Dear C-Section Scar

Dear C-Section Scar,

I didn’t want you. I didn’t plan for you. In fact, I did everything I could to avoid you. But today I touch you with compassion. I smile at you. I send love, grace, and tenderness to you.

You are not weakness. You are not failure. You are not a mistake. You are part of me.

You are not a dead end, the place where my birth journey halted and could travel no further. You are a passage I am still discovering. You are the door that opened to my baby. You are the door that opened into who I am as a mother and as a woman.

First you hurt.

Riding over bumps in the car. Laughing and coughing. Bending at my waist. The day I stopped taking narcotics to soften your pain was a milestone. The day I could get out of bed without holding my husband’s arms and without searing pain was a milestone. The day I could stand up from the rocking chair while holding my baby was a milestone. The day I could sit on the floor to play with my son and make my own way back up to my feet was a milestone. The day I could bend over to pull my underwear up by myself was a milestone. These were milestones I resented. I didn’t want to have to be passing through these milestones.

Part of the pain was wishing you didn’t exist, wishing I didn’t have this new seam in my body. I had worked hard to avoid a c-section. I had done everything I could throughout my pregnancy to get this baby here naturally. I knew my initial doctor was not going to be the best chance of having the instinctive and safe birth I wanted, so I interviewed several providers before deciding on my doctor. I attended childbirth classes for three months, followed the Brewers Diet, used acupuncture and chiropractic care, walked, practiced yoga and Spinning Babies, and listened to hypnobirthing visualizations and affirmations. I did everything right. I was the model patient. I wasn’t going to “try” natural birth; I was all in. I didn’t deserve this c-section. Why had it happened to me? What happened?

After the pain came the numbness.

I wasn’t prepared for the numbness. I couldn’t feel anything when my fingertips touched my own skin in the inches between my belly button and pubic bone. My fingers felt like they were touching someone else’s body; there was no feedback from my nerves that had been cut. It felt like I was touching something in me that had died.

A blow to my feminine vitality, there was a deadening of this tender and sacred space on my body. I wanted to come out of birth more alive, more attuned to the exquisite sensations of my body–not numb to them. It would take months for the sensations to return. It would take years for the life force of my womb and my sexuality to feel restored after that depletion. 

Then you were itchy; you were like a sand trap for my underwear, which always migrated to this new divet in my bikini area. I started wearing old lady panties to avoid the irritation. I started wearing leggings and jeggings instead of anything with a zipper. It was over a year before real pants felt comfortable to me again.

I hated having to work around you, to change my life for you. How much more must I change? I had already changed so much for my baby. My sleeping and waking schedule, my clothing choices to accommodate frequent nursing, my diet to help baby’s tummy, my hair length so I could better manage caring for myself while caring for an infant…How much more could I change? I would need to give up my cute and sexy underwear, too? All because of this irritating scar that I didn’t even think should be there?

My external scar and my internal scar migrated away from each other. The scar on the outside was not the same one that was deep in my body. Running my fingers along my skin, I could feel the internal scar raised like a child’s crayon etching on paper stretched across a tombstone. 

….

C-section scar, I’ve tried to understand your origins to make peace with you and with myself.

The road you took me down has shaped me as a mother. It’s not the one I expected. It’s not the one I planned for. You were a secret passage. Not a secret garden, a wall of ivy opening into a flowered realm. You were more of a sewer channel, dark and grimy, the kind with long rodent tails and mysterious scurries. You were a dusty, claustrophobic crawl space, a cave tunnel. I found it difficult to breathe.

But I feel myself emerging now into the cavern of crystals, with a clear blue pool and a ceiling of light. I have traveled far into you, and the beauty I am meeting in motherhood cannot be separated from your narrow passage.

What have I learned about myself and who I am as a mother because of you?

I have realized that I set the intention of my birth with great planning and care. That is the kind of mother I am: lovingly intentional. But then I met the moments breath-by-breath in labor. I saw what was in front of me, and I made the best choice I knew to make in that moment. That is also the kind of mother I am: flexible and present. I have learned that when things do not go “my way,” I am a person who will find a way to make this way, the one that’s being lived, a passage of light and growth and transformation.

I have learned that I am strong. Strong enough to meet a wall within myself–a place I wanted to circumvent through my rigorous birth prep–and learn to find a way over. All for love of my baby and love of myself.

C-section scar, you revealed a whole house of healing waiting within me.

There were so many rooms in this house that I thought had been lost to infestation or slow rot or hoarding of old feelings. So I had closed those doors. I stopped opening them. There were other rooms where I had been living, and I thought they provided sanctuary, but I didn’t know how much more peace and function they could hold.

There was so much peace to be made with my body. I didn’t know how much I underestimated its strength and just how much was right with it. There was so much power and vitality in my sexuality that I had not realized could be mine. This body held years of anger and fear. A wounded child lived inside me asking for acknowledgment, understanding, and the chance to grow healthy and strong and free.

And my intuition. Oh, my blessed intuition. I had denied it and forsaken it for so long, giving my head and rationale the keys to the kingdom. Then there was this voice, a clear, strong, brave voice that I had been muffling. It was a voice of darkness that broke into light, a voice of social justice and invisible womanhood and the raw, vulnerable movement of the soul.

The house of my body was cut open to birth my baby, and the doors I had closed flew open, too. The doctor cut through six layers of muscle, tissue, and organ to get to my baby. She separated my abs in the middle and pulled my baby through. I have met at least seven new layers within myself because of you.

Can I attribute all the labor of my own birthing as a mother and woman to you, c-section scar? Surely not all of it. You are not my whole story of becoming a mother. But I will never know how my birth as a mother would have been different had I pushed my baby out of my vagina. Victoriously, I imagined. Roaring. Fearlessly. I will never know what would have been lost and what would have been gained had my plans followed the path of my perfect imagining. But this is the birth I have, and I will work with the holy reality of the one true birth of my son.

What have I learned about my child because of you?

My baby came into this world the way he did for a reason.

Here is what I have observed about my son: he knows his limits. He will rarely do something with his body that puts him in danger. He has a sense for what he is ready to do and what he is not. He will often not try a new thing the first time it’s offered. He will hang back and watch others sliding down the big slide; he will sit at the top and observe kid after kid flying down. Then one day weeks later, he will slide down, slowing himself down with the squeaky rubber of his shoes as his hands hold onto the sides. Now he is ready. Before he was not. But he will still do it the way he feels safe.

My husband joked, “Maybe once he sees his little brother slide out of the birth canal, he’ll be ready to come out of the womb that way, too.”

Either he was trying really hard to come out, and all that striving into a tight, immovable space left an imprint on him. Or he just wasn’t going to do the cardinal movements, the neonatal acrobatics required to tuck, twist, and extend his way out, simply because of who he was. Or maybe he needed more time than doctors could calculate. What looked like a path toward danger from the outside as the hours passed, for him was a path toward security and finding his own way slowly.

He and I worked so hard together to get him out without surgery. In the end, c-section scar, you were the way he got into my arms. Even the doctors had a hard time pulling him out. It took one doctor to push and one to pull. You were the way he was born, and we were shaped by it.

C-section scar, I don’t think you came to be wholly because of who he is or who I was. I think it was about who we were together. This was the journey that he and I had to travel together as mother and child. This is the journey we had to travel to become who we needed to be for each other and for ourselves, no matter how difficult and non-linear the path.

C-section scar, you connected me to others.

God has given me many experiences in my life to build my capacity for empathy. I believe that is one of the wisdoms gleaned from my cesarean birth. Before my cesarean I couldn’t really understand how a surgical birth could happen if you were well-informed and not in a true “let’s get that baby out NOW”emergency situation. I think I had my share of judgment.

Now I understand that tremendous effort, determination, and education do not always determine the outcome in birth. The way our babies come out of our bodies is not the grade we earn for the work we put in. There is a mystery to birth. There can be a whole network of underground feelings and history in us that we have never seen or touched. We bring our whole selves to birth, and sometimes we cannot understand the unfolding of the layers. I want to have compassion for the person I was who consented to the c-section and the person who slowly and painfully recovered from it.

C-section scar, you were a window into myself.

After the cesarean birth, I realized, “What more do I want from myself? What other trials do I need to put myself through in my life before I accept that I am actually strong, resilient, full of grit?” I realized how much pressure I had been putting on myself to have a natural birth, like that was going to be the one thing to make me see and trust my strength and power, when 28 years of life and experience couldn’t make me believe in myself.

I didn’t learn it about myself as an adolescent when I served as the middleman and counselor in my parents’ failing marriage.

Not when I pulled myself from an eating disorder as a teenager without any outside counseling.

Not when I lived through and escaped a long-term sexually and emotionally abusive relationship.

Not when I was the primary caretaker of my grandmother in her last six months of life with terminal cancer while I was a college student with two jobs.

Not when I taught in a very challenging critical-needs school outside the Mississippi Delta for two years while earning my Masters and watching my body fall apart.

If none of that made me truly believe in myself, how could I expect one experience to fill me with so much?

….

Today, mere weeks out from the birth of my second child, I prepare for an unmedicated vaginal birth once again. 

I’m not seeking a do-over birth. The story behind this c-section scar is the story of how I became a mother. It’s the story of how my son was brought into this world. It’s his one birth story and a piece of our love story. I don’t want to write over it with another birth, a “better” birth. There is wisdom to be found in his birth. There is strength there. It’s a story of determination, resilience, and one of brokenness. It’s a story of partnership and community and a whole lot of love. God is there.

This birth story didn’t end with the cutting; it ends with the healing. If healing hasn’t happened yet, the story isn’t over.

C-section scar, you hold the cutting and the healing. You are wound and salve. You are a giver of new life and an invitation to a hundred deaths within myself. You are the dark place cut into me that opened into light. You will never be one simple story, but you will always be mine.