April is Cesarean Awareness Month
. To me, a birth story is like a good book that I can’t put down. I love to hear how these amazing little creatures are born. No birth story is the same, and that’s what makes them as unique as the mommies and babies telling the story.
I had two very, very different birth experiences.
My first child was born via cesarean after 18 long hours of labor. I gave it the good fight, but my transverse baby boy had other plans. When my doctor came in to ask me to start thinking about the alternative option to a vaginal birth, my immediate reaction was relief. I was ready to be done and, like so many other moms and dads, we wanted a healthy baby.
Thankfully, the birth was uncomplicated from there. My husband was with me practically the entire time and he was the first to hold our precious little boy. I was able to have skin-to-skin contact and nurse him within 45 minutes.
But then, in the wee hours of the morning, when all was quiet and my baby slept peacefully next to me, my mind started to wonder. {You know where this is going…}
I was mad. I was sad. I felt robbed of the only birth experience I envisioned for myself.
Never, at any time, did I EVER think I was going to have a c-section. It never came up with my doctor. So it was a complete shock to have a birth experience that was so completely different than one I had imagined for the past nine months. I knew deep down that I had a healthy baby and that was what mattered most, but I was mad at myself.
I thought I was a failure. That my body wasn’t meant to do what nature intended it to. I looked at other moms who had these beautiful births and I was jealous. I was Googling information on VBAC {vaginal birth after cesarean} success rates within days of having our first baby, and was determined to have a natural delivery the second time around. I was, for lack of a better term, out of my mind.
Fast forward 26 months. I got my VBAC –an unplanned home VBAC.
But here’s the thing that I am sure I don’t even need to say :: both recoveries were no day at the spa. With my cesarean, I couldn’t walk up the stairs to see my little guy in his room until days later. I could barely bend over to pull him out of his bassinet without yelping in pain. With our second, I was bedridden because I lost too much blood and was anemic for three months postpartum. Childbirth is rough, and the recovery is rough. There is no easy way out of it. Period. Yet both experiences gave me the very same thing – healthy, beautiful little babies.
I look back now on how I thought about myself after our first was born and I get so angry. Not because of what happened, but because of how I felt. No mother should EVER feel that her birth story is not worthy.
Birth is birth, love is love, and no matter how you got there, you’re a mom. Just like me.