do I need to defend myself, explain myself? If so, I need to speak up not just for myself but for every woman whose birth as a mother has done damage–damage to her body, her emotional health, her view of herself as a mom, or her relationship with her child. I need to say, “Listen. This is real.” But that’s a whole lot to say when you’re feeling unstable and sleep-deprived, and a little person counts on you to be functional. So I’ll just stay silent.
Maybe my moral compass as a mother is not under attack, but if I don’t need to defend myself, might I need to reach out for help? Are these feelings a problem? Or can I just sort through my heart’s barrage of wounds and stitch it up all on my own? The tension of it all feels as taut as that bowstring behind my fingers.
Please don’t tell me, “You have a healthy baby, and that’s what matters.” Heavens, I know that my baby’s safe arrival was the most important thing. Every mom can feel the utter fragility of the life that’s in her up until the very moment she hears the first cry. And the responsibility we feel for this one fragile and precious life never ends.
For nine months we have been bulls, and we have been the china shop
Strong and raging with emotion and hormones. Delicately walking our own narrow path towards motherhood. Overjoyed and expectant, while finding the stillness within us that says, “Nothing is guaranteed. This baby is not guaranteed to be carried to term, to be be born alive, to ever leave the hospital.” We are boundless joy and sobering truth. We know at any moment this could all end, but we dare to recklessly love. We are a strong body carrying another body, our heart working harder to pump more blood through our veins ever than before. And we are a body with searing heartburn, cumbersome movement, and limitations we’ve never experienced. We are stronger than we have ever been, and you better believe we will fiercely protect this child. But we may also burst into tears at any moment.
We are the bull, and we are the china shop. And inside this china shop lives the most precious masterpiece ever created.
I tell myself, “You have a healthy baby. You are healthy. You both made it out alive.” I feel the gratitude for these truths so deeply. But that doesn’t need to be the end of the conversation with ourselves.
Do you know what else is important? Mental and emotional health.
My child needs and deserves a healthy mom. I deserve to be healthy, too–as a mom, as a woman, as a PERSON. I might not know if I’m ok. I know that what happened in my birth as a mother left a big tangle of feelings that stretched from my heart to my gut to my head. And that tangle of feelings is wrapped up in the enormity of this new life I’ve cannonballed into and my developing love for a new person. I’m trying to untangle it all as I operate on little sleep and learn to share my body with a baby who desperately needs me but also puts me in toe-curling pain every two or three hours when he eats.
So please don’t tell me with a smile or a pat, “You have a healthy baby, and that’s what matters.” Sometimes I surely do need things put into perspective, but sometimes it can feel a whole lot like you’re trying to push me through the hard, icky part, and I’m digging in my heels because I’m not ready to leave the hard part. Your push does not make me feel better. In fact, it makes me feel worse. When I’ve learned what I needed to learn from the darkness, I’ll leave it. Right now I just want you to be present to whatever feelings need to come out.
Be present. Hold space. Listen to my story without trying to frame it or walk me through it as a tour guide. Sit with me in my questions. Laugh with me. And maybe wash the mound of dishes on my countertop if you’re feeling extra wonderful. That’s a big kind of love.
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